She Was Pregnant When She Was Killed In Her Home, And One Of Her Young Daughters Found Her
In 2012, Amy Jane Ellison Nichols of Girard, Georgia, was a 27-year-old mother of three with a fourth child on the way.
She called her daughters, who were 11, 8, and 5 years old, her “three favorite people,” and on February 21 that year, she shared a sonogram image of her unborn baby on Facebook.
Yet, by the early morning hours of March 7, 2012, Amy had been shot and killed in her own home. It was one of her daughters who ultimately found her remains.
At the time, they had been living in a trailer home in the 200 block of Brigham Landing Road, and at about 5:30 a.m., Amy’s eldest daughter contacted 911, saying she was “laying on the floor, bloody.”
Dispatch told the young girl that an ambulance was on the way, and she responded, “Okay, just get here fast because we’re here alone.”
Amy’s eldest also called her aunt, Angell Heath, who immediately raced to Amy’s house.
“I got there as fast as I could. The girls were huddled up in the corner, in the hallway. They weren’t even standing by their mom. When I come in and I see her lying there, I’m screaming her name. Then I realized she was gone,” Angell recalled.
In the middle of the night, there had been a knock on Amy’s front door. Investigators believe she answered, and that’s when she was shot by a single bullet. The bullet hit her spleen, killing both her and her unborn baby.
After Amy’s daughter woke up, discovered her body, and called the police, authorities arrived on the scene at 5:54 a.m. She and her baby were declared dead, and an investigation was put underway.
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Her death sent shockwaves through the small town of Girard, with former Burke County Sheriff Greg Coursey noting, “Any murder is an awful thing. But to take the life of a young woman with three children and leave her to die in that house, what could be worse?”
Authorities didn’t think that Amy’s slaying was part of a burglary or random incident. Instead, since there were no signs of forced entry or items missing from the home, they theorized that she knew her killer.
“This does not appear to be a random act of violence. I can’t preclude the possibility, but right now, I don’t believe it is,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Special Agent Mike Ayers stated in 2012.
“I think Amy was specifically targeted for a specific reason, and we just need to find out what that is,” echoed the new Burke County Sheriff Alfonzo Williams in 2017.
So, the police spoke to dozens of individuals, ranging from Amy’s estranged husband to a new man she’d been seeing.
Investigators also knew who had fathered her unborn baby, but in 2017, Sheriff Williams said, “We are withholding that information.”
No arrests have been made in Amy’s case, and her murder remains unsolved nearly 13 years later. Amy’s sister, Angell, is most distraught by the fact that Amy was found by her children, who “acted just stunned” and “didn’t know what to say or what to do.”
“Whoever did it, they get to go home to their family. They get to have fun. If they have children, they get to spend time with their children, their mom, and we don’t have that, and that’s not fair,” she expressed.
“I fear that we’ll never know. We’ll never have justice, never find out exactly who did it.”
Still, Sheriff Williams believes “more than one person” knows what happened. All it takes is someone to come forward with information.
Amy is remembered as a loving wife, devoted mother, daughter, sister, and friend whose world “revolved around her three beautiful girls.”
“She lit up the room with her beautiful smile. She will be deeply, deeply missed by everyone who loves her and everyone she loved. Her world will miss her comforting spirit,” her obituary reads.
The Burke County Sheriff’s Office is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for Amy’s death. Anyone with information is urged to contact the Burke County Sheriff’s Office at (706) 554-2133.
You can read more on Amy’s case here.
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