Butterfly Garden honors Debbie Lynn Randall, murder victim of recently solved Marietta Cold Case

The 1972 kidnapping, rape and murder of nine-year-old Debbie Lynn Randall changed Marietta in many ways. Last month the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office announced it had finally cracked the Randall case, pinning the murder on the late William Rose of Mableton. 

On Thursday, Girls Inc. of Greater Atlanta dedicated a butterfly garden to Debbie Lynn Randall at its Marietta headquarters on Manget Street. Melvin Randall, Debbie’s older brother, were among the 75 or so attendees at the event and represented their parents, who did not live to see their daughter’s murder solved. Randall told the guest, “I know my sister is here with us today, I feel her presence here. I see all the love that I’m looking at right now. It’s overwhelming for a man like me. “I just want to tell everybody: thank you from the bottom of my heart. Y’all brought a big man like myself to my knees today.”

Randall, a third-grade student at Pine Forest Elementary School, disappeared on Jan. 13, 1972. She was walking to her First Street home in Marietta Place from the Duds & Suds Co-op Laundromat when she was abducted, then raped and strangled to death. The laundromat was just a half-block from her home. The only clue left behind was spilled detergent on the pavement. A massive volunteer effort was launched to find Randall and lasted 16 days before her body was found by a group of Southern Tech students north of Powers Ferry Road and south of Windy Hill Road. An estimated 900 people attended her funeral at Roswell Street Baptist Church. During the 50 years since her death, there have been no leads and three of the four original detectives on the case died before it was solved.

The DA’s Office concluded this year that William Rose kidnapped, raped, and murdered Randall. Rose killed himself in 1976, two years after the murder. A piece of cloth recovered from Randall’s body all those years ago was the key piece of evidence. Hair removed from the cloth was analyzed in 2001 by the FBI, which contributed to a partial profile of an unknown male while ruling out other suspects. The evidence was analyzed again in 2015, in 2022 and in 2023 using forensic investigative genealogy and software such as GEDmatch Pro and Family Tree DNA, which led to Rose’s family. Family members cooperated with investigators by contributing their DNA. Investigators eventually exhumed Rose’s body to do DNA testing, which ruled out any remaining doubts that Rose was Debbie’s killer.