JENSEN BEACH, Fla. - A Florida attorney with a distinctive courtroom record, who briefly was a Columbus resident, has entered a notorious Georgia murder case which is scheduled to come up Monday in Jackson County Superior Court.
However, the state of Georgia, which has tried to hold a teenage boy in jail for seven months awaiting trial, probably won’t be ready for the trial.
Edwin A. Marger, former director of the Columbus Industrial Education Center, said Saturday, "we’re ready to go to trial. We know the boy is innocent," Marger said.
The boy is 18-year-old John Robert Colville, formerly of Athens, Ga., who now lives here.
Marger’s efforts to keep the youth out of jail in Jackson County have enabled the boy to graduate from high school and earn 24 semester hours of college credits in the interim.
Young Colville, is accused of murdering his mother Jacquline Colville three years ago, in rural Athens. Since that time it has developed that jurisdiction lies in Jackson County, although prosecution is being spearheaded by Clarke County’s Sheriff’s Department in Athens.
Mrs. Colville was shot to death March 29, 1968, at her home on Nowhere Road in rural Athens.
The accused son, youngest of three, was indicted last March, allegedly on the basis of, "new evidence," discovered by investigator Ralph Clarke of the Clarke County Sheriff Department.
The indictment came some three years after the murder. Since that time the accused youth’s father has moved his family to Florida. The boy’s father Joseph H. Colville, 47, an outstanding graduate of University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady’s school of journalism, now is Director of Development for Indian River Community College.
"We want the chance for the boy to prove his innocence," his father said.
I’m convinced he is innocent." Jack S. Davidson, of Jefferson, Ga., the boy’s Georgia lawyer said.
But it is doubtful he will come to the trial at the court term Monday in Jackson County, Davidson said. District Attorney Nat Hancock, has informed him, Davidson said, that the state of Georgia will not be ready to go to trial Monday.
The prosecution will not be prepared to go to trial because they will not be able to produce one witness, Paul Serene, a former employee of the Georgia’s crime lab, Davidson said he had been informed.
The victim was slain at her home late in the afternoon at a time when the accused youth was the only other member of the family present. He told investigators he was away from the house in a wooded area when he heard shots and ran to the house to find his mother fatally wounded in the back yard. A man standing there ran when he approached, the boy said. Two .22 caliber weapons, both normally kept in the home, were responsible for the death, according to investigators.
A coroner’s jury ruled Mrs. Colville’s death was caused by "a person or persons unknown."
Attorney Marger said he is curious about the fact that the Colville case is the only one which has brought an indictment among seven unsolved murders in Clarke County within the last seven years. The indictment of young Colville came six weeks after the double murder in Athens of a prominent druggist and his wife, Marger noted.