Decades After His Death, Hunt for Virginia Police Officer's Killer Begins

GATES COUNTY, N.C. -- The crack of gunshots pierced Olivia Mundie's sleep at about 5:30 that chilly morning in March 1984.

One, two, three shots. Then, about 30 seconds later, a fourth. It sounded like a high-powered handgun, she told police.

Mundie woke her husband, Keith. Together, they peered out of the window of their stately old home on N.C. 32, at the Gates and Chowan County line.

"We thought it was just somebody spotlighting deer, you know?" Keith Mundie said last month. "We couldn't see a car."

But the hollow on Warwick Swamp, with a small bridge running across it, got progressively busier. By the time the Mundies went to the kitchen for morning coffee, emergency vehicles and police cars were everywhere.

Keith Mundie remembers walking down to the road to see what was going on. It was only about 100 yards from his front door.

The body of a 39-year-old Portsmouth police officer had just been found, floating facedown in the shallow swamp that runs beneath the bridge. A small, brick, Baptist church looks over the hollow from the Chowan County side.

Mundie said he kept watching.

"The buttons from his shirt were laying on the bridge," he said. "His wallet, his cards, all of the paperwork from his wallet, it was all floating in the creek. His wallet was out there, too. That won't no suicide."

Mundie left it up to the professionals. Two sheriffs, the state Bureau of Investigation, the Portsmouth Police Department and others concluded that Garland L. Joyner Jr. had taken his own life, prompted by debts from bad investments and hefty insurance policies he had recently taken out on his own life.

It was obvious, they said, that Joyner wanted to provide for his family.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the Portsmouth police, working with the FBI, have reopened the case as a homicide investigation. Robert Huntington, a police sergeant heading the investigation, said there is new evidence. He would not elaborate.

Fliers in convenience stores, from the Virginia state line almost to Edenton, where N.C. 32 leads, announce that the Joyner investigation has been reopened as a cold case. The header across the top of the fliers reads "Homicide."

It's the talk of the rural communities along the North Carolina highway.

Joyner, by all accounts, was an excellent police officer. He'd been on the force for 14 years, specializing in "physical evidence," as it was called back then. Today, his speciality would probably be called forensics.

He had a wife and a daughter. They lived in the Cradock community of Portsmouth, a few miles from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. He'd lived in the same house his entire life, news accounts say.

Joyner was a rainbow-chaser, always looking for opportunities to supplement his police officer's salary. He worked security at what was then the Portsmouth waterfront Holiday Inn. He invested in the gold market, which was on the upswing in the early 1980s. He and his wife got involved with marketing a diet product. He bought a crabbing boat, just before local rivers were banned to catching shellfish because they were contaminated with the insecticide kepone.

He had a pet skunk, and he was determined to make sure it had been fed before he left Portsmouth that night, according to news clips from The Virginian-Pilot.

Joyner spent most of the day on the eve of his death with close friend Mike Holley, a restaurant owner in downtown Portsmouth. Holley told investigators Joyner was having problems with the brakes on his car and asked to borrow one. Holley didn't ask any questions.

The gray 1977 Datsun police found parked not far from the bridge in North Carolina belonged to Holley's fiancee. The front door and back doors were open. The back window had been shattered by a bullet.

Nobody, not even his good friend, could tell police why Joyner left Portsmouth about 10:30 that night. He'd said only that he was going to meet someone in Edenton, that it had to do with a gun-smuggling operation he'd been looking at for about two years.

Or maybe he was going to Richmond. Accounts of the day seem vague. Police know he spent much of the night in Gloucester, talking long into the night with a convenience store employee there, even telling the clerk about gun smuggling in southeast Virginia.

Holley, now a member of the Portsmouth Police Department, refused to talk about the details of the case. He said he's been told that he will likely be subpoenaed to a federal grand jury looking into the case.

"Back then, I gave coffee to all of the officers," he said. "Garland was the only one who wouldn't take it for free. He never walked out of the restaurant without throwing his 50 cents on the counter. He was a good man, a very dedicated police officer."

Joyner, Holley said, was a smart, innovative investigator. Holley doesn't believe his death was a suicide.

Neither did Joyner's wife, Lillie, even after police took weeks to reach that conclusion.

Back then, medical examiners said reports indicated Joyner died of a close contact wound to his left chest, and that he had apparently used his left hand to hold the gun against his body.

Investigators did say, however, that Joyner would likely have had to be sitting on the railing of the bridge to end up in the position in which he was found. And there was no explanation about why he had removed his jacket and outer shirt.

Huntington, the Portsmouth police sergeant, would say only that Lillie Joyner was "thrilled" when she heard that the investigation had been reopened. She did not return phone calls for this story.

In 1984, Lillie Joyner hired a private investigator -- Billy Franklin from Virginia Beach -- to report to the insurance company that carried the life insurance policies on her husband.

"I've seen dog-biting cases that were worked better than this one," Franklin said at the time of the original investigation. "The coroner's ruling was based on statements from the Portsmouth police about Joyner's indebtedness and his frame of mind."

Joyner's widow, however, told police then that she and her husband had never been on better terms, had never been happier.

"He hinted to me that he was working on something really big," she told police during the original investigation.

Investigators speculated that the insurance policies may have been a factor in Joyner's attempt to make the death look like a murder. But Lillie Joyner's private investigator was convincing: In the fall of 1984, only a few months after Joyner was found dead, Woodmen of the World, which initially declined to pay the widow the $130,000, paid her all but $5,000.

After almost two months of being plastered to counters and pinned to bulletin boards, the fliers about Joyner's death are beginning to tatter. But people at the network of convenience stores along N.C. 32 are still talking.

They wonder what really happened that chilly March morning so many years ago. They try to remember what they were doing around that time. The sheriffs from Gates and Chowan counties who investigated the case have passed away.

Keith Mundie said his life has changed dramatically, but he and Olivia are still living in the same house.

But he's never forgotten the sight of the man's body floating in the swamp beneath the highway.

He still doesn't think it was suicide.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service