Georgia 1971 Cold Case Solved — The Killer’s Own Nephew Handed Over the Evidence

She is 31 years old.  She has three children under the age of eight, a husband who works the night shift at a garment factory, and a routine so regular that neighbors see her and set their watches .    On the evening of October 14, 1971, Darlene Puitt walked from the front porch of her home in Western County, Georgia, to her mailbox at the end of the gravel driveway , and never returned .

  This is not the story of a woman who lost her way in life .  It’s about a man who believed he would never be found, and a nephew who carried a burden for 52 years that no one should have to carry alone . It took 52 years, a cardboard box hidden in the hall closet, and a single morning conversation at a kitchen table in Marietta, Georgia, to identify the man who took Darlene Puitt away from her children.

But before we talk about that, we need to go back to that October evening , because to know what was lost , you first have to understand who Darlene really was . Western County, Georgia in 1971 was a place that believed in its own goodness .  It’s located about 40 miles southeast of Atlanta, next to a two-lane highway lined with kudzu-covered pine trees and red dirt embankments.

  Its 2,300 residents grew up together in a way that is only possible in small southern towns.  They knew each other’s children , sat in the same place in church, and were so close and trusting that danger seemed unlikely.    On warm evenings, smoke from the wood-burning stove would waft through the screen doors , the news would be heard by Walter Cronkite at 6:30 and by those who would meet at Morrison Feed and Hardware the next morning .

People used to leave their doors unlocked during the day. Many people would leave their doors unlocked even at night .  Everyone knew that the new 18- mile westbound interstate ramp, which arrived in the summer of 1971, would change things .  But by October, things had still not changed in Western County.  That autumn the world was still filled with the smells of pine needles, dried tobacco, and Sunday lunches steaming hot on the stove burners .

  In such a place, a woman walking to her mailbox at dusk would have no fear. Darlene Puitt has lived her entire life in Western County .  She grew up two miles from the house she lives in with her husband, Roy, which was built by Roy’s father in 1948. Her presence in the neighborhood was such that communities relied on her even if she was not officially recognized.

    If the porch light on your front porch isn’t on two nights in a row , she’s the one who’ll notice.  She’s the one who left pound cake on your doorstep when your mother died . She would organize Sunday School volunteer programs at First Baptist without anyone asking or expecting thanks. She worked three days a week as a records assistant at the Weston County Health Clinic , securing patient details and seeing to appointments.

  Her boss, Patricia Coles, later told authorities that she would not have known her worth without Darlene. Seven-year-old Kevin, five-year-old Susan, and eight-month-old baby Thomas;  These three children were her world, and she showed it not only in her words but also in her actions .    When she walked Susan to the school bus every day , she never rushed , but waited patiently until Susan counted the lines on the path.

Her sister Carol, who lived in Savannah, said she remembered Darlene writing letters in her handwriting on light blue paper, each letter detailing details about the children, things Kevin said, pictures Susan drew, and Thomas’ sleep. Carol had a habit that she remembered well, because Darlene often mentioned it in her letters .

  Every day before bed, she would check to see if the windows in everyone’s rooms, from the oldest child to the youngest, were properly closed.  She had been doing that since Kevin was born . She never missed that task. October 14, 1971 was a Thursday. Roy Pewt leaves for the night shift at 7:30. Darlene breastfed the baby at 8 o’clock , put Thomas to bed in the crib, and sat Kevin and Susan in front of the TV in the hall .

  She is waiting for a letter from Carol .  The sisters wrote letters at least twice a month, and sometime after 8:30 , she told Kevin that she was going to the mailbox .  Kevin later told officers that he saw their mother open the screen door and walk out . He heard the sound of the door springing. He turned back to the TV .

  She didn’t come back .    The next morning at 5:50 a.m., Roy Pew arrived home, and Kevin and Susan were sleeping on the hall floor .  The test pattern is already coming on the TV. Thomas was moving slowly in his cradle , but Darlene was nowhere to be seen in the house. He searched every room .  He went out. He stood on the porch for a while in the October darkness .

  Then he went to the phone. At 8 o’clock he called his next-door neighbors, the Hendersons, who arrived promptly. He called Patricia Coles. He called Carol in Savannah, and before he could finish the first sentence, she started crying .  At 9:17 a.m. that morning , Roy Puit went to the Weston County Sheriff’s Office on Main Street to complain that his wife was missing .

Deputies arrived at Puit’s residence within the hour .    The clues they found at the mailbox immediately indicated that Darlene had come all this way. Tire marks lie in the gravel by the side of the road.    There were signs of a struggle on the soft ground near the tree line, and most importantly, about 6 feet from the mailbox post, was Darlene’s left slipper, with a light blue fleece lining .

She came out wearing only her slippers at home .  She didn’t want to cross the road.  What happened at that mailbox happened very quickly.  By 10:30 a.m. , the sheriff had ordered a full-scale search. By noon , more than a hundred Weston County residents gathered in front of Puitt’s house with flashlights. She is one of them.

  No one in that community could have imagined that only one of them had done this .  The case was assigned to Deputy Floyd Hatcher, a 15-year veteran of the Weston County Sheriff’s Office ;  He served under three different sheriffs and developed a reputation for meticulous, meticulous documentation .

  Witnesses believed in his age, 52 years, and his manner of conducting interviews, which included listening more than talking, and never being in a hurry .    As he himself later admitted to his colleagues , it became very difficult for him to forget this case .  He knew Darlene through First Baptist Church. He attended her wedding in 1963.

    In the first few weeks, the investigation focused on two individuals.  The first person was Lester Gaines, a farm worker from the neighboring county, who was seen driving a dark-colored truck on Darlene Road several nights in October . Gaines had two previous arrests and his alibi for the night of the 14th could not be verified , but forensic examination of tire tracks found there showed that they did not belong to Gaines’ vehicle, as the rear axle was wider than the tracks.

  He was removed from the investigation.    The second suspect is a local resident, whose name was removed from public records at the family’s request. He was a neighbor, Roy Puit, who had a property dispute last spring. Two independent witnesses confirmed his alibi . He was given a clean chit within a week.    What Deputy Hatcher didn’t know at the time was that there was a different name that would eventually emerge as the suspect .

A name that circulated in Weston County every day during the early months of the trial.  Perhaps he has uttered that name many times, unaware of the fear behind it . Darlene’s body was discovered on November 3, 1971, by a deer hunter hunting on the eastern edge of the Millican property, about 2 and a half miles from the Puitt home .

    The state medical examiner confirmed the cause of death was blunt force trauma. Evidence collected at the scene was processed with 1971 capabilities, including soil samples, fiber analysis, and limited serological testing .    Although Deputy Hatcher carefully secured and cataloged each item , the technology of the time was unable to identify the suspect .

  The trial continued throughout the winter and into 1972 . It slowed down when spring came. By the end of 1972, with no suitable suspects and no new evidence to be found, the case file was placed in long-term storage.  It is not officially closed .  It just went silent .  Roy Puit raised three children alone. Kevin Mann became a mechanic in the city and by 1985 he had two children .

Susan got married in 1988 and moved to Chattanooga .  Baby Thomas, who was put to bed the evening Darlene went to the mailbox, grew up knowing his mother only through photos and the change in his father’s voice when he said her name.  Roy carried the case for 32 years, pressing the sheriff’s office on each anniversary, calling to see if there was any new information .

  He died in 2003 at the age of 71. By 1980, 9 years had passed.    The new owners painted the house where the Puit family lived a different color .    A new principal has arrived at Susan’s school.  Neighbors who arrived at 8 a.m. when Roy couldn’t find his wife Darlene left for Augusta . The world continued in its own detached manner .

By 1990, 19 years had passed. Kevin’s children are learning letters .  By 2000, that case was almost three decades old, and the photocopied notice hanging in the window of Morrisons Feed and Hardware had faded so much that the letters on the yellowed paper were barely visible .  But no one removed it.  That one thing spoke louder than any official statement.

Weston County has not forgotten. It has only learned to live with uncertainty. Carol would drive from Savannah every year on October 14th . She would sit with Roy until he died. After 2003, she spent time with Puit’s children and those who were unable to attend. She saved every letter Darlene wrote to her. They are all arranged by year and are in a shoe box tied with kitchen string.

  She read them countless times, each time searching for something in the simple words that she might have missed: for some clue that would explain what had happened to her sister on an ordinary Thursday evening, in a town where nothing bad could happen . She found nothing, but she didn’t stop reading. Floyd Hatcher retired from the Weston County Sheriff’s Office in 1989 .

He kept a manila folder containing personal case notes for Darlene Puit in a drawer on his desk at home . His daughter told a local reporter years later that she knew the folder was there and that she understood it as a child as evidence of her father’s unfinished work . Hatcher died in 2007 . He never found an answer.

Thomas Puit grew up to be a very punctual person, which seemed to be his specialty to his colleagues.    He remembered the dates even if no one told him. He kept his appointments to the minute. He could never see the month of October like any other month . In 2009, at the age of 38, he drove from his home in Decorah to the Weston County Sheriff’s Office and asked to speak with whoever was currently looking into unsolved cases.

  He brought with him the photos his father had hidden .  He brought Carol paper clippings .  He prepared himself . He meets Detective Sergeant Anita Dubois, who joined the department in 2001 and is adept at solving old, complex cases, with her special experience in examining evidence.  She listened to Thomas for an hour .  In the end, she gave him a promise.

She said she would pull out the entire case file and read it from the first page .  Behind every case on this channel lies weeks of hard work searching records, verifying facts, and reconstructing real lives lost .    If you want us to continue uncovering the truth behind stories like this , please like and subscribe to this video , as well as comment on where in the world you are watching from.

Now, let’s get back to the Darlene thing . Sergeant Dubois read the Poit file, knowing it was very important, carefully , without skipping a single page . She was amazed by the quality of the documentation prepared by Deputy Hatcher .  He meticulously recorded every item of physical evidence, as if he knew that if the case were to be rebuilt one day, the evidence he had left behind would be the basis for his case.

The evidence, which was stored at the County Evidence Storage Facility, which installed climate-controlled preservation units in 1998, is still intact . Even 44 years after Darlene Puit walked to the mailbox in her house slippers, the biological evidence in her case remains safe in sealed archival condition .

  In 2015, Sergeant DuBois submitted a formal request to have the preserved evidence analyzed with modern DNA technology, as well as compared to genetic genealogy databases. She later explained to Thomas Puit in simple language how this process works . A laboratory collects a DNA profile from biological material collected from a crime scene.

The case took material preserved in evidence folders for more than four decades and compared that profile first to a national database of criminals and then to consumer DNA databases where millions of Americans voluntarily submitted saliva samples to learn about their family histories .    If the person responsible, or any close blood relatives of that person, have ever submitted a DNA sample to one of these genealogy services , this technology can trace their family name based on their genetic lineage.

    The laboratory results came in March 2016.  There is no hidden criminal data there . The person responsible had no previous criminal history from which DNA would need to be collected .  But one thing that the lab found important in genealogical analysis was revealed. That is a strong partial resemblance, indicating a family group from Western County, Georgia.

  Sergeant Dubois printed out the result.  She gave it to her captain.  That genetic pathway led to a man named Curtis Earl Belland. Curtis Belland was born in Weston County in 1946. He was 25 years old in October 1971, and he lived 0.4 miles from Puit’s house . He worked for years in the same garment factory as Roy Puit , a fact that was in the original case files but was ignored at the time .

  He used to attend social events . He was married with two daughters , and died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 58. He was never charged with any crime. He was never formally questioned in connection with the death of Darlene Puit .  In every story about him, he appeared to be an ordinary person. Curtis Belland has a nephew.  In the spring of 2016, Gary Belland was 59 years old and working as a property manager in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta .

  He hid a cardboard box in his home’s basement for over 30 years, with great care and terrifying discipline . Because he couldn’t destroy it, nor could he hand it over to the authorities . Sergeant DuBois drove to Marietta on a Tuesday morning in April 2016.  She called ahead, introduced herself to her department , and only said she was investigating a matter related to Weston County.

Gary Belland opened the door. He is a very quiet person.    As his daughter later described him , he kept things inside , and it became a part of his behavior. He understood why she had come before the sergeant had finished his second sentence.  He realized the matter from the name of the county she mentioned . He invited her inside .

He made coffee. He sat across from her at the kitchen table .    Then he said he had to get something from the hall.    It was that cardboard box that Gary Bell brought back. It contained his uncle Curtis’ personal notebooks , small books written with a blue ballpoint pen .  Gary, then a teenager, found them around 1985 when he asked his aunt Curtis for help organizing a storage unit .

He was 16 years old then. He opened a notebook at random and started reading .  He understood what he was reading, slowly at first, then suddenly.    The October 1971 entries in Curtis Bellon’s notebook are not officially a confession .  They are the writings of a man trying to understand what he has done .

  They described an evening journey, a gravel road, an incident, a decision made under the shadow of dark trees , and then the underlying fear that runs between simple sentences about work, the weather, and neighbors .  The geographical details in those inscriptions are very clear .  Time passed, and the fear in those writings became more apparent than ever.

Gary Belland took those notebooks home in 1985 . He considered calling the police three times over the next few years. He has been secretly observing the notebooks ever since they were found, on the anniversary of Darlene’s death twice . Another time, in 2003, he read about Roy Puit’s death in the Weston County Register, only to find out that Roy had died without finding an answer .

  That was the closest Gary came to revealing the truth. But every time he stopped, he didn’t understand how to explain the 30- year silence .  He didn’t know who to call or where to start . He did n’t know if coming forward would do any good or if it would destroy the rest of his family. Curtis, who was already dead, faced no consequences. He remained silent.

  He hid the box as it was . He carried it like a burden that humans carry, unable to let go, unable to hold on and move forward. Finally, a small newspaper article in 2009 moved him. That was the short news story in the Weston County Register about Thomas Puit’s attempt to reopen his mother’s case. Gary read it.  He put it aside.

    He took it again.    He started packing the things in the box . He has been waiting for someone from Weston County to call ever since . I was 16 when I found those notebooks. Gary Bell told Sergeant Dubois at the kitchen table in Marietta . I do n’t know what to do. I do n’t even understand how to fix that mistake without doing anything.

Sergeant DuBois went back to Weston County with those notebooks and Gary Bell’s sworn statement .  A forensic document examiner analyzed those composition books and confirmed that they matched Curtis Bell’s handwriting. There is a hand-drawn sketch in one of the notebooks, dated October 1971. That was a map drawn by Curtis himself .

One of the road names and geographical features matched the exact location where Darlin’s shoe was found in 1971 .    The tire marks from the original evidence collected by Hatcher were matched with vehicle registration records from the time.  The axle width of a truck registered in the Belland family’s name in 1970 matched the tire marks found at the scene.

  DNA evidence, affidavits , notebooks, and complete case documents were collected and submitted to the Weston County District Attorney’s Office. On September 9, 2016, the Darlene Anne Pewitt case officially closed. Curtis Earl Bellande was found responsible for her death. Curtis Belland died in 2004.    There is no possibility of him being investigated.

He lived another 33 years after killing Darlene Pewitt.    He worked with her husband, traveled around the village where her children grew up , and participated in all kinds of events held in small towns.    No one ever questioned him .  He was very ordinary . Everyone believed him. He was a good neighbor to everyone who knew him.

    When the news reached Weston County in September 2016 , the public reaction was not so easy.  There is some relief there . There is also a special kind of anger that comes when we realize how close the truth is to us. Those who knew Curtis Bell, those who stood next to him at old events, now have to look at those memories differently .

Those who have been living there for a long time told local reporters that they did not know what to do after learning about this . A woman who grew up next to the Peuit family said she was happy the case was over , but very angry that it took so long . Both of those things are true.  Those two things are still real .

One Friday afternoon in September, the Weston County Sheriff’s Department called Thomas Pewitt. Kevin came by car from Mon. Susan is from Chattanooga .  The three Pewitt children sat together in the same county where their mother had lived all her life.    The sergeant, who had explained the case from the mailbox to the laboratory, and finally to the kitchen table in Marietta, kept his promise to his son that he would read the file .

  The following week, Thomas Puit spoke to a local reporter. He said that he wanted justice to be done, but the outcome was different, but that ‘different’ does not mean ‘bad’.  He said that the truth is true, and that it will not change even if the person responsible cannot be brought to court and questioned .  He said he thought about Floyd Hatcher repeatedly , the deputy who kept the case file in his desk drawer throughout his retirement and passed away without finding an answer, and he wished Hatcher had known about it .

  Darlene Puit would check her children’s windows every night, in order from oldest to youngest , never avoiding the task .  She walked Susan leisurely to the school bus.  She wrote on light blue letter paper, which always ended with a special note about each child .  She would put on her house slippers and walk to the end of the driveway, hoping for a letter from her sister .

And she had done nothing wrong, nothing to deserve what happened to her in the darkness at the edge of those trees . Those who loved her, the husband who pressured the sheriff’s office until his death, the sister who traveled from Savannah every October for more than 40 years , the three children who grew up with the loss of her absence, never stopped believing they should know the truth.

  They are right. Justice has been served for Darlene Puit after 45 years.  She is 31 years old. Her children are still among us.  There are still some questions remaining in this case and they need to be carefully examined.    Do you believe that Gary Belland’s decision was ultimately the right one ?  Or, do you think that no matter what is eventually revealed, 30 years of silence cannot be fully rectified ?  What should we think of society when the person responsible has lived with them for three decades , worked with the victim’s husband, and is

considered a commoner by all who know him ? And how many other cases from that period are now lying in storage facilities?    Has no one thought of retesting them with modern technology, and are they still waiting for someone to respond ?  After 45 years, Darlene Puitt got justice. This channel exists for stories like hers.

    If you believe that the search for the truth is worth it, no matter how long it takes, subscribe to never miss the next case . More solved cold cases await in the description below . Thank you for being here.