MONROE COUNTY, Ga. — The sheriff's office in Monroe County said Thursday that it had solved a three-decades-old cold case involving a 23-year-old woman who disappeared after being seen entering a tractor-trailer with a man in 1989.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, the body of 23-year-old Mary Willfong was found near I-75 by deer hunters on Nov. 21, 1989. An autopsy later determined she had been sexually assaulted, and her cause of death had been strangulation.
An investigation was able to pinpoint her last known location as Forest Park, where she'd been seen at the local farmer's market getting into a tractor-trailer with a white man. The sheriff's office said that at the time, a number of suspects were interviewed and gave DNA samples, but none of those samples matched, and the trial went cold.
Then the case was reopened in 2019.
A sheriff's office investigator, Marc Mansfield, "took the original evidence and re-submitted it to the GBI crime lab due to new technology." He also took the evidence to Miami for a genealogy trace.
The re-opened investigation led to a suspect in Indiana. With the help of local authorities there, further DNA evidence was collected and matched to DNA taken from the body of the 1989 victim, Willfong.
Larry Padgett, 59, was then arrested on Wednesday.
"While in Indiana, Investigators were able to obtain more evidence in the case linking Padgett to the murder of Mary Willfong. Padgett will be held in Indiana until a waiver of extradition is signed," the sheriff's office said.
(note: the below video is from a different Georgia cold case)
