On May 1, 2008, 72-year old millionaire real estate developer Hal Wenal returned to his home in Lawrenceville, Georgia and was horrified to discover that his 60-year old wife, Eva Kay Wenal, had been murdered. Her throat was slashed and she had been punched in the face. There were no signs of any forced entry, which seemed to indicate that Kay let her killer into the house. Nothing was stolen and Kay was not sexually assaulted, so no one could figure out the motive. Hal Wenal was immediately cleared as a suspect. The only major lead was provided by a witness who saw an unidentified man walking through the neighborhood near the Wenal home on two separate occasions, both before and after the murder. He was a white male with graying brown hair who wore wire rimmed glasses and did not match the description of any of the neighborhood’s residents, so a composite sketch was made.
Two-and-a-half months after the murder, an anonymous letter was sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Someone went to the trouble of cutting words and letters out of magazines and pasting them together to form sentences. The angry, profanity-filled letter read:
“It turns out she was just a money grubbing [deleted]. I loved her. She said we could be together. She told me she hated her house and that fat miserable lying [deleted] husband. She said she loved me but that was a lie too. I told her this would happen if she didn’t keep her [deleted] promises to me. Her [deleted] family screwed everything up. Those white trash [deleted]. His money was more important than our love. We could have been so happy together but they [deleted] everything up.”
Investigators believed the letter was a genuine confession, but Hal and the rest of Kay’s family and friends had no idea who the author could have been and denied any knowledge of her having an affair.
The strangest lead came when Hal died of a heart attack two years later. His family was going through his personal possessions and found a box containing old photographs. Some of these photos featured a man who bore a striking resemblance to the unidentified suspect seen in the neighborhood around the time of Kay’s murder. He was a white brown-haired male wearing wire rimmed glasses. At least one of the photos is time-stamped from 1987, and in another picture, the man is standing alongside Hal and Kay, so they obviously knew him. Yet no one associated with the Wenals has any idea who this man is! Even though these photos have been released to the media, the man has yet to be identified, but authorities still wonder if he might be Kay’s killer.
More on this story on Gwinnett Daily Post and on Daily Mail.
