Secrets of the Well

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2:24My name is Clay Bryant, and I'm a criminal investigator for the District Attorney's Office in LaGrange, Georgia. The Gwendolyn Moore case, Ms. Moore was killed on the night of August the 3rd, 1970. It was just phenomenal the way that that case came back into my life. 33 years later, I was a 15-year-old boy, wide-eyed at the horror of what I was looking at. She was found in a well just outside the city limits of Hogan'sville, Georgia. One of the sheriff's deputies went down on the hook of the wrecker and wrapped a rope around the lady's torso and pulled her up out of the well. She was suspended over that well and spinning around on that cable.

3:06Her face was swollen and blue. I'll never forget it as long as I live. Even at 15, I was able to understand that there were going to be some lives that were going to be profoundly affected by this. It finally dawned on me then that Mama was dead and I would never see her again. This was a case that should have found resolution in a matter of days. Nobody ever talked about it. Everything was all covered up. Her case was just totally discarded. The lady was dead when she went in the well. Murder. Murder. Was there ever a second of doubt as to who had done this? No, ma 'am. The truth will bear itself to be.

3:53There will be a day of reckoning. We're here. We're here. All right.

4:05Police, anybody home? Fifty-year-old investigator Clay Bryant goes after leads like a dog goes after a bone. I've tried other things in my life, and I haven't been happy. I couldn't think of doing anything else. Nobody, huh? He has a law degree, years of police experience. I don't know if we're going to find anybody here. And a new nickname, Cold Case Clay. That's our man. That's him. A joking reference to his success in helping the DA in LaGrange, Georgia, solve cases long forgotten. I found a tremendous amount of satisfaction to right a longstanding wrong. You had the right to remain silent.

4:45He says he was born to the job. I was raised on the front seat of a police car by probably the best criminal investigator there was, my father. Buddy Bryant, Clay's father, was the police chief of a tiny town nearby, Hogansville, and Clay idolized him. My dad was the greatest guy in the world. We spent as much time in the Chattahoochee Rivers, about as much time as I did at school. But to 15-year-old Clay, the most fun was going out with his dad on police calls. Every waking moment that I wasn't having to cut grass or do some of the things I had to do, I spent right behind my daddy. And that's exactly where he was on a hot August morning in 1970.

5:33This was a little different. I was a little closer to this situation. When Buddy Bryant responded to a call from the sheriff's department. It involved the mother of kids that I was raised with. A child had spotted a woman's body at the bottom of an abandoned well a lot like this one. They brought her up out of the well. I'll never forget. It was awful. It was macabre and the poor woman spinning around on that cable. That image has haunted Clay Bryant for 34 years. It was surreal. It was so removed from what life ought to be. Her name was Gwendolyn Moore, and she'd gone missing the night before.

6:16Married at 15, with four kids, she was dead at 30. She was just really a beautiful person, easygoing, sweet. Pat Terry is Gwendolyn's sister. She was willing to do anything to help anyone. The sparkle in her eyes, her laugh, her smile. Gwendolyn's oldest son, Alan Moore. I had probably the most wonderful mother in the world. I remember her fixing Kool-Aid for us. I remember her fixing sandwiches for us as we played. But Gwendolyn Moore's smile hit a lifetime of abuse. I knew that there was a lot of talk about the Moore house. The father was known as a rough individual. I've been spent with everything from a hose pipe to a chain to a tree limb, belts.

7:00And this was just routine occurrence in your house? If Daddy got mad, he got mad. And he took it out on your mother? Yes, ma 'am. Quite a few times. We'd hear the beatings going on at night, and we'd just fall asleep crying. She tried to leave him, but he would always find her. She was physically taken back? He threatened to kill the children if she didn't come back with him. This was her refuge. Gwendolyn Moore often hid here, in a crawlspace under a neighbor's house. That's where Alan last saw his mother. Her left eye was swollen shut, and you barely could see. out of her right eye. And you could tell that she was in a lot of pain.

7:43She's in the crawl space underneath this house. Yes, ma 'am. In the dark. Yes, ma 'am. By herself.

7:53She said she was leaving. She told me that she loved us very much, that she'd be back to get us. And I left her. her.

8:05Gwendolyn Moore's body was found the next day. For the last 34 years, I've honestly thought that it was me that called Mama to die because I felt like if I'd have been man enough to grab her by the hand and take her down the road to the police department. You were 14 years old. I was scared to death. You thought your father had done this from the minute you knew what had happened? Yes, ma 'am.

8:39Suspicion immediately fell on Gwendolyn Moore's husband, Marshall, who admitted he had hit her the day before. He was interviewed by police, he passed a lie detector test, and Clay Bryant says Marshall Moore also knew some very important people in town. For whatever reason, somebody did not want to solve this case. So-and-so knows so-and-so and he's going to protect so-and-so and just your basic corruption? That's exactly right. It was just a tragic ending to a tragic existence. No one ever was charged and Clay's dad was helpless to do anything because the well was just over the city line. This is where the well was right here.

9:23Exactly. And out of Buddy Bryant's jurisdiction. An inch as good as a mile. It's either in or it's out. My daddy had some very strong feelings about this case, and I heard him talk about it all the way up to his death. It was one of the injustices that he really just, he never got over.

9:46The years passed, but the son never forgot his father's frustration. Marshall Moore, meanwhile, went on with his life, remarrying within a few months of his wife's death and living in the same house he'd lived in with Gwendolyn. And that's where things stood in 2002 when Clay Bryant got a phone call from a local sheriff's deputy. A remarkable call. He asked me about a case happening in the Hogan'sville area where a lady had been thrown in a well. A call that would give him a chance to do what his father had been unable to do. There has to have been some type of divine intervention that put it this way.

10:30Find justice for Gwendolyn Moore. Clay's like a bloodhound. I mean, when he gets that bite in you, you can hang it up.

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12:23On duty or off, Clay Bryant is a proud man. We got to go. But not too proud to drive all the local kids to a high school track meet. I was lucky enough to be raised by a mother and father that instilled in me the basic principle that a man has to be accountable for his action. And I hope that I instill that belief in my children. My very consistent son forgot it, she. He and wife Beth, a court clerk in LaGrange, have two children, 16-year-old Emily and 14-year-old Clayton. You know what I told you? Your strength's going to be in the middle of the race. Come on, Clayton, pick it up, son. You got to go.

13:00Go get him, boy. Let's go. But the times they spend together are a far cry from the times Clay spent with his dad. At crime scenes. Experiences that haunt him still. I'll never forget the sight of them recovering Ms. Moore from that well. Nor will he ever forget the day the Moore case came back into his life. Remarkably, it was on his father's birthday. There are connections to some things that we just can't explain. I've got chills on me now thinking about it. None of it would have happened without Leslie Iannuzzi, a distant relative of Gwendolyn Moore. It all started after she found a photo of a woman she didn't recognize in a family album.

13:48Did you have any idea that you even had a great aunt Gwendolyn? No. Her mother Millie explained who Gwendolyn was and her tragic end. What was it about this that piqued your interest any further than that? I guess because nobody ever talked about it. It was just like everything was all covered up. And I just wanted to know what happened. I saw something in her face when she saw Gwenlyn's picture that I knew she was going to pursue that. Not everyone in the family was happy about it. Gwen's sister, Pat. At first I thought, no, don't dig this up. It's in the past. You know, just let well enough along.

14:28But Leslie wanted answers. She combed the internet, looking for obituaries. She called sheriff's departments, checked out the local county archives, and finally struck pay dirt here at Atlanta's Vital Records office, where she found Gwendolyn Moore's death certificate. Once I got the death certificate, that was just, that was the best part for me. It showed not only that the death was no accident, but that everyone back then knew it. Does the death certificate actually say homicide on it? Well, it has the choices, and it has the little blocks beside it, whether it's a homicide accident, and it is marked as a homicide.

15:12So your question then was? Where's the police report? Was what I wanted to see at that point. And? No one could ever give me one. I kept getting different people with, you know, we'll see what we can find, we'll see what we can find, but nobody could ever give me anything. Leslie was convinced someone had gotten away with murder. There you are, I mean, kind of at a standstill. What broke the log jam? Clay Bryant. Leslie's persistence finally led to Clay being assigned to the case. What you got for me? And then he had a surprise for her. Before we talk about anything, he says, I just wanted you to know I was there.

15:55And I said, what do you mean? And he says, I was there when they pulled her up out of the well that day. He was there with his father. Could you believe that? No. Nope. It was something he carried with him for a long time. It had so much age on it. But as far as developing a suspect, it wasn't any problem. You knew who you were going after. Oh, absolutely. You just needed to build a case that would support it. A case against Marshall Moore, Gwendolyn Moore's husband. But Moore was 67 and ailing. Many of the cops from back then were dead, as was the medical examiner who had checked homicide on the death certificate.

16:35To prosecute Marshall Moore, Clay knew that he needed new evidence. He needed to exhume the body of Gwendolyn Moore.

16:50We met with the family and told them what we were up against. And we told them it was a long shot at best. I said, man, I really don't want to do this. I said, mama's at peace. He told me, he says, Al, I wouldn't ask you to do this if we didn't really need to do this. And he said, the only thing that I ask you to do, if you're going to bring this up again, it's going to hurt all over again. He said, please promise me that you'll have the conviction to see it through. Clay was at the grave site for the exhumation, and he was with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Pathologist for the autopsy. He was cleaning up the skeletal remains, and he was looking, and he looked at the cranium, and he said, I just don't see anything that resulted in her death.

17:37And without his finding something... We were through. Your case is nowhere. It was over. And then all of a sudden, as Dr. Sperry is rebuilding the skeletal remains on a table adjacent to the coffin, he says, oops, this is provocative. Oops, indeed. The bone just in front of the voice box, called the hyoid bone, was fractured. There's not but one way for it to be fractured in this traditional manner, and that's with the thumbs and the manual strangulation. So the lady was dead when she went in the well. Murder. Murder. Three decades after a teenaged Clay Bryant watched Gwendolyn Moore's body being pulled from the well, the DA charged Marshall Moore with first-degree murder.

18:29I didn't think it would go as far as it did. No, this wouldn't have come to be without Clay. That's just all there is to it. Marshall Moore went free on bond, insisting through his attorney, William Stemberger, that he is innocent. And as far as your cancer, he's saying it's still in remission? Yeah. Okay. His trial was delayed by illness and by an appeal. He argued he couldn't get a fair trial after all this time. The defense, as you know, says, good Lord, nobody's alive anymore. I can't call witnesses. How am I supposed to defend this guy? he's sick. You know, why are they persecuting this man?

19:10It's not a question of persecution. It's a question of 34 years ago a tremendous wrong was inflicted on this poor woman. And it began a long time before then. More lost his appeal. He would have to stand trial. What is it going to be like for you to sit in that courtroom and look across and see him sitting there. I know what my mother went through. I'm a big boy now. And I'll look at him dead in the eyes and say, you were wrong. You want to put your hands on somebody now? Come put them on me. I'm old enough and big enough now that I can defend my mama's reputation.

20:01But that showdown wasn't to be. Allen's father, Marshall Moore, died in 2005, just before his murder trial was to begin. I really felt cheated. Once it had went to trial and all the evidence had been shown, everybody would have known that my mother was murdered. Everybody. Do you feel any closure? No, ma 'am. I'll wind up taking that to my grave. Even so, Clay Bryant feels he got his man and that some measure of justice has been served. There's no doubt in my mind that the day that an arrest was made in this case, somewhere, somehow, my dad looked down at me and smiled. And fate will intervene again.

20:56but this time literally with a bolt from the blue. Handing Clay Bryant another cold case and another mystery. And guess where the answer just might lie. Has anybody ever accused you of going to the well too often?

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23:04May 2003, a freak thunderstorm rolls through Western Georgia. Sirens started blaring and then came the rain and lightning.

23:18Divine intervention for Cold Case Clay and his boss, D.A. Pete Scandalakis. My boss had just bought a brand new Dodge pickup truck. Flame fire red, four-door Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck. And a pine tree broke off. Flattened it, just like a pancake. It was an act of God bringing everyone together at the same time.