By Associated Press - Sunday, June 2, 2019

HAHIRA, Ga. (AP) - A sharecropper found Claude Norris Wood’s body behind the deli counter of the small grocery store the 66-year-old farmer owned. His killer escaped capture and remains unknown more than 45 years later.

The Valdosta Daily Times reports the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is taking a fresh look at the cold case in rural South Georgia and is asking the public for any new tips. Wood’s grandson hopes he’ll finally get some answers.

“It was a senseless murder,” said Michael Wood, who spent a summer on his grandfather’s farm not long before the slaying. “There wasn’t that much money in the cash register.”

The elder Wood had served as a Cook County commissioner in the 1950s and owned a farm in Hahira, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) south of Macon. His grandson told The Valdosta Daily Times that Wood was making plans to turn the farm over to his brother so that he could focus his time on running the grocery store.

Somebody came into the store Sept. 28, 1973, shot Wood and dragged his body behind the deli counter. That’s where a sharecropper found him dead and alerted Wood’s brother, who called police.

Then-Gov. Jimmy Carter offered a $1,000 reward for tips leading to an arrest. But no suspects were ever identified.

The GBI agreed to dust off the case in 2005 and assigned an agent, Michael Wood said, but found may of the people involved in the case had died.

A poster asking for new information about the slaying was posted by the GBI on social media recently, said Mark Pro, the agent in charge of the GBI’s office in Douglas.

Michael Wood, who was 12 when his grandfather was slain, said wonders if the killed was a customer who owed his grandfather money, or perhaps an inmate from the Cook County jail assigned to a nearby road detail.

“I loved him,” he said. “I wonder why someone would to do this to such a good man.”

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