Mystery at Murder Creek: The vanishings no one noticed

Could it be the cases are nigh-unsolvable?

Might the modern fascination with all things whodunit, with true crime and its trappings and, dare we say, souvenirs, have made the web of suspects too vast?

Is the ring of culprits so considerable that the human bloodhound of a sheriff in these parts has never caught scent of perpetrators, or for that matter, so much as bothered sniffing for them?

Whatever the reasons, the motive seems clear: irresistible loot.

In the form of green, rectangular highway signs.

Not just any roadside signs.

These read “Murder Creek.”

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The suspect(s) will absolutely use an older-model, American-manufactured pickup truck as his sole or primary mode of transportation. … The bed of such a vehicle will most likely contain rods and reels (especially Zebco model 33) along with cane poles, logging chains, 5-gallon buckets, fatwood lighter knots, and be littered with empty beer cans along with a few plastic bags of garbage. Dried deer blood will also be present on the floor of the truck’s bed. — From Putnam County Sheriff Howard R. Sills’ tongue-in-cheek, FBI-like profile of those responsible.

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The origin of the creek’s nefarious-sounding name is as unknown as what has become of the signs marking it.

Some have suggested it refers to a “murder of crows” (a group of crows often being referred to as a “murder”). Or maybe even cows. A news account from March 1944 described how during torrential downpours that year, more than two dozen bovines herded in the creek bottoms drowned.

The Wikipedia entry to how the Murder Creek name came to be is wrong. As is a 2009 write-up in the Monticello News, the legal organ of Jasper County where the waterway forms some 15 miles due south of I-20.

Those erroneous citations refer to an “Indian Affairs” passage from the 1780s, a historic account of a silver heist and subsequent slaughter along the banks of what has since been known as Murder Creek — in southern Alabama.

Other sources over the years have posited that the Murder Creek in Georgia takes its name from killings that range from slave slayings to European settlers’ bloody run-ins with the land’s native people.

In 1987, in a quest to determine once and for all how the creek here got its name, Bill Boyd, longtime columnist for the Macon Telegraph, talked to locals along the creek for miles. Some suggested it stemmed from the water’s mud-red hue after heavy rains. Some spoke of ancient bloodshed near its banks.

Boyd gave up after talking to Monticello history buff Marcia Hayes Carnes, who told him the name “may have started with the Indians.” But she wasn’t sure how.

“If you find out,” Carnes said, “I’d sure like to know.”

The venerable and indispensable reference book “Georgia Place-Names,” first published in 1975, is a compilation of how towns, cities, areas and waterways came to bear the names we know them by.

The book says the name Murder Creek is a translation from the Muskogean word “Chattochuccohatchee.” But that isn’t quite right either, though research tomes of the region in the 1800s do mention a path bearing that name.

An official at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Library and Archives noted in a recent email that “Chattochuccohatchee” may stem from a combination of words in the native peoples’ spoken language: “The English spelling seems to indicate three Mvskoke words placed together: chatto, chucco, hatchee. Which sound like the following words in Mvskoke: cvto, cuko, hvcce. Which translates to: rock, house, river.”

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

That seems apt, considering Murder Creek’s array of granite outcroppings and shoals and openings that some locals describe as caves. But it’s nowhere close to “murder.”

The 1984 book “History of Jasper County, Georgia,” notes that Baptist minister and educator Adiel Sherwood, in his publication “A Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,” mentioned Murder Creek in 1827: “It is 60 feet wide … and gives motion to many mills.”

But as the Jasper County book concludes, “Who was murdered, white or Indian, and under what circumstances, can only be surmised.”

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The suspect(s) will seldom have a firearm actually on their person except when they are engaged in the dispatching of serpents or the recreational shooting of Catostomidae or sunning Chelonians.

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Perhaps it is poetic that the most-traveled state highway bridge crossing where Murder Creek signs go to die or disappear is around the corner from a country lane named Twilight Shores Road.

The bridge there overlooks Murder Creek Recreation, a live bait and hunting shop. (It also rents kayaks.) Proprietor Shannon Newman, along with her husband Russ, moved south from Woodstock and opened the long-shuttered, century-old roadside store a few years ago.

Newman is frequently asked by customers how the creek got its name.

The best she can answer is, “There are so many stories.”

The area is residential, cluttered with Lake Sinclair-area dwellings, and yet rural enough that three years ago thieves thought it sufficiently secluded to bury whole, on property off Rabbit Skip Road, the cargo hold of a stolen Isuzu box truck.

There are two other state highways with Murder Creek crossings — Ga. 83, which leads to Monticello from the north; and Ga. 16, along which a pivotal scene in the 1992 comedy “My Cousin Vinny” was filmed.

Credit: Joe Kovac

Credit: Joe Kovac

At least five other thoroughfares, country lanes maintained by Jasper and Putnam counties, cross the waterway.

As of mid-February, only a single Murder Creek marker remained.

William Volk, a Milledgeville-based communications officer in that region for the Georgia Department of Transportation, confirmed the serial sign-nappings.

He said that for “several years” the department’s “sign technicians” have replaced Murder Creek signs more than any in that district.

“Whenever a new ‘Murder Creek’ sign is put up, it typically doesn’t last long,” Volk wrote in an email, adding that usually the signs are gone in less than a month. “We have not had much urgency to replace the signs after they disappear.”

Volk noted that workers have employed “strategies” to make the signs harder to steal.

“The last time we installed them, crews used special hardware and tools with locking mechanisms. ... Still, the signs disappeared within a few weeks,” Volk went on. “In at least one instance, instead of removing just the sign, the entire pole was removed.”

Credit: Joe Kovac

Credit: Joe Kovac

He said the department was considering ordering new signs with other securing methods for poles and signage.

Volk, in urging would-be bandits to instead order look-alike signs from online vendors, further noted, “Georgia DOT strongly discourages the stealing of road signs. … Hopefully people won’t read this story and feel inspired to steal!”

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The suspect(s) will perpetrate the thefts of these signs nocturnally, usually between the hours of 22:00 and 04:00. … Officers encountering individuals meeting this profile should always use the same caution as they do when encountering any criminal, but this suspect(s) will either expeditiously confess upon being confronted with evidence and somewhat joyfully surrender without resistance only to use his subsequent conviction, when allowed to be sentenced for a lesser misdemeanor theft, as a highlight of his curriculum vitae. On the other hand, the officer encountering such a suspect(s) who is in the environment of the creek, its banks, or adjacent swamps and lowlands, will have a proclivity to escape into said environment if the opportunity avails itself, and unless the pursuing law enforcement officials have the same experience of knowledge as the miscreant being pursued, there will be little chance of apprehension.

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Howard R. Sills, the Putnam sheriff going on 30 years, has in his half-century in law enforcement helped send five killers to death row.

He has also handled his share of far lower-bore mischief.

Fourteen years ago, Sills tracked down a quartet of vandals who, from the grounds of the Uncle Remus Museum, stole a 3-foot-tall iron statue of author and Putnam native son Joel Chandler Harris’ most famous critter character Br’er Rabbit.

Credit: Putnam County Sheriff's Office

Credit: Putnam County Sheriff's Office

His department has handled calls about a nuisance rooster pecking a woman’s flowers on Possum Point Drive. In 2018, a local man who was certain the underwear in his bedroom had been rearranged by a ghost.

However, aside from a recent excursion to determine just how many of the Murder Creek signs remain, the Putnam sheriff or his deputies have never jotted a single incident report regarding the theft of one.

He has seized, as he put it, plenty of road signs “from dope houses” whose occupants used the signs for decoration. The missing Murder Creek signs, he figures, now adorn the walls of dorm rooms, man caves, poker dens and hunting clubs.

On a recent morning, at the wheel of a 2002 Chevy Tahoe with 259,000 miles on it, he cruised out Ga. 16 into neighboring Jasper County.

As he approached the two-lane Fred Emory Smith Memorial Bridge, the sheriff said, “Oh, the sign is there. I do believe it is.”

A smaller rectangular green sign beside a wider one bearing the bridge’s name came into view.

“Murder Creek,” it read.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

According to a sticker on it, the aluminum sign had been there since 2019, a sole survivor of Murder Creek.

Someone, though, had previously opened fire on the bridge-name sign, a bullseye through the “I” in “Memorial.”

“Must be a .22,” Sills said upon closer inspection. “Didn’t penetrate.”

Sills, who uncannily knows something about everyone or everything that moves in the area, seemed truly surprised the Murder Creek sign was still there.

He paced toward the other side of the bridge and squinted into the distance, toward the spot where another Murder Creek sign should be.

“It’s gone,” Sills said.

He offered no further investigative opinion of the sign’s whereabouts or the fates of its purloined brethren, or what might bring an end to the pilfery.

Though it falls far short of a satisfactory conclusion — say, an apprehension and arrest — the sheriff’s off-the-cuff suspect profile does offer a remedying suggestion:

Government entities who wish to permanently stop the theft of such signage should simply replace them with signs that announce some Orwellian doublespeak like “Muddy Influent of the Oconee River Watershed.”