WAYNESVILLE — A Brantley County has been arrested and charged with two counts of Murder and two counts of Aggravated Assault in the 1985 deaths of Harold and Thelma Swain of Camden County.
Erik Kristensen Sparre, 61 of Waynesville, was taken into custody Monday, December 9 by the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) without incident for the murders of the Swains back on March 11, 1985. He was booked into the Camden County Jail.
The Swains were shot to death while at the Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Woodbine.
The GBI believes Sparre is truly responsible for the decades-old cold case crime seeking to clarify the circumstances surrounding the murders. The investigation gained traction with tips from the public and forensic advancements. In August 2020, the GBI searched the Waynesville property where Sparre and his late mother had lived, uncovering potential links to the crime and reopened the case.
This investigation is active and ongoing.
The case was closed after Dennis Perry was convicted of those murders in 2003. In 2021, spurred on by the Georgia Innocence Project and an award-winning Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation, a judge exonerated Perry.
The Swains’ deaths at Rising Daughter Baptist Church roiled the community near Waverly, about half an hour west of Brunswick. But the case sat unresolved for years.
Suspicions about Sparre, a purported white supremacist, had circulated in the wake of the Swains’ death, but investigators accepted his offered alibi. His supposed manager at Winn-Dixie told police over the phone Sparre was working at the grocery store the night of the killings.
The AJC investigation debunked the alibi. Former reporter Joshua Sharpe found the person on the phone had used a fraudulent name, Social Security number and contact information.
Sparre
The original investigator on the case couldn’t recall for sure, but he likely got the manager’s number — which did not correspond to the Winn-Dixie — from Sparre himself.
The GBI says a DNA test ties Sparre to the original crime scene. Sparre also told multiple people about the shooting, according to police and court records.
In previous interviews with the AJC, Sparre proclaimed his innocence. The GBI declined to provide additional information about their decision to arrest the 61-year-old.
It was unclear if he’s hired an attorney.
Joe Gregory, a GBI agent, and Butch Kennedy, Camden County’s chief sheriff’s deputy, were the original investigators assigned to the Swain case and worked it for many years. Both men, now retired, investigated Perry in 1988 and found it all but impossible for him to have been at the crime scene.
This week’s news, Gregory said, “is the best Christmas present Butch and I could ask for.”
