The Georgia Church Murders Part 2: Dennis Perry's Story of Wrongful Conviction and Redemption
Gone South
Audacy Podcasts
4.8 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2003, Dennis Perry was convicted of the 1985 murders of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia. He was innocent. He would spend the next 20 years, six months, and ten days behind bars.
This episode of Gone South tells the Georgia Church Murders story through Dennis's eyes — from his arrest and interrogation by detective Dale Bundy, to his trial, his two life sentences, and the years he spent inside Jimmy Autry State Prison waiting for someone to believe him.
It's also the story of Brenda Perry, the woman who knew Dennis his whole life, married him in a prison chapel, and never stopped fighting for his freedom. After reporter Josh Sharpe of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed the truth and the Georgia Innocence Project secured his release, Dennis was fully exonerated. This is what survival looks like.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lour. |
| 0:05.9 | In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families. |
| 0:11.9 | I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita. |
| 0:14.5 | And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true. |
| 0:18.5 | He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers. |
| 0:21.1 | Oh my God. |
| 0:22.1 | Please follow and listen to Family Law, |
| 0:24.0 | an Odyssey podcast, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. |
| 0:32.2 | In the last episode, we talked to Joshua Sharp, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Back in |
| 0:39.5 | 2020, Josh wrote a story about a man named Dennis Perry, who'd been wrongfully convicted |
| 0:45.1 | of killing a black couple in a church in 1985. In this episode, we're going to revisit that |
| 0:52.5 | story. But this time, we're going to tell it through the eyes of Dennis Perry himself. |
| 1:00.0 | On the day he walked out of prison in July 2020, Dennis had been locked up for 20 years, |
| 1:06.0 | six months, and 10 days. He was officially exonerated of the murders the following year. Since then, Dennis |
| 1:14.7 | has been living in Waverly, Georgia. His house is just a few miles from the church where the murders |
| 1:20.7 | happened. To be honest, while I was reporting the last episode, I'd hesitated to reach out to Dennis. He was now 64 years old, |
| 1:30.5 | and he'd lost a third of his life for a crime he didn't commit. I assumed the interview would |
| 1:36.3 | be tense, shaped by years of frustration with the justice system that put him away. But when I finally |
| 1:43.1 | called Dennis, that's not what happened. He sounded |
| 1:46.7 | almost happy to talk about his case. Any lingering bitterness seemed eclipsed by the fact that he was free. |
| 1:54.5 | His sunny attitude was kind of puzzling at first. But then, halfway through our interview, |
| 2:00.7 | a woman appeared on the screen next to him. |
... |
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