The cell phone records of the late Joycelyn Nicole Wilson of Atlanta are being investigated in hopes of gaining new insight into her death and her fiancé’s disappearance.
Wilson and her betrothed, Gary Laron Jones, were boating on Lake Oconee Saturday, Feb. 8, when a mysterious incident resulted in their 11-foot Sun Dolphin boat circling in the water with no occupants.
Wilson’s body was recovered from the water the next day, but the search on and around Lake Oconee for Jones continued Tuesday at the newspaper's press time.
Cell phones
Wilson was holding her cell phone in her right hand when her body was recovered.
“I’ve never seen that before, but according to the medical examiner, that is not unusual, especially for a drowning victim,” said Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who is heading up the investigation of the boating incident and working alongside the Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources in the search.
Regarding the phone data, Sills is working with Milledgeville Police Department Detective Phillip Vinson, who is specially trained in retrieving cell phone and computer data.
As of the newspaper's press time Tuesday, the search warrants had been obtained, and they were waiting on the data records from AT&T and T-Mobile.
“Contrary to what you see on TV shows, they don’t get them back to you the next day,” Sills said.
Sills hopes the data will reveal the location where her phone stopped working and any other clues that may indicate what happened between the boat's launch and its unoccupied discovery in the water.
Sighting tips
The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office received several calls from people who thought they saw Jones at various places around the state, including at a coffee shop in Chatham County, purchasing a burner cell phone from Walmart in nearby Madison, and leaving a laundromat in Lawrenceville.
Sills checked the security camera footage of each place, and the man in one of them looked very similar. So, He investigated to learn his identity, and it was someone else.
The other sightings were also unfounded.
“The person they saw looks no more like Gary Jones than I look like Melania Trump,” he said of the video from one of the sightings. “But if there’s a possibility of validity, action is being taken behind the scenes to check them out.”
Wallace Dam
Sills asked Georgia Power to let searchers inside the buoy line that blocks boats from the dam. The dam is located approximately four miles from the Long Shoals area, where people spotted the unoccupied boat. Its water can reach up to 100 feet deep.
Georgia Power officials opened the buoy line, but the search yielded nothing.
Sills said there is no way for a body to go through the dam when water is released because there is a grate in front of the take-in turbines to prevent logs and other objects from going through.
The what-ifs
As previously reported, Sills said it could take anywhere from 14 to 24 days for a drowned body to float to the surface of a lake as deep as Lake Oconee.
Thinking aloud and discussing the situation with newspaper reporters Monday, Feb. 24, Sills said evidence still leads him to believe Jones’ body is in Lake Oconee, and it could be tangled up in some trees in the lake.
“Even if it’s stuck on a tree, I think it would still eventually come up,” he opined. “But it’s conceivable that it would never come up.”
Noting there is approximately a week left in the timeframe he mentioned earlier, Sills added, “If it doesn’t come up right now, I’m sure it will in the spring with the lake water turnover.”
Meanwhile, the multiagency search continues with Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and Georgia DNR using boats equipped with various types of sonar, aviation patrols, and the Georgia State Patrol’s remotely operated vehicles that search underwater.
Local boaters, Louisiana’s Cajun Navy, the Georgia Community Emergency Response Team, the Emergency Dive Response Team, Southwest Panhandle Search & Rescue Canines, and others are also assisting.
For previously published details of the fatal boating incident and ongoing search, visit lakeoconeenews.us.