By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
SEPT. 27, 2019 | It is one of the darkest moments in Gwinnett history. Three Gwinnett County policemen were gunned down with their own weapons and left handcuffed together and found the morning of April 17, 1964, just off Beaver Ruin Road. As a result, Gwinnett got the reputation as an unsafe, lawless and backward county.
More than a year after the murders, after painstakingly difficult investigations, police charged three persons. Two were found guilty of these cold-blooded murders. (One turned state’s evidence and got off without sentence.) Another was paroled after 25 years in prison, but Alex Evans died after more than 50 years in prison, becoming the longest tenured prisoner.
The crime was an especially heinous one, in that 16 bullets of 19 fired found their mark on the officers’ bodies, two of them shot directly in the face. The preparation of their bodies for viewing by an undertaker in Buford, the standard custom then, was a particularly difficult job.
Years of unsurpassed growth helped Gwinnett eventually outgrow that unsavory reputation, though many who were living here in 1964 still are deeply disturbed about the murders.
On September 20, a new book was released concerning the horrible incident. It is entitled Arc Road, named after the road where it all happened. The author is a 65-year-old Peachtree Corners resident, Tony Tiffin, who had never written a book before. While replete with large verbatim conversations from the legal transcript of two trials, it is still a work of historic fiction, something that bothered me at first when direct quotations were employed of actual people involved with the case.
However, Mr. Tiffin’s characterizations of the conversations, while harsh, sound genuine and ring true, as one person told him of the language used by many in those days working with law enforcement, “Keep in mind we are not talking about cupcakes and ice cream.” Essentially, Mr. Tiffin boiled down 1,200 pages of transcript of the trials to quote questions and answers directly from the record the words of attorneys and defendants in the book.
The author also spent a day talking with one of the three involved, Alex Evans, who was then at Hardwick Prison. “He would sometimes incriminate himself in talking to me, as I would catch him in a lie, and he would get mad. I would tell him that I was not there to interrogate him, but to interview him, as it was my job to find out if he was telling the truth. He would pitch a temper tantrum, and the guards would have to come into the room. But I learned a lot talking to him. Though Evans denied it, lots of people who knew him told me he was capable of doing this.”
The telling of the story has been a 10 year effort by Mr. Tiffin, a Georgia native of Augusta, who was raised in Atlanta and is a graduate of Briarcliff High School, and former automobile and corporate aircraft salesman. He says: “My father was a military police officer, and he told me once when I was six years old sitting in his lap, that if I ever got in trouble, go find the nearest policeman. He died two weeks later. Living in this area when the three were killed, I could not get that out of my mind, and decided 10 years ago to write the story.”
If you want to know more about this unfortunate bit of Gwinnett history, this is the book for you. This amazing and difficult chapter of Gwinnett life is available at Amazon for $17.95.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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