An Alabama man has been arrested for the cold-case murder of a pharmacist who was found stabbed to death in her Georgia home 24 years ago.
Clerence George, 63, faces charges of murder and aggravated assault in the 2000 slaying of 43-year-old Julie Ann McDonald, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Friday.
McDonald had likely been dead for three or four days when her body was found inside her LaFayette, Georgia, home on June 11, 2000, Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said. George, who was an acquaintance of McDonald, was one of the four or five suspects in the case at the time, partly because he was found with her checkbook, the sheriff said.
“It was not a stranger crime,” Wilson said on Friday. “They knew each other.”
But there was not enough evidence at the time to make an arrest, he added.
George, who would have been 39 years old at the time of McDonald’s killing, has a lengthy arrest record in Alabama, but none for violent crimes that court records show, AL.com reported.