Camden County · Woodbine · Georgia · December 2024 – October 2025 | ForensicTimes.com | Cold Case · Wrongful Conviction · Forensic Science
Table of Contents
- March 11, 1985: A Church in Woodbine, Georgia
- The Wrongful Conviction of Dennis Perry
- The Glasses on the Floor: DNA That Freed One Man and Charged Another
- Erik Sparre: The Suspect Who Was Cleared With a Lie
- The Cassette Recording: “I Killed Them, and I’ll Kill You Next”
- Forensic Analysis: Mitochondrial DNA and the Cold Case Revolution
- Criminal Psychology: Race, Church, and the Anatomy of Hate Crime
- Law and Legal Implications: Wrongful Conviction, Mistrial, and the Road to Retrial
- Global Context: Church Shootings and the Forensics of Racial Terror
- Investigation: What Remains Unknown
- It’s Not About Me
March 11, 1985: A Church in Woodbine, Georgia
The Rising Daughter Baptist Church stands in Woodbine, a small community in Camden County on Georgia’s southeastern coast, near the Florida border. On the evening of March 11, 1985, Harold Swain, 66, and his wife Thelma Swain, 62, were at their church for a regular service. Harold was a deacon. They were, by every account of those who knew them, the kind of couple that a small rural community builds its shared life around — present, faithful, steady.
A white man with blonde hair entered the church. Witnesses inside the building saw him. He shot Harold and Thelma Swain to death and fled. The crime was witnessed. The description of the shooter was recorded. Shell casings were collected. Investigators found what would become the most forensically significant piece of evidence in the case: a pair of eyeglasses, left on the floor near the bodies, with hair still in the hinge.
The murders of Harold and Thelma Swain were, from the first hours of the investigation, recognised as potentially racially motivated. A Black couple, killed in their church, by a white man. Camden County, Georgia, 1985. The context was not subtle. Investigators interviewed early suspects, including a local man named Erik Sparre — a white man with blonde hair who lived in the area — who provided an alibi placing him at work and was cleared without further immediate investigation.
The case went unsolved for fifteen years. Then, in 2000, it went wrong in a different way.
The Wrongful Conviction of Dennis Perry
Dennis Perry was arrested in 2000, fifteen years after the Swain murders, based on a tip from his ex-girlfriend’s mother. Perry denied any involvement and said he had an alibi: he worked in the metro Atlanta area and had not left his job until after 5:30 p.m. on March 11, 1985. The Swains were shot at 8:40 p.m. Making the drive from metro Atlanta to Camden County — nearly four hours — in that time window was virtually impossible.
In February 2003, a jury convicted Dennis Perry of murdering Harold and Thelma Swain despite his alibi, despite the fact that he did not wear glasses and the glasses found at the scene were a key piece of evidence, and despite DNA evidence from the crime scene that did not match him. What the jury did not know — and what was later revealed to constitute prosecutorial misconduct — was that a key witness in the case had been paid for their testimony, a fact that prosecutors did not disclose to the defence or the jury. Perry was sentenced to life in prison.
He maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration. He said, repeatedly, that he had not killed the Swains. “It took a long time, but I never gave up,” he would say after his exoneration. The system that had convicted him was not listening — not until the Georgia Innocence Project began looking at the case with the tools available in 2019 and 2020 that had not existed in 2003.
The Glasses on the Floor: DNA That Freed One Man and Charged Another
The glasses found near the bodies of Harold and Thelma Swain were not simply abandoned eyewear. They were the crime scene’s most significant biological evidence deposit: a pair of glasses left by the shooter, with hair caught in the hinge — hair that retained, even after thirty-five years of storage, enough genetic material to be profiled through mitochondrial DNA analysis.
The story of how those glasses broke open the case begins with an investigative journalist and a journalist’s instinct about an alibi that seemed too convenient. Kyle Sharpe, then at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, began reinvestigating the Swain murders after learning about the case from the Georgia Innocence Project. He identified Erik Sparre — the early suspect cleared by an alibi in 1986 — as deserving the same scrutiny he was applying to everyone else. Sparre had told investigators he had been called about one of his employees, a Winn-Dixie store supervisor in Brunswick. When Sharpe tracked down that supervisor, the man told him he had never spoken to Sparre about the investigation and would have remembered it if he had. He later gave a sworn statement to the same effect. The alibi was fabricated.
Armed with that information, Sharpe contacted the Georgia Innocence Project. Christina Cribbs, a senior attorney with the project, sent an investigator to Sparre’s home and asked his mother, Gladys Sparre, to volunteer a DNA sample. She agreed. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the maternal line — it is the same in a mother, her children, and all her maternal-line descendants. The mitochondrial DNA from the hair in the glasses hinge was compared against the sample from Gladys Sparre. It was a perfect match.
The hair in the hinge of the glasses belonged to someone with Gladys Sparre’s mitochondrial DNA profile. Her son Erik Sparre shared that profile. The glasses on the floor of the Rising Daughter Baptist Church, left next to the bodies of Harold and Thelma Swain, carried the DNA of Erik Sparre’s maternal line. At the same time, the DNA excluded Dennis Perry entirely — confirming what his alibi had always suggested, that he had not been at the church that night.
In July 2020, based on this evidence, a Superior Court judge overturned Perry’s conviction and granted him a new trial. In July 2021, with a new district attorney on the case, the charges were formally dropped. Dennis Perry, who had spent twenty years in prison for murders he did not commit, was exonerated.
Erik Sparre: The Suspect Who Was Cleared With a Lie
Erik Kristensen Sparre was born in 1963 and was 21 years old at the time of the Swain murders. He had blonde hair. He lived in the Camden County area. He was interviewed by investigators in March 1986 — almost exactly a year after the murders — after a recorded phone call surfaced in which a voice allegedly matching Sparre’s confessed to the killings. He provided the alibi involving the Winn-Dixie supervisor. Investigators called the phone number Sparre gave them for the supervisor. The person who answered confirmed the alibi. The case was closed against Sparre.
What investigators did not do — and what Sharpe’s 2019 journalism revealed — was verify that the person who answered that phone number was actually the supervisor Sparre had named. When Sharpe tracked down the real supervisor, the man said he had never received such a call and had never spoken to investigators about an employee named Sparre. The name and phone number in the police file were incorrect. The alibi had been constructed using false contact information that investigators accepted without verification.
For thirty-eight years, that unverified alibi protected Sparre from further scrutiny. In August 2020, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at the Stafford Road property in Waynesville where Sparre lived with his mother Gladys. Agents recovered additional evidence as part of the ongoing reinvestigation. In December 2024 — after the mitochondrial DNA evidence had been presented in court, after Perry had been exonerated, and after four additional years of investigative work by the GBI — Erik Sparre was arrested at his home in Waynesville. He was 61 years old. He was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault.
He has denied killing the Swains. His public defender, Stephen Tillman, declined to comment beyond confirming his office’s representation. A relative of Sparre’s told CNN that the allegations had taken a toll on the wider family, that Gladys Sparre had died shortly after Perry’s exoneration, and that the family had struggled to reconcile the allegations with the man they had known.
The Cassette Recording: “I Killed Them, and I’ll Kill You Next”
The cassette recording that investigators received in 1987 — and which Sparre’s former brother-in-law brought to the Camden County Sheriff’s Office — was the first indication of what the DNA would eventually confirm forty years later. The recording, made on March 7, 1986, reportedly captured a voice saying: “I killed those people.” Followed by: “I’ll kill you next.”
This recording surfaced publicly during the first day of testimony in Sparre’s trial in October 2025, when his former brother-in-law testified that he had given the cassette to the Sheriff’s Office in 1987. It was, according to trial reporting by the Brunswick News, a significant revelation — both for what it contained and for the question it raised about why its existence had not been more central to the investigation of Sparre in the years that followed.
The recording’s evidentiary status — whether it constitutes an admissible confession, whether the voice on the tape can be authenticated as Sparre’s, and how it interacts with the mitochondrial DNA evidence — will be central to the prosecution’s case at retrial. A voice identified as making a confession in 1986 that matches the physical profile of the shooter (white, blonde) and whose DNA is found at the scene represents a convergence of evidence that the prosecution will argue is conclusive. Whether the defence can challenge either the identification of the voice or the reliability of the cassette’s chain of custody over nearly four decades will determine how effectively that argument lands with a jury.
Forensic Analysis: Mitochondrial DNA and the Cold Case Revolution
The forensic technique that freed Dennis Perry and charged Erik Sparre — mitochondrial DNA analysis — deserves precise technical examination, because it occupies a specific and important niche in the DNA forensics landscape that distinguishes it from the standard nuclear DNA profiling used in most criminal prosecutions.
Nuclear DNA, which forms the basis of the STR profiling used in most forensic identification, is present in the nucleus of cells and is unique to each individual (except identical twins). It is the gold standard for forensic identification. However, it requires nucleated cells — cells with intact nuclei — to produce a usable profile. Hair shafts, which do not contain nuclei, cannot be profiled through standard nuclear DNA analysis unless the root is attached and intact.
Mitochondrial DNA is found in the mitochondria of cells — organelles that exist in large numbers in every cell, including in hair shafts. It is far more abundant than nuclear DNA and can be extracted from hair, bone, and teeth even when those materials have been subjected to decades of degradation. However, mitochondrial DNA is not unique to an individual — it is shared by all people in the same maternal line. A person’s mother, their mother’s siblings, their maternal grandparents’ children, and all their maternal-line descendants share the same mitochondrial DNA profile. This means that mitochondrial DNA can establish membership in a maternal lineage — but it cannot distinguish between members of that lineage.
In the Swain case, the mitochondrial DNA from the hair in the glasses hinge matched Gladys Sparre’s profile — and therefore also matched Erik Sparre’s profile, and the profiles of any of Gladys Sparre’s children or maternal relatives. The DNA evidence places the hair’s origin in the Sparre maternal line. It does not, by itself, establish which member of that lineage left the hair. That is why the mitochondrial DNA evidence is powerful but not independently conclusive — it is one strand of a prosecution that also includes the cassette recording, the witness descriptions of a blonde-haired man, the false alibi, and the circumstantial evidence assembled over four decades of investigation.
The defence’s pre-trial motions raised the mitochondrial DNA question directly, with an analyst’s testimony confirming that the DNA is inherited through the mother. The limitation — that the profile matches any maternal-line relative, not exclusively Erik Sparre — is the defence’s primary forensic argument against the DNA evidence, and it will be central to cross-examination at retrial.
Criminal Psychology: Race, Church, and the Anatomy of Hate Crime
The prosecution’s theory of motive in the Swain case — reflected in their pre-trial resistance to defence motions seeking to exclude references to racial slurs, Confederate flags, and KKK affiliations — is that Harold and Thelma Swain were killed because they were Black, in a church, in rural Georgia in 1985, by a person whose ideology framed that act as righteous or necessary.
The targeting of Black churches for violence has a specific and extensively documented history in the American South. Black churches have functioned as the organisational centres of Black community life — as places of worship, political organising, social support, and community identity — since the antebellum period. They have been targeted by white supremacist violence precisely because of that centrality: destroying or terrorising a church is not simply an attack on a building but an attack on the community structure it sustains. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, which killed four young girls, is the most widely known example. There are hundreds of others, documented across more than a century of recorded racial violence.
The specific forensic and psychological profile of the Swain killings — a white man, entering a Black church during a service, shooting a specific couple and leaving — suggests a targeted rather than opportunistic act. The Swains were not chosen at random. Harold was a deacon — a recognised and respected figure in the community. The choice of target and the choice of location suggest a perpetrator with prior knowledge of the victims and their community role, and a motive that extended beyond individual grievance to ideological statement.
The defence’s motion to exclude references to racial slurs, Confederate flags, and KKK affiliations reflects a strategic calculation: that the prosecution’s evidence of ideological motive, while legally relevant to the question of who committed the crime and why, is also likely to produce a jury reaction that is difficult to contain and to channel toward the specific legal question of Sparre’s guilt. The judge had not ruled on those motions before the first trial ended in mistrial.
Law and Legal Implications: Wrongful Conviction, Mistrial, and the Road to Retrial
The legal history of the Swain case is one of the most complex in recent Georgia criminal jurisprudence, involving a wrongful conviction, a contested exoneration process, a district attorney who refused to consent to a retrial despite a judge’s order, a change in district attorney, a formal exoneration, an arrest nearly four decades after the crime, and now a mistrial at the first attempt to try the man currently charged.
Erik Sparre was arraigned in December 2024 on two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault — charges that carry, upon conviction, the possibility of life in prison. His trial began on October 28, 2025, with jury selection, and testimony began October 28. On October 29, 2025, the trial ended in a mistrial — one day after testimony began. The mistrial resulted, according to Georgia Public Information Liaison Don Plummer, from “the violation of a pretrial order restricting witnesses from testifying about information unrelated to the charges against Mr. Sparre.” The violation was triggered during the testimony of Sparre’s former brother-in-law, who revealed the existence of the 1987 cassette recording — information that either exceeded the scope of the pretrial order or was presented in a manner that the court found violated the order’s restrictions.
A retrial date had not been set as of this report. Sparre remains charged with two counts of murder. The mistrial does not preclude retrial — it is not an acquittal and does not raise double jeopardy concerns. The prosecution will have the opportunity to present the same evidence again, with whatever adjustments to witness examination are required to avoid a second pretrial order violation.
The wrongful conviction of Dennis Perry generates a separate legal question that has not been fully resolved: compensation. Perry spent two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit, for which there was an alibi that was effectively ignored, prosecution of which involved the withholding of material information from the defence and jury. Whether Perry has pursued or received civil compensation from Georgia, from Camden County, or from the prosecutorial individuals responsible for the misconduct in his original trial is not confirmed in the public record as of this report.
Global Context: Church Shootings and the Forensics of Racial Terror
The murder of Harold and Thelma Swain in 1985, the subsequent wrongful conviction of an innocent Black man for those murders, and the decades-long delay before the case was reopened and the correct suspect charged, sit within a documented pattern of American racial violence and institutional failure that extends across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The targeting of Black churches in the American South was not a historical aberration of the 1960s civil rights era. It was an ongoing practice. In 1996, a wave of Black church arsons across the South prompted a federal investigation and legislation. In June 2015, nine Black parishioners were killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by Dylann Roof — a white supremacist who had spent time with the congregation before opening fire during a Bible study session. That attack, like the Swain murders, was specifically targeted at a church as a community institution and was motivated by documented ideological racism.
The specific forensic challenge of prosecuting racial hate crimes that occurred decades in the past is compounded by the institutional reluctance to investigate or prosecute such crimes that characterised many Southern law enforcement agencies during the same period when the violence was occurring. The original investigation of the Swain murders produced the fabricated alibi of Erik Sparre without follow-up verification — a failure that, in the context of a 1985 rural Georgia investigation into the murder of a Black couple by a white man, may reflect something more than simple investigative oversight.
The Georgia Innocence Project’s role in this case exemplifies the function that independent legal organisations have come to play in American criminal justice: systematically reviewing cases where the institutional process produced a wrong outcome, developing and deploying forensic tools that the original prosecution did not use, and applying pressure to institutions — courts, district attorneys — that would not otherwise reopen cases that had officially closed. Without the Innocence Project, the mitochondrial DNA evidence from the glasses hinge might never have been tested. Dennis Perry might still be in prison.
Investigation: What Remains Unknown
The specific motive for the Swain murders — what personal, ideological, or circumstantial factors led Erik Sparre to enter Rising Daughter Baptist Church on March 11, 1985, and shoot Harold and Thelma Swain — has not been established in any public proceeding. The prosecution’s theory of racial motivation has not been tested before a jury, as the first trial ended in mistrial before a verdict. Whether specific evidence of Sparre’s ideology, his prior contact with the Swains, or his specific knowledge of the church and its occupants will be admitted at retrial has not been determined.
The cassette recording — the voice allegedly saying “I killed those people” and “I’ll kill you next” — has not been the subject of published forensic voice analysis in the public record. Whether the voice on the recording can be authenticated as Sparre’s through acoustic analysis, whether the recording’s chain of custody over nearly four decades can withstand a foundation challenge, and what the recording’s full content reveals about the circumstances of the killings are questions that will be addressed at retrial.
Dennis Perry’s civil claims, if any, against the State of Georgia and the individuals responsible for his wrongful prosecution have not been reported in the public record. He spent two decades in prison. His exoneration was obtained through his own legal team’s work and through a journalist and the Georgia Innocence Project — not through any institutional acknowledgment of the original prosecution’s failures.
The retrial date for Erik Sparre had not been set as of this report. He remains in custody. The investigation, per the GBI, remains active and ongoing — suggesting that additional evidence may be developed before retrial proceeds.
It’s Not About Me
When Erik Sparre was arrested in December 2024, Dennis Perry issued a statement through the Georgia Innocence Project. He had spent twenty years in a prison cell for murders he did not commit. He had been convicted despite an alibi, despite DNA that did not match him, despite a witness who had been paid for testimony and whose payment the prosecution withheld. He had fought for years to be heard. He had been told, repeatedly, by the system that imprisoned him, that the evidence against him was sufficient and his appeals were not.
His statement about the man now charged with the murders that sent him to prison was six words long: “It’s not about me. All I want is justice for Harold and Thelma Swain and their family.”
Harold Swain was 66 years old when he was shot in his church. Thelma Swain was 62. They were, by every account, people of faith who had given their lives to their community and their congregation. They were killed in the place they went to worship. The man witnesses described as the shooter — white, blonde, consistent with the description that could have resolved the case in 1986 if an alibi had been properly verified — spent thirty-nine years after their deaths living in the same county where he had killed them.
The first trial ended in mistrial. The retrial has not yet begun. Harold and Thelma Swain’s family is still waiting for a verdict that names, before a jury, the person who entered their church and took them away. It has been forty years. The glasses left on the floor next to their bodies are the reason there is still a case to try.
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