UGA Professor Murder: Marianne Shockley's Boyfriend Charged, Another Suspect Kills Self

A man shot himself while another was taken into custody and charged with the murder of Marianne Shockley, a University of Georgia professor who was found dead near a hot tub at a home in Milledgeville on Sunday.

In a press conference Monday, Baldwin County Sheriff Bill Massee said 42-year-old Shockley and her boyfriend, Marcus Lillard, were at 69-year-old Clark Heindel’s home Saturday night. Early Sunday, the two men called 911 and reported that the victim had drowned in the hot tub. Officers arrived at the home and felt something was wrong as they spotted blood at the scene.

“They determined that the scene looked a little inappropriate as far as just a pure drowning incident due to some blood at the scene and the demeanor of the people at the scene,” Massee said.

The responding officers found Heindel performing CPR on Shockley’s body. Masse said Shockley was bleeding heavily from a head injury and all the three people were naked. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The officers questioned Lillard and Heindel together at the scene. Lillard told them that he had gone to the woods to gather firewood and when he returned, he noticed Shockley “passed out” in the hot tub. He said while pulling her out of the tub, Shockley fell and received the head injury. Meanwhile, Heindel told the officers he was swimming on the other side of the pool when the victim was alone in the hot tub. The officers, however, found a pair of blood-stained eyeglasses at the end of the pool deck and decided to question them separately, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

While Lillard was sent to a patrol car, Heindel was asked to move to the home’s front porch. However, when the officers were about the reach the front porch, Heindel disappeared inside the home and shot himself. The officers ran inside and found him dead.

An autopsy was conducted on Shockley’s body which revealed she had died of strangulation. Lillard, a former car salesman, was taken into custody and charged with murder by strangulation, concealing a death and aggravated assault. He remained in jail while investigators tried to find out the cause of the murder.

Describing the case as one of the strangest ever, Massee said, “I don’t know how to explain this to people who are not in our business, but when we first arrived at the crime scene, there was just something about it not right, and it was sort of a bizarre, different kind of case. We had that conversation privately and [in] our law enforcement circle,” the Union Recorder reported.