Editor’s note: This story has been updated with several additional details, including comments from the victims’ daughter and the district attorney and new evidence that surfaced before the plea deal.
MCRAE-HELENA — A Middle Georgia man pleaded guilty Monday to robbing and killing a retired Marietta couple after luring them to the rural countryside here nearly a decade ago on the promise of selling them a vintage Ford Mustang.
Ronnie Adrian “Jay” Towns, who turned 38 last week, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors originally sought the death penalty in the case, which was set for trial early next year.
The slayings of Cobb County retirees Elrey “Bud” Runion, 69, and June Runion, 66, in January 2015 became national news after they were fooled into traveling to Telfair County, about 75 miles southeast of Macon, to meet a man claiming to have a 1966 Ford Mustang for sale.
Bud Runion had posted an ad on the online marketplace Craigslist seeking such an automobile. Prosecutors have said Towns, who had been out of work and was desperate for cash, saw the posting and contacted Runion using “burner” cellphones, coaxing him to drive south to see the Mustang. The car did not exist.
June Runion traveled with her husband to a spot not far from the Ocmulgee River hamlet of Jacksonville, Georgia, in mid-January 2015.
The pair’s bodies, both shot in the head, were found in the woods nearby on Jan. 22 that year, close to a farm where Towns was raised.
Towns was arrested soon after and had been jailed for nearly 10 years awaiting trial.
The case had been hamstrung by delays that included the COVID-19 pandemic and the dismissal of Towns’ original indictment by the Supreme Court of Georgia on grounds that the grand jury was improperly composed.
Victims’ daughter tells courtroom about Runions’ charity
In the courtroom here Monday, Towns was dressed in gray slacks and a matching long-sleeve dress shirt. His hands were jammed in his pants pockets as he gazed at a lectern and twice declared himself guilty. He declined to address the court on his behalf and hardly glanced at the Runions’ relatives across the room.
Towns, flanked by two of his lawyers, didn’t look up when Brittany Patterson, one of the slain couple’s three daughters, rose and delivered a victim impact statement.
Patterson told how for years her parents had ministered to people in need and provided food for hungry families. At Christmas, they gave away bicycles to scores of children.
When a winter storm socked Atlanta in 2014, Bud Runion, a Vietnam veteran, fetched his wife from work in his four-wheel drive. On the way home, they picked up strangers and drove them home first.
“That’s who my parents were,” Patterson said. “That’s who we lost. My parents were not random people from Cobb County. They proudly served God and the community.”
Patterson told the court that she often wonders what would have happened if Towns had simply asked her parents for help.
“They would have given their killer money, cars, the shirt off their back. They would have helped him,” she said. “They didn’t need to die.”
Magnet surfaced new evidence in stream this spring
Towns looked pudgier than he was a decade ago when he was arrested. He has spent much of the past nine-plus years incarcerated in the next town over, Eastman, at the Dodge County jail.
District Attorney Tim Vaughn said after the hearing that Towns became something of the jailhouse’s resident tattoo artist. Towns was accused last year of smuggling in razor blades to further his handiwork.
Early this spring, new and strongly implicating evidence against him emerged in the murder case. It came stashed inside a black plastic trash bag, one that had been hoisted from the bottom of a stream not far from Towns’ boyhood home in an area also close to where the Runions were killed.
A man “fishing” with a magnet tied to a rope in search of random treasures latched onto the bag and something heavy inside it. The man had tossed his magnet line into the water from a tiny bridge that spans Horse Creek.
Inside the bag, weighed down by a hunk of metal that turned out to be part of a workbench vise, were the slain couple’s driver’s licenses, credit cards and at least one of their cellphones, Vaughn said.
Investigators were alerted and later found another part of the vise, a perfect match, in a bucket beneath a shelter at the Towns family’s farmhouse.
The findings served to enhance the case against Towns. Prosecutors said they also had video footage of him at a dollar store buying a cellphone that was later used to communicate with the Runions.
DA: Killer tried similar Craigslist ruse with Indiana online shopper
When the killings happened in early 2015, they served as a reminder of the perils of online shopping with unknown parties.
Vaughn, a veteran DA whose circuit spans much of southeastern Middle Georgia’s river country, said outside the courtroom that the slayings also “kind of shatter the thought that nothing bad happens out in the country.”
“But bad things do happen out in the country,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after Monday’s hearing. “There are evil people in the city and in the country.”
And the Runions, Vaughn said, found a “very evil one.”
The DA said Towns had sold stolen items on Craigslist in the months before he reached out to Bud Runion. Among them, a four-wheeler ATV. Towns also tried to sell a tractor-trailer rig that didn’t exist to a man in Indiana, Vaughn said.
Had the murder case gone to trial, prosecutors planned to present evidence that Towns, who’d lost his job with a tree-cutting service, was hooked on prescription narcotics and may have dabbled in methamphetamine use, Vaughn told the AJC.
Vaughn said Towns had lied to his wife about losing his job when their car was repossessed.
“He went over the edge,” the DA said.
Mother continues to defend son after plea deal
From the outside looking in, Vaughn noted, it appeared that Towns came to realize the case against him was a strong one. But admitting his guilt to his parents, who have supported him and paid for his lawyers, proved difficult.
“He had lied to his parents for so long,” Vaughn said, noting that “they had sold a part of the family farm” based on their son’s lies.
In the courtroom before Monday’s hearing, Towns’ mother, Gwen Dowdy Towns, told an AJC reporter that the case against her son was “a bunch of crap.”
Jay Towns had been set to plead guilty at a hearing earlier this month, but he did not go through with it at the time.
When an AJC reporter asked Vaughn if he thought the evidence pulled from the stream proved to be what, in the end, compelled Towns to enter his plea, the DA wasn’t sure.
“It was a very good piece of evidence,” Vaughn said. “But we had a good case before that. It just made it better. It was just another piece of the puzzle.”
And, perhaps, a piece of poetic justice as well.
The road at the bridge over Horse Creek where the vise and slain couple’s IDs turned up is designated as County Road 237.
In these parts, however, it is better known as Old Prison Camp Road.
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