On December 8, 2022, investigators arrested Franklin Roy Estes at his home in Augusta, Georgia. He was seventy-eight years old, a retired landscaping worker, a churchgoer, a grandfather. His grandchildren were teenagers; the youngest had never heard the name Netty Coulter before that week. Estes was charged with first-degree murder in a case that had been closed, inactive, and unresolved for more than half a century.
Netty Grace Coulter was fourteen years old on the Tuesday afternoon in April 1971 when she stayed late at Laney High School for choir rehearsal. She sang alto, and her music teacher, Bertha Hollands, had told her she possessed one of the strongest natural voices in the program. Netty took that seriously, the way she took most things seriously. A classmate saw her last at the corner of Laney Walker Boulevard and Telare Street at approximately 5:15 in the afternoon, heading south toward her grandmother’s house on Olive Road.
She wore her school uniform, a navy skirt and white blouse, and carried her choir folder along with her school bag. She never arrived at her grandmother’s house. She never arrived home. She was never seen again.
That evening, her grandmother, Eda May Coulter, called the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department to report her granddaughter missing. Officers walked the route between the school and Olive Road. They found nothing. They interviewed students from the choir rehearsal, residents along the route, and teachers and administrators at Laney High.
The case remained active through 1971 and into 1972. Then, under the weight of other investigations and the institutional pressures of a county sheriff’s department in the early 1970s, it gradually went cold without producing a resolution. There was another dimension to the inadequacy of that original investigation, one that investigators reviewing the file in 2023 documented explicitly. This was Augusta, Georgia, in 1971.
The school Netty attended was a historically black institution in a city still processing the aftermath of a massacre. Less than a year earlier, in May 1970, six black men had been killed by police during a civil rights protest in the Augusta riot. The political and institutional climate of Richmond County in 1971, as investigators later noted in formal documentation, was not one that ensured black residents and black children received the same quality of attention and resources as white residents when something happened to them. Eda May Coulter waited on her front porch for three hours that Tuesday evening before calling the police.
She was a black woman in Augusta, Georgia, in 1971, and she had learned through her entire life that calling the police was not the same as receiving help. She hoped, with the desperate and diminishing hope of someone trying not to panic, that Netty had simply stopped somewhere along the way and would come through the gate at any moment. When she finally called at 7:45, the dispatcher asked why she had waited so long to report the girl missing. She said only that she had been hoping she wouldn’t need to call.
The investigation that followed was, by any retrospective standard, inadequate. The route was walked once. The interviews were conducted quickly. Leads were documented but not rigorously pursued: a neighbor who thought she had seen a girl matching Netty’s description get into a vehicle on Telare Street, a classmate who mentioned a man who sometimes waited in a car near the school.
By 1972, the file had been transferred to inactive status. Eda May Coulter continued to request updates from the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department for fifteen years. She died in 1986, having buried the expectation of an answer, if not the grief that had attended its absence. Netty’s mother, Ruth Coulter, outlived her own mother by ten years, dying in 1996.
Between them, the two women who had loved Netty most had spent decades carrying that absence without resolution. Netty’s case was eventually taken up by her younger cousin, Darlene Coulter Hayes, who had been two years old in 1971 and had grown up knowing Netty only through photographs and the stories Eda May told about her granddaughter’s voice, her straight A’s, and her plans for college. Darlene became a social worker in Augusta, working in child and family services, and she brought the same professional persistence to the pursuit of Netty’s case that she brought to her advocacy work. She contacted the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office annually.
She wrote letters to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She submitted the case details to a national database for cold case review twice, in 2005 and in 2015. Both times she was told there was insufficient evidence for the database to work with. Bertha Hollands, Netty’s music teacher, was still alive in 2023.
She was eighty-nine years old, living in an assisted living facility in Augusta, and she was sharp. When an investigator visited her in the spring of 2022 as part of the background review, Mrs. Hollands remembered Netty Coulter without being prompted, without being shown a photograph, without needing any context. She simply said, “Oh, yes, Netty.
” Then she sat for a moment. She said Netty had the purest middle register she had ever heard in a girl that age, the part of the voice that carries the most weight in a choir arrangement, the part you feel in your chest. She told Netty she was going to be very useful to somebody’s choir someday. Netty said she intended to be.
Mrs. Hollands cried briefly when told the state of the investigation, then composed herself and answered every question with the completeness and precision of a woman who had spent sixty years paying very close attention to people. In 2021, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation launched a formal review of unsolved homicides involving black victims from the 1960s through the 1980s, part of a state initiative to address documented disparities in cold case investigation resources. The Netty Coulter case was among the files reviewed.
An investigator named Agent Patricia Lamb was assigned to re-examine the original file and any evidence that had been preserved. The evidence log from 1971 contained one item that had never been fully processed: a section of chain-link fence from the alley behind a property on Telare Street, removed during the initial investigation because an officer had noted what appeared to be a fresh tear in the fence fabric at a point consistent with someone moving through it quickly, and what appeared to be a small piece of fabric caught in the chain link. The fabric swatch had been photographed, logged, and stored. It had been there for fifty-two years.
Agent Lamb sent the fabric swatch to the GBI’s forensic laboratory in January 2022. The swatch, preserved in a paper envelope in the original evidence box, yielded biological material sufficient for DNA analysis. The profile recovered had two contributors: one consistent with a female matching Netty’s known biological family through a comparison with Darlene Coulter Hayes’s voluntary sample, and one from an unknown male. The unknown male profile was uploaded to the FBI’s combined DNA index system and simultaneously to a forensic genealogy database.
The genealogy analysis returned a family network centered in the Augusta metropolitan area and narrowed through six months of work to a single primary candidate. His name was Franklin Roy Estes. Born in 1944 in Hephzibah, Georgia, just south of Augusta. In April 1971, he had been twenty-six years old, working as a yard maintenance worker for several residential properties in the South Augusta area, including properties on Telfair Street, confirmed through old city business license records and client accounts held by a now-defunct property management company.
He had worked that street. He had been on it regularly. Estes had a prior arrest from 1969, a charge of aggravated assault in Columbia County that had been reduced and disposed of with probation. The victim in that case had been fifteen years old.
The case records, located in a Columbia County archive, showed the charge had been substantially reduced from the original filing. The victim, now in her sixties, was contacted by investigators in 2022. She confirmed the assault and stated she had been told at the time that pursuing the case would be difficult, and had accepted the reduced charge under pressure. Franklin Roy Estes had lived in the Augusta area his entire adult life.
He married in 1975, had two children, worked in landscaping and yard maintenance until his retirement in 2009. He attended a church in South Augusta. He was, in the language of his neighbors and acquaintances, a quiet man who kept to himself. An arrest warrant was obtained in September 2022.
His sample was compared to the unknown male profile from the fabric swatch. The match was confirmed in November 2022. Estes’s DNA matched the biological material recovered from the section of chain-link fence on Telare Street, the fence from the alley behind a property he had been employed to maintain in April of 1971. He was arrested on December 8, 2022, and charged with first-degree murder.
He entered a not-guilty plea. He stood trial in the fall of 2023 and was convicted by a Richmond County jury after three days of deliberation. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Darlene Coulter Hayes was in the courtroom when the verdict was announced.
She was sixty-four years old. She had driven to the courthouse that morning with a photograph of Netty, the school photograph from 1970, the one Eda May had always kept on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in the Olive Road house. When the jury foreperson read the verdict, Darlene held the photograph so that Netty’s face was facing the front of the courtroom. She held it up and kept it up until the judge left the bench.
She had been carrying that photograph for decades, in the literal sense of transporting it from one place to another, and in the larger sense of carrying what it represented: the record of a girl who had existed and mattered and deserved better than to be known mainly for the way her story had ended. Netty Grace Coulter was fourteen years old. She sang alto in the school choir and had one of the strongest natural voices in the program. She made straight A’s and had already begun, at fourteen, to think about which colleges she wanted to attend and what she wanted to study when she got there.
She carried her choir folder and her school bag home from Laney High on a Tuesday afternoon in April, heading south toward the house where the dahlias were growing in the front yard and the porch steps were freshly painted and her grandmother was going to be waiting with dinner. She deserved to make it home. Justice found her after fifty-two years, through a piece of fabric in an evidence envelope that had waited in a box since 1971, through a DNA database that did not exist when she was alive, through a cousin who refused to let her name be forgotten.