Hey intercepted listeners, it is Jeremy. We are really excited to share with you two episodes of the gripping new podcast series from the intercept and topic studios. It's called Murderville, an investigation by intercept reporters Jordan Smith and Liliana Segura. Here is episode two.

On the website of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI is a gruesome tab, unsolved homicides. It's five pages long, 50 names total. Lives cut off and reduced to a paragraph or two. More police blotter than tabloid.

Limesha Crouter, a 21 year old single mom, murdered at home 18 years ago. Mary Susan Humphrey, air traffic controller. She died after leaving a nightclub in Valdosta back in 1980.

And then there's a man known only as Roy. He died sometime between 1975 and 1979, maybe in Georgia, or maybe in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas. There's a number to call if you have more information.

Some of the entries include pictures of the victims. Old school photos, outdated haircuts, lots of blurry snapshots, family and friends cropped out to frame the victim.

On about half of them, there's no picture at all, just a little white box with a gray end slash A where the face should be. One of those belongs to a man named Salish Patel, murdered Friday, April 7, 2000 in Adel, Georgia, at a house just blocks from the small convenience store where he was working.

Tim Balch is a former police officer from Adel, and he remembers when Patel was killed because it was the second gruesome murder in less than two years in this town of just 5,000 people.

That store is literally like a block and in fact you can see the front end of it from here. That where those gas pumps are down there is where that happened. Yeah, he was found dead three streets behind us on Gordon Street.

What do you remember about that case? What can you tell us about that? That was probably one of the most savage murders. The fight was throughout the house.

And I think that the coup d'etat is you could say that the final deal was when the television went over his head. I mean there was fighting and stabbing and there's a very bloody crime scene.

I mean it seems amazing that that didn't get solved. It seems like it could be a lot of good potential evidence there. It's so violent. I just wonder if you just ever thought about what actually might have occurred and why?

It was just a very strange place for a murder to take place in any way because it wasn't one of those areas that you would even expect.

You know family fighting to take place. It was a pretty good area. We've rarely got calls over there.

We've talked about how wrongful convictions leave the real killer free. Well, Salish Patel was murdered barely a year and a half after Donna Brown.

And we're sure the GBI pegged the wrong man, Devanya Inman for that crime. We can't say that there's a connection between the murder of Donna Brown and the murder of Salish Patel.

We can say that there was talk around town that there might have been. But we don't know if the Adel police or the GBI ever considered that.

What we do know is that Patel's death was grizzly. Left his family devastated and the town shocked again. And that nearly 20 years later his killer has never been identified.

From the intercept, I'm Liliana Sakura. And I'm Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia.

Salish Patel was murdered in April 2000 after Devanya Inman was jailed for Donna Brown's murder, but well before he would go to trial.

That's a lot of time. And if the wrong man's in jail, it's a lot of time for the right man, the real killer, to plot his next crime.

So could Patel's killer be the real culprit behind Donna Brown's murder? And if so, then why wasn't that person caught? And why was Devanya Inman in peg for the crime?

We're going to try to figure that out. But first, we need to understand what happened with the Donna Brown case and Devanya Inman's conviction, and how Devanya went from a kid getting in trouble in California to an adult facing murder charges in South Georgia.

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