CEDAR BLUFF, Ala. -- Before his shooting rampage in Atlanta, Mark O. Barton already was regarded as a prime suspect in the 1993 bludgeoning deaths of his wife and mother-in-law at an Alabama campsite.
Barton was never charged in the earlier killings, but he was "the No. 1 suspect all the way through and still was," said Richard Igou, district attorney at the time of the killings.The bodies of Debra Spivey Barton, 36, and her mother, Eloise Powell Spivey, 59, both of Lithia Springs, Ga., were found at Riverside Campground on Weiss Lake in northeast Alabama. They had been staying in a camper without Barton during Labor Day weekend. The camper showed no signs of forced entry.
Current District Attorney Mike O'Dell said Thursday that authorities had a suspect in the case, but said he "can't confirm or deny" the suspect was Barton. O'Dell added that investigators made sure they kept up with Barton's whereabouts.
Police said the killer dumped the older woman's purse and took two rings, but ignored other jewelry and an envelope containing $600.
The women had been beaten with a sharp instrument, Igou said. Spivey's .32-caliber revolver lay on the kitchen counter.
Barton had also taken out a $600,000 life insurance policy on his first wife just before her death, and the company paid on the policy about a year later after he threatened to sue, said Maj. Phil Miller of the sheriff's department in Douglas County, west of Atlanta.
Miller, whose office was involved in the 1993 investigation because the victims were Douglas County residents, said the insurance policy "was one of the reasons we were extremely suspicious of him."
Relatives of the Spiveys referred all phone calls Thursday to investigators. A few months after the slayings, Spivey's husband, Bill, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "until the murders, Mark was the perfect son-in-law."
"Since then, we have cooled tremendously toward each other," said Spivey, a retired Federal Aviation Administration supervisor. He said Barton had refused to take a polygraph test.