Thirty-four years after Mary Wilfong was killed and dumped in a field off Johnstonville Road in Monroe County, her killer pled guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday, March 5.
Larry Padgett, 60, an Indiana truck driver, pled guilty before Judge Tommy Wilson on Tuesday. He was sentenced to life in prison. But under the more lenient law in place in 1989, Padgett will be eligible for parole in 7 years. Current Georgia law would have made him eligible for parole in 30 years. Padgett, then 26, says he killed Willfong, then 23, after he paid her for sex and she refused to give him his wallet back.
Before he was sentenced, Willfong’s oldest son Justin Kasper testified via teleconference that it was hard losing his mother when he was just 5 years old.
“It’s affected me,” said Kasper, now 39 and living in Fargo, North Dakota. “I’ve carried the weight of her death on my shoulders. My family forgot about it and wanted me to forget about it. But she’s my mother and that’s not who I am. She deserved justice, and today, we’re getting it.”
Kasper said while Padgett has been out for 34 years living his life, he’s had to live with a ghost, trying to figure out what happened and why.
Kasper said he didn’t get an answer until last year, when Monroe County sheriff’s Inv. Marc Mansfield used DNA technology and a semen sample Padgett left to solve the crime and arrest him last year.
“I still want to know why,” said Kasper. “If he truly regrets what he did, why didn’t he come forward 34 years ago? But he’s getting his just desserts right now.”
A semen sample taken from 1989 was matched with DNA genealogy banks to identify Padgett as the killer. Mansfield watched from the court gallery as Padgett pled on Tuesday,
“It’s absolutely my proudest moment in law enforcement,” said Mansfield. “We did this for Mary. She didn’t deserve to be killed and drug in the woods and left like trash.”
Investigators say Mary lived a rough life, frequenting military bases and traveling around the country by hitching rides from truckers. She had three children by three different men and had most recently worked at the Waffle House in Gainesville, Ga. She had last been seen on Nov. 19, 1989, two days before, at a truck stop near the farmers market off I-75 in Atlanta. Deer hunters found her body off Johnstonville Road on Nov. 21, 1989.
Padgett had no criminal record until the murder charge. Padgett attorney Dustin Buttigieg of Forsyth told the Reporter that his client has given a consistent story of the 1989 murder: Willfong charged him $50 for sex at a truck stop. Afterwards, she asked for a ride to a different truck stop and he drove her. As he was walking into the truck stop, he realized he’d left his wallet with Willfong. When he re-entered the semi, Willfong had the wallet and a struggle over it ensued. Padgett said that Willfong pulled out a knife from her purse (silver handled, like a kitchen knife) and stabbed his left hand and said he still has the scar. He admitted to fighting with her and strangling her at that point. He panicked and dumped her body in Monroe County en route to Florida.
At sentencing on Tuesday, Buttigieg said that Padgett did want to say that while photos of Willfong’s body show her shirt rolled up, he did not do that now did he cut the chicken wire fence near which she was found.
The Mary Willfong case is the first ever in Monroe County solved using DNA genealogy technology and is one of the first such cases in Georgia. Sheriff Brad Freeman reopened the Wilfong case in 2019 after taking office. He assigned it to Mansfield, a former GBI investigor.
When Mansfield reopened the case, Mary’s then 84-year-old mother Cory Willfong told him she had a dream that her daughter was getting into a tractor-trailer with a truck driver who killed her. But she died before her daughter’s murder was solved.
