Cold Case: Man accused of killing ex-girlfriend will face stalking-linked murder charge

Leslie Adams vanished in October 2005. Nobody found her right away. It took until May 2007 — nearly two years later — for two people in Franklin County to stumble across parts of her body in a swampy area not far from an interstate.

By then, the trail was cold. The case went quiet.

It didn’t stay that way.

Gwinnett County cold-case investigators eventually picked up the investigation and found something that changed everything: cellphone records placing Billy Joe Cook, Adams’ on-again, off-again boyfriend, near the area where she disappeared. The records put him there around October 21, 2005 — the day prosecutors believe she was killed.

Cook was indicted in September 2018, roughly 13 years after Adams went missing. The indictment charged him with two counts of malice murder and two counts of felony murder. One of the malice murder counts alleged he shot her. The other alleged he killed her “in a manner unknown.” One of the felony murder counts was predicated on aggravated assault. The other — the one that became the center of a years-long legal fight — was predicated on aggravated stalking.

That last count alleged Cook made non-consensual, in-person contact with Adams for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her, in violation of a temporary protective order she had obtained against him. And that contact, prosecutors alleged, resulted in her death.

A Gwinnett County trial court threw that count out before the case ever reached a jury. The judge ruled the state had failed to establish any causal connection between the stalking and Adams’ death. The state appealed.

On Wednesday, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed that decision.

The court ruled the indictment did exactly what it needed to do to survive a legal challenge at that stage — it tracked the language of the felony murder statute and alleged the essential elements of the offense.

“Count 4 alleges that Cook ’caused the death’ of Adams ‘while in the commission of a felony, Aggravated Stalking,'” Justice Pinson wrote, noting the indictment alleged Cook made non-consensual contact with Adams “for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her,” which violated the protective order and “resulted in Adams being killed by Cook in a manner unknown to the Grand Jury.” That, the court said, is enough.

The felony murder count based on aggravated stalking is back on the table.

The court also took up a second issue: the cellphone records. Before trial, the court found the state had not properly authenticated those records under a procedural rule that allows certain business records to be admitted without live testimony. The state tried to appeal that ruling too, arguing it amounted to an order excluding evidence.

The Supreme Court disagreed — but not in a way that necessarily helps Cook.

The court dismissed that portion of the state’s appeal, finding the authentication ruling didn’t actually exclude the records from trial. It just meant the state couldn’t use a procedural shortcut to get them in. Prosecutors can still try to authenticate the records the old-fashioned way — through testimony from someone with direct knowledge — and seek their admission at trial.

The trial court itself said as much during a pretrial hearing: the ruling was that the records couldn’t come in “that way,” but “it doesn’t mean that the State can’t get it in other ways.”

So the phone records aren’t gone. The stalking-based murder count is reinstated. And Billy Joe Cook, indicted two decades after Leslie Adams disappeared, is headed toward trial.

The case has not gone to trial yet.