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Zone 7 with Sheryl McCollum

Solving the Murder of Fred Wilkinson | Chief Clay Bryant Part 2

Zone 7 with Sheryl McCollum

iHeartPodcasts and CrimeOnline

True Crime

4.4696 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In November of 1987, 49-year-old Fred Wilkerson, a truck driver, last seen on Thanksgiving night, vanished. Fred's car was found a month later in the Atlanta airport's parking lot with two uncashed checks in the car. Years later, Fred’s remains were found in ex-girlfriend, Connie Quedens well. 

In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, talks with Clay Bryant as they discuss the case of 49-year-old Fred Wilkerson who vanished in November, 1987.  Clay lays out the glaring red flags in Fred's case that went unnoticed years prior, the reason Fred’s son wanted the case further investigated, and what led to Connie’s guilty verdict. 

Show Notes: 

  • [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum. Sheryl gives an introduction of Criminal Investigator, Clay Bryant to the listeners
  • [3:00] Solving the West Georgia Murder of Gwendolyn Moore | Chief Clay Bryant Part 1
  • [3:30] Criminal Investigator, Clay Bryant details out the second case he’s solved involving a well
  • [7:10] 49-year-old Fred Wilkerson was a truck driver that vanished in November of 1987
  • [8:59] Sheryl and Clay go over some glaring red flags during the disappearance of Fred Wilkerson
  • [10:54] A break in Fred’s case 
  • [13:48] “[Clay] became an expert in solvability factors. He would look at what he had and instantly know what he needed to push that case into the endzone. Clay's gift is being able to talk to people and pull information out of them that nobody's ever heard. To stack that information into this pyramid of justice, he does it better than anybody.”
  • [22:16] Clay details out the trial and evidence in the court
  • [28:20] “The truth will always come to light.”
  • [28:50] Next week on Zone 7, we will be discussing the unsolved case of 21-year-old Melissa Wolfenbarger 
  • [29:15] Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review! How to Leave an Apple Podcast Review: First, Open the podcast app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. Then, hit the “Search” tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page and search for Zone 7. Select the podcast, and scroll down to find the subheading “Ratings & Reviews”. and select “Write a Review.” Next, select the number of stars you’d like to leave. Please choose 5 stars! Using the text box which says “Title,” write a title for your review. Then in the text box, write the review itself. The review can be up to 300 words long, but doesn’t need to be much more than: “Love the show! Thanks!” Once you’re done select “Send” in the upper right-hand corner.

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Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award-winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, a Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.  

You can connect and learn more about Sheryl’s work by visiting the CCIRI website https://coldcasecrimes.org

Social Links:

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

How good or bad you are at something will get you a nickname in law enforcement.

0:15.0

I've got a friend down in South Georgia. She crashed her squad car into not one, but two, state patrol cars during the same

0:26.6

incident. They were brand new state patrol cars. They call her crash to this day. Now keep in

0:35.2

mind, that was about 25 years ago. Every card, most invitations, most emails,

0:43.5

they will address her as crash. When I was working for the Crime Commission, they assigned me

0:49.9

to Operation Weed and See through the Atlanta Police Department. My partner, A, and I, we worked in the most dangerous, violent neighborhoods in Atlanta at that time, which was Zone 3.

1:01.0

We worked Thomasville Heights, Ingo Wood Manor, and Mechanicsville.

1:07.0

There was a pretty dangerous drug dealer there who had the nickname Geronimo.

1:12.8

Well, unbeknownst to me, he had given me a nickname.

1:16.1

And one afternoon, I was working like I always did, pretty much by myself, all times day and night.

1:24.2

So this little fella ran up to me, and he said, hey, living with seven. And I said, well,

1:29.9

hey, buddy. And he took off. And I thought, living with seven, I thought that's such strange.

1:37.7

And then this kept happening with different people. And I asked my partner, A.B., I was like,

1:47.1

what are they saying? She said, I have no idea.

1:53.8

So this went on for a little while, and I thought, I'm going to have to ask somebody because I'm not able to figure it out. I went up to one of my folks in the neighborhood that I'd known really since

1:59.5

before I even got out there as part of my

2:01.6

official capacity. And I asked him, why are they calling me living with seven? And he said,

2:07.1

they're calling you snow white. So eventually, the longer I worked, they dropped the living with

2:14.3

and I just was called seven. So there's a lot of folks in this one pocket of

2:21.1

eight years of my career. That's how they know me, and that's how they will still refer to me.

2:27.3

Clay Bryant earned his nickname, Cold Case Clay, because he's just that good at solving old cases. There's even a joke that in the

2:40.6

state of Georgia, if you kill somebody, don't throw them in a well because clay will find you and

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