GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — Ten years after a man disappeared, the lone suspect in the case has been convicted of his murder.
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On Tuesday, a Gwinnett County jury found 30-year-old Jeffrey Emerson Moulder, of Cumming, guilty of malice murder and two counts of felony murder in the strangulation death of 21-year-old Samuel Waters.
On Jan. 4, 2015, Waters left his Lawrenceville home with a friend to buy beer. He was never seen again. The friend was Moulder.
Waters was classified as a missing person case until 2021.
Prosecutors said the two knew each other because they had both fathered children by Moulder’s first wife.
According to the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office, the woman and Waters never got married and he wasn’t in the child’s life.
When she was contemplating divorce from Moulder, he tried to bring Waters back into her life to avoid having to pay child support for his child and Waters’ child, the DA said.
Officials said the woman told Moulder that to fix the relationship, he would have to remove Waters from her life.
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Court documents revealed Moulder later lured Waters to a back road in Lawrenceville and strangled him to death, then dismembered the 21-year-old’s body and disposed of the remains in multiple areas near Lake Lanier after unsuccessfully trying to burn the body.
In the court document, prosecutors say Moulder confessed to his second wife that he had “placed Samuel in a chokehold and after he rendered him unconscious, he then placed a plastic bag over Samuel’s head (suffocating him to death.) (He) then placed Samuel’s body in the trunk of his car and drove to the lake house.”
Months later, authorities searched the Lake Lanier home and seized a metal barrel, one they say Moulder used to burn the body in before burying the remains in different places around Hall County.
According to testimony from the trial, he also described the locations where he buried parts of the body.
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Investigators searched the areas Moulder described with cadaver dogs but could not find any human remains. The cadaver dogs did, however, locate evidence that human remains had once been in one of the burial locations.
During the trial, a cadaver dog expert described how the dogs could identify where remains had potentially deteriorated and thus were undetectable to the human eye.
During the trial, prosecutors played an audio recording of Moulder strangling his second wife until she passed out while demanding that she stop recording the argument they were having.
She testified that when she came to, Moulder told her, “I killed Samuel Waters, do you want to record that, too?”
After the jury deliberated for less than two hours, Moulder was convicted and a judge sentenced him to life in prison.
“Samuel Waters’ family is able to get justice after 10 long years,” Gwinnett District Attorney Patsy Austin-Gatson said. This was not an easy case to close because the body was never found. But our team was able to successfully piece together evidence to prove the defendant’s guilt.”
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