Lt. Brad Dougherty with cold case file on Arthur L. Green Jr.

Sheriff Joey Dobson recently reopened the nearly three-decades-old murder case of a young man bludgeoned to death and dumped in the woods south of Macclenny.

The victim’s mother, Marty Green Wallace of Tennessee and formerly a nursing supervisor at the Fraser emergency room in the 1980s, contacted the sheriff in January and requested the case be reexamined.

Ms. Wallace said she’s finally ready to talk publicly about the murder of her 19-year-old son, Arthur Lewis Green, Jr., and revisit perhaps the most tragic event in her life.

Mr. Green moved from his father’s home in Albany, GA to live with his sister, Donna Cooper Pullem, on West Ivey Street in Macclenny. He worked at a gas station at South 6th Street and US 90, known as the Direct Oil station.

About a month after he went missing — not returning home or showing up for work — a couple collecting aluminum cans found Mr. Green’s remains in a logging road ditch in the woods between SR 121 and CR 125 about 5 miles south of Macclenny the evening of September 30, 1983.

“After a few weeks, there wasn’t much left,” Ms. Wallace, 69, said of the remains. “He was covered by a large truck or heavy equipment tire.”

The victim’s bones were found among those of a cow carcass as well.

Physical evidence from the scene, including a red hatchet and other items, were in the custody of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement last week.

Champion

A circuit judge on February 19 sentenced a Macclenny man to two years in state prison for sending obscene images to a 15-year-old girl during a period of several days in July of last year.

The state dropped a charge of obscene communication against Buddy Duane Champion Jr. in return for his no contest plea. Judge Mark Moseley also ordered the defendant to serve two years on probation following release and gave him credit for 124 days in county jail.

Mr. Champion, 23, will also be subject to a psycho-sexual evaluation based on his actions during a more than two week period during which he engaged in lewd communication with the girl via text and also transmitted lewd photos of himself.

He has a criminal record that includes theft, burglary and resisting police.

In other cases that court session, Judge Moseley ordered Chester Hadley, 25, of Sanderson to prison for 15 months for failure to register a change of address. Mr. Hadley is a sexual offender with a past offense of lewd conduct with a female under 17 years old, and thus is required to apprise authorities of his place of residence.

The state dropped a companion charge of failure to register in the county as a sex offender.

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In recent years Baker County’s crime rate has dropped but its inmate population in county jail has not. It’s been growing and draining the county’s once healthy rainy-day fund in the process.

Since the new Baker County Sheriff’s Complex opened in June 2009, the annual deficit in the county’s fine and forfeiture fund, which covers corrections, law enforcement and other related costs, has steadily grown to $3.9 million.

In the four years between 2007-08 and 2011-12, the deficit more than doubled.

Part of that jump is due to the higher daily rate the county pays per inmate at the new 500-bed facility — roughly $85 per day or $40 more than the rate at the former jail adjacent to the courthouse. But the rising local prisoner population, which has been expanding about 10 percent per year, is also stressing the fine and forfeiture fund.

Thousands of pine trees in an area near Sanderson in western Baker County, located near railroad tracks and two major highways, could be replaced one day by a manufacturing plant, warehouse, mining operation or some other business employing hundreds of people.

At least, that’s what is intended in a proposal to amend the county’s long-range comprehensive plan to change the future land use designation on 300 acres from agriculture to industrial.

The Baker County Land Planning Agency, an appointed panel that reviews land use and zoning applications, endorsed the proposed change during a meeting on the evening of February 14 and sent it on to the county commission for consideration.

Ed Preston, the county’s planning and zoning director, told the board that the proposal, known as a “large scale future land use amendment,” had met the unanimous approval of the development review committee comprised of various county department heads, and his staff also recommended approval.

No specific development plans have been drawn up, nor are any known developers interested in the site at the moment, Mr. Preston said. Or, if there are, he said, “they haven’t told me about it.”