There is a drawing in a Manila envelope inside the Loun County Sheriff’s Office evidence room in Valdasta, Georgia that was made by a six-year-old child in the autumn of 1991.
It is done in crayon, blue sky, green grass, a yellow house with a brown door, two figures standing in the yard, one tall, one small.
The tall figure has red scribbled over its chest, the way children sometimes color a shirt or a jacket.
Underneath it, in the careful, oversized lettering of a child who has just learned to write, are three words.
That is him.
The detective who received that drawing in October of 1991 looked at it for a long time.
He filed it with the rest of the evidence.
He never forgot it.
He worked the case for 11 years before he retired, and he kept a copy of that drawing in a folder in his home office until the day he died in 2019.
His wife found it when she was sorting through his things.
She didn’t know what it was.
She called the sheriff’s office to ask.
That phone call is what broke the case open.
Her name was Darlene Fa Hutchkins.
She was 29 years old.
She worked the night shift at a nursing home on Norman Drive in Valdasta.
And she had a daughter named Abby who was six and who drew pictures of everything.
Their apartment, their cat, the oak tree in the front yard, and in October of 1991, the man she had seen standing in the parking lot the night her mother did not come home.
For 35 years, that drawing sat in an evidence envelope.
For 35 years, nobody knew the man’s name.
Then a retired detective died and his wife made a phone call and everything changed.
Valdasta, Georgia in 1991 was a city of around 40,000 people situated in the far south of the state, close enough to the Florida line that the summers were suffocating and the winters barely arrived.
It was a military town shaped in part by Moody Air Force Base on its northern edge and a college town shaped by Valdasta State.
And in between those two institutions, it was also just a town.
Neighborhoods of singlestory brick houses with pecking trees in the yards and churches on every third corner and a downtown that had a hardware store and a lunch counter and a family pharmacy that still mixed prescriptions behind a wooden counter the wayarmacies had in 1955.
Darlene Hutchkins had moved to Valdasta in 1988 from Tiffan, 40 miles north, after a relationship ended and a fresh start presented itself in the form of a job posting and a cousin who had a couch to sleep on for a month.
She had found her footing quickly.
She was the kind of person who did.
She got the job at the Magnolia Care nursing home within three weeks, signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment on Patterson Street by the end of the month, and enrolled Abby in kindergarten at Salis Mahon Elementary in the fall.
By 1991, Darlene had been at Magnolia Care for 3 years and was one of their most reliable night shift aids.
Her supervisor, a woman named Brenda Tatum, said later that Darlene was the employee she called first when someone didn’t show up and last when she wanted something done right.
She was patient with the residents in the particular way that night shift work demands.
Gentle and steady at 2:00 in the morning when everything is harder and quieter and lonier than it is in the day.
She had a small life and she had built it herself and she was proud of it in the way that people are proud of things they made from nothing.
Her daughter Abby was 6 years old and missing her two front teeth and obsessed with drawing.
There were pictures taped to every surface in their apartment, the refrigerator, the hallway wall, the back of the bathroom door.
Darlene had started dating a man named Terrence Picket that spring, but the relationship had cooled by summer and ended quietly by September.
Her closest friend in Valdasta was a neighbor named Sheryl Makin, who lived two apartments down and who watched Abby on the nights Darlene worked and who had a key to the apartment for exactly that reason.
On the evening of Monday, October 7th, 1991, Darlene Hutchkins kissed Abby good night at 9:15 p.m., walked her to Sheryl Makin’s apartment, and left for her shift at Magnolia Care.
Her shift began at 10 Nelo 0 p.m.
She was due back by 6:30 the next morning.
She never arrived at work.
Brenda Tatum called Shir Makin at 10:45 p.m.
When Darlene had not appeared and was not answering the phone.
Shiryl looked out her window at the parking lot.
Darlene’s car, a white 1988 Chevrolet Cavalier, was gone.
By 6:00 a.m.
Tuesday, Shiryl had called Darlene’s cousin in Tiffan.
No one had heard from her.
At 7:30 a.m., Sheryl Makin called the Valdasta Police Department.
Officers canvased the apartment complex.
The white cavalier was found at 900 a.m.
On Tuesday morning, parked behind a strip mall on North Ashley Street, four blocks from the nursing home.
The engine was cold.
The driver’s side door was unlocked.
Darlene’s nursing home ID badge was on the passenger seat.
Her work shoes, the white rubber sold ones she wore every shift, were on the floor of the back seat.
She was found that afternoon in a drainage easement behind a warehouse on Bemis Road, half a mile from where her car had been abandoned.
She was 29 years old.
She had been dead for less than 12 hours.
The detective who caught the case was a 12-year veteran of the Loun County Sheriff’s Office named Ray Cheetum.
He arrived at the scene at 2:14 p.m.
On Tuesday, October 8th, and spent 40 minutes walking the perimeter before he went near the body.
He wanted to understand the geography first.
He always said, “You had to understand the geography.”
What he understood standing there on that October afternoon with the smell of wet grass and red clay in the air was that this location was not random.
Whoever had brought Darlene here knew this spot.
Knew it was behind a warehouse that closed at 5.
Knew the easement was not visible from the road.
This was not a crime of panic.
This was a crime of planning.
Abby was with Sheryl Mak when the news came.
Nobody told her anything specific.
She was six.
She knew something was wrong because all the adults kept crying and then stopping when they saw her and trying to smile.
That Thursday, a child psychologist employed by the county conducted a gentle, careful session with Abby Hutchkins.
Abby said she had been awake when her mother left.
She said she had looked out Shir’s window and watched her mother walk to the car.
She said there was a man in the parking lot.
The psychologist asked Abby if she could draw what she remembered.
Abby drew the parking lot.
She drew her mother’s car.
She drew the man near the car.
She drew him with a red shirt or jacket.
She drew him tall.
She wrote at the bottom of the page in the careful block letters of a child who had just learned how that is him.
Detective Ray Chetum received the drawing the following Monday.
He looked at it for a very long time.
The investigation that followed was immediate, wide ranging, and built around two parallel tracks, the physical evidence and the drawing.
The physical evidence was limited.
The drainage easement had been compromised by rainfall on Tuesday morning.
Trace evidence was recovered, but minimal.
There were no usable footprints.
The vehicle on North Ashley Street had been processed and yielded partial fingerprints, some of which could not be matched to any known person in the available databases of 1991.
Without a name, partial prints meant almost nothing.
Terrence Picket, Darlene’s ex-boyfriend, was brought in and interviewed on Wednesday, October 9th.
He was cooperative.
He had spent Monday evening at his brother’s house in Hira, 14 miles north of Vald Dosta, and three family members confirmed it.
He was eliminated.
A man named Curtis Webb, a resident of Darlene’s complex who had reportedly made her uncomfortable on two separate occasions, was interviewed.
He had been in Florida the weekend of the crime visiting his parents.
Confirmed by a toll receipt and his parents’ statement.
Eliminated, the drawing presented a different kind of problem.
The man Abby had depicted was generic in the way children’s drawings are generic.
Tall, two arms, a round head, that red shirt.
The detail that stood out was the shirt.
Brenda Tatum, Darlene’s supervisor, mentioned to Detective Chetm that there had been a man in the parking lot of Magnolia Care on several recent evenings whom staff had noticed but assumed was waiting for someone.
He had worn, she thought, a red jacket.
She could not describe his face.
She had not paid close attention.
No other witnesses could be found.
By December of 1991, the investigation had no viable suspect.
Detective Cheetum kept working it.
By 1995, he had returned to it 17 separate times, chasing leads that dissolved on contact with reality.
By 1999, the case was formally classified cold.
By 2002, Ray Chetum retired.
He took a copy of the file.
He took a copy of the drawing.
Abby Hutchkins was raised by her great aunt in Tiffan.
She was told the truth.
Age appropriately over time, the way children are told truths that they will have to carry for the rest of their lives.
She grew up quiet and precise and serious in the way of people who have learned early that the world does not always make sense.
She became a parallegal.
She moved to Mon.
She never forgot the drawing she had made or what she had seen in that parking lot when she was 6 years old or the feeling of looking out a window and watching her mother walk towards something that was waiting for her in the dark.
If you’ve been with this story from the beginning, take one second right now to subscribe and turn on notifications.
This is the part where everything changes and you need to be here for it.
The years passed.
Abby sent letters to the Loun County Sheriff’s Office every few years.
She received over time a range of responses, some thorough, some form letters, one that misspelled her mother’s name.
She kept writing anyway.
By 2010, NA technology had advanced far enough that cold case units across the country were revisiting old evidence.
Loun County’s cold case resources were limited.
Darlene Hutchkins’s case was on a list.
It was not at the top.
By 2015, Abby was 30 years old and living in Mon with a quiet determination that her co-workers described as the most consistent thing about her.
She had started a small online page dedicated to her mother’s case.
She posted on the anniversary every year.
She posted photos of Darlene at Christmas at the beach holding baby Abby in the hospital laughing in the kitchen of the Patterson Street apartment.
She wrote about her mother the way her mother deserved to be written about as a complete human being, not a case number.
And then in the spring of 2019, a woman named Eugenia Chetum called the Loun County Sheriff’s Office.
Her husband Rey had passed in February.
She was going through his home office.
She had found in a manila folder in the bottom drawer of his desk a copy of a case file and clipped to the front of it, a photocopy of a child’s crayon drawing.
She didn’t know what it was.
She thought maybe the sheriff’s office would want it back.
The detective who took her call was a cold case investigator named Sergeant Donna Elroy, who had been with Loun County for eight years and who ran the county’s backlog of unsolved homicides out of a cramped office with one window and two filing cabinets.
She recognized the case name immediately.
She drove to Eugenia Chetum’s house that afternoon.
What Sergeant Elroy found in Ray Chetum’s folder was not just the drawing.
It was 30 years of private notes.
Chetum had never stopped working the case in his own way.
He had a list of names, men who had lived or worked near the Magnolia Care parking lot in 1991 and who had never been formally cleared.
He had notes on a man named Wayne Delert, a delivery driver who had serviced several businesses on that stretch of Norman Drive in the early 1990s.
Chetum had circled the name twice in red ink next to it in small handwriting.
He had written red jacket ask again, never followed up.
Wayne Delert had been interviewed once briefly in November of 1991.
He had been cooperative.
He had been noted as a peripheral associate of the area.
He had not been a suspect.
He had moved to Wayross, Georgia in 1994 and largely disappeared from the relevant geography.
By 2019, Wayne Delert was 58 years old and living in Brunswick, Georgia.
He worked at a marine supply warehouse.
He had two prior arrests.
One for disorderly conduct in 1988, one for a harassment complaint filed by a woman in Wear County in 1997 that had not resulted in charges.
He had never married.
Sergeant Elroy requested that the original physical evidence from the Hutchkins case held in the Loun County evidence room in sealed bags since 1991 be sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations forensic lab for updated DINA processing.
The partial fingerprints from Darlene’s Cavalier were re-examined using technology that had not existed in 1991.
Three of the original partials were upgraded to near full profiles using digital enhancement.
They were run through Aphysis, the national fingerprint database.
On March 3rd, 2022, the Gibby returned a result.
The prints from the driver’s side door of a 1988 white Chevrolet Cavalier matched a man who had been arrested for a dwey in Brantley County, Georgia in 2004 and whose fingerprints were in the system.
His name was Wayne Allen Delert.
Sergeant Elroy was sitting at her desk when the email arrived.
She read it twice.
She picked up the phone and called the GBI.
Then she called Abby Hutchkins.
Abby was at work in Mon.
She stepped into a conference room and closed the door and listened while Sergeant Elroy told her that they had a match, that they had a name, that the investigation was moving.
The line was quiet for a moment.
Then Abby said, “My mother knew.
She always told me if something ever scared me to draw what I saw.”
Wayne Allen Delard was placed under surveillance on March 5th, 2022.
Detectives worked quietly and quickly building the evidentiary case that would survive a courtroom.
In April of 2022, a Dena sample was obtained covertly from an item Delard discarded.
It was matched to trace biological evidence recovered from Darlene Hutchkins in 1991 and preserved in the GB’s cold case evidence archive.
On May 9th, 2022, 30 years and seven months after Darlene Hutchkins did not arrive for her shift at Magnolia Care, Wayne Allen Delert was arrested at the Marine Supply Warehouse in Brunswick, Georgia at 7:22 in the morning.
He was standing at a workbench when the detectives came through the door.
He looked at them and set down the tool in his hand very slowly, very deliberately, and did not say a word.
His co-workers watched from across the warehouse floor.
Several of them had known him for years.
A man who came in early.
A man who stayed late.
A man who kept to himself and was good at his job and who had for 30 years been the only person on earth who knew what had happened in a parking lot in Valdasta, Georgia in the autumn of 1991.
The Brunswick community learned his name by the afternoon.
In Valdasta, people who remembered the case, who remembered Darlene Hutchkins, who had children at Salis Mahon Elementary the year Abby was in kindergarten, read the news with the particular stillness that comes when something long broken is finally named.
In January of 2023, Wayne Allen Delert was convicted of murder in the first degree by a Loun County jury.
Deliberations lasted four hours.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He showed no visible reaction when the verdict was read.
Abby Hutchkins was 37 years old the day Wayne Delert was convicted.
She sat in the same courtroom row where she had watched the proceedings for three days.
And when the verdict came, she pressed both hands flat on her thighs and looked straight ahead and breathed.
Her great aunt Francis, 80 years old, was beside her.
Francis had raised Abby from the age of six and had driven four hours from Tiffan to be in that courtroom.
And when it was over, she took Aby’s hand and held it without saying anything because there was nothing that needed to be said.
Later, on the steps of the courthouse in the thin January light, Abby spoke to a small cluster of reporters.
She did not speak for long.
She said that her mother had been a night shift nursing home aid who took care of people nobody else wanted the night shift for.
She said that Darlene Hutchkins had been patient and funny and had made the best rice and peas she had ever tasted in her entire life and that no meal since had ever quite measured up.
She said that when she was small, her mother had taught her to pay attention to what she saw and to write it down or draw it because details matter and because the truth doesn’t disappear just because someone wants it to.
Then she stopped and she looked at the reporters and she said she was right.
Darlene Fay Hutchkins was 29 years old.
She was a nursing home aid who worked through the night so that elderly people who were frightened and in pain had someone steady and kind to call for.
She was the mother of a little girl who drew pictures of everything she saw and who grew up to spend 35 years making sure the world remembered her mother’s name.
She was the woman in the parking lot on a Monday night in October with a life ahead of her that she never got to live.
The drawing is still in evidence.
Crayon on white paper, 35 years old, its colors slightly faded at the edges.
Blue sky, green grass, a yellow house, two figures, a red shirt, and at the bottom in the block letters of a six-year-old who was paying attention the way her mother had taught her, that is him.
It took the world 35 years to catch up to what Abby Hutchkins drew in an afternoon.
Some truths are patient that way.
They wait.
They survive.
They sit in manila envelopes in desk drawers and evidence rooms.
And they do not fade entirely.
No matter how much time passes, no matter how many times the world looks the other way.
Darlene Hutchkins did not come home.
But her daughter made sure she was never forgotten.
And in the end, that turned out to be enough.
Should child witness testimony and drawings like Aby’s carry more formal weight in criminal investigations from the very beginning?
And what do you think it means that a retired detective kept working this case privately for 30 years on his own time out of nothing but conscience?
Leave your thoughts below.
Every comment gets read.
If this story stayed with you, please subscribe and share it.
There are families right now who are waiting for the same phone call Abby Hutchkins received on a Tuesday afternoon in Mon, Georgia.
The least we can do is keep the stories alive until justice finds them.
