Solution to Old Killing Found Too Close to Home

For more than a decade, Dennis Cloud worked in the Sheriff’s Department, down the hall from investigators searching for the identity of a dead man and his killer.

Cloud booked prisoners and dispatched deputies to emergencies. He occasionally asked about the unsolved murder case. But who didn’t?

Recently, sick and frail, Cloud, 53, sat in an easy chair in his Atlanta home, inches from Chief Investigator Rene Chamblee.

“You want the truth?” Cloud asked, pushing on a cane to straighten his gaunt frame. Chamblee leaned closer.

“I shot the son of a bitch.”

There it was: the shocking solution to half of a 13-year-old mystery. But Chamblee still did not know the identity of the stinking, decomposed body discovered on July 13, 1984, in an abandoned house.

“Man,” cried one of the two wild-eyed men who found the corpse, those many years ago, “I’m tellin’ you, there’s a body in that house.”

The stench permeated Chamblee’s clothing and her hair when she walked into the house, nearly 60 miles southwest of Atlanta. The blackened, bloated body sprawled in the doorway of a bedroom closet.

“I smell it every time I think about this case. You never forget something like that,” she said. “It was so badly decomposed, you couldn’t tell [by looking] if it was black, white, a man or a woman.”

There was no wallet or other ID on the man, who was wearing just a pair of jeans and one shoe. In his pockets, they found an Atlanta bus ticket and a business card for Chez Danielle’s Hair Salon in Atlanta.

Nearby, there were seven shell casings from a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

An autopsy showed that the man had died a week before from five gunshot wounds to the chest and head. But there was little else to go on: The man was white, tall--about 6 feet--and had dark hair.

The coroner could not describe his face.

Chamblee was sure somebody in Atlanta must know the man. But no one reported him missing, and the salon owner had passed out the cards to strangers on the street.

Using partial fingerprints taken from the body and a mold of his teeth, Chamblee put together a bulletin that went out on the National Crime Information Center computer.

Then two high-profile murder cases--women with names and families in this town of 13,000 people--diverted investigators from the search for the man’s identity and his killer.

“We knew who these women were, and we had leads. We had nothing with this guy,” Chamblee said.

John Doe was buried in a cheap casket at Lamar Memory Gardens. There were no mourners, no eulogy and no tombstone.

It was a year before investigators could get back to the case of the man with no identity. They exhumed the body so a sculptor could create a face from a clay mold of the skull.

“It wasn’t very good. It looked like a GI Joe doll. It was plastic-looking and vague,” Chamblee said.

But investigators took the clay bust to nightclubs, salons, restaurants and hotels in Atlanta, hoping to find someone who remembered the man. They contacted the media. No one came forward.

Over the years, hundreds of missing persons’ reports poured in. As she crossed off each one, Chamblee scrawled notes across the computer printouts: “Close, but no cigar” and, “Nearly, but not quite.”

Two months ago a woman came to Chamblee and asked: What if someone told her that he had killed a person and she didn’t tell anybody?

Five years ago, a family friend swore her to secrecy and told her he had killed a man in 1984, the woman said.

He told her it was self-defense. He told her about the gun, the shooting, the blood.

She said his name was Dennis Cloud.

“Our Dennis?” Chamblee asked in disbelief. “You mean, the Dennis who used to work here?”

Cloud had retired in poor health in 1995. Now terminally ill, he invited Chamblee to his home on Aug. 13.

This is the story he told:

Cloud was on his way home the Monday after the Fourth of July weekend in 1984. He had to work at the Sheriff’s Department that night.

It was midafternoon when he picked up a hitchhiker who was on his way to Florida. Cloud offered him a ride as far as Barnesville; two miles outside of town, he told Cloud he had to go to the bathroom, urgently.

Cloud remembered the vacant house and stopped.

“Hurry up now, I gotta get home. I have to work tonight,” he called to the hitchhiker.

“Come in here. Check out this dead snake I found. You gotta see this,” the hitchhiker told him.

As Cloud walked into the house, the man demanded his wallet and his car keys and lunged at him with the knife. Cloud panicked, reached into his back pocket, pulled a gun and fired seven times, missing twice.

“He was scared to death. He said all he could think was, ‘I killed somebody. I killed somebody. I’m a murderer,’ ” Chamblee said.

He went home, changed clothes and went to work at the Sheriff’s Department. He never knew the name of the man he killed.

But Cloud--indicted in September on charges of murder and concealing a death--did know something no one else knew: He knew what the man looked like. The result hangs on Chamblee’s wall, a charcoal drawing of a cleanshaven, clean-cut young man.

This, Chamblee hopes, will help solve the rest of the mystery.

“You know, everybody’s got a mama. Everybody’s got somebody. There has got to be somebody out there missing this guy,” she said.