Crime Immemorial

About a week into the month of April, a hard-working immigrant doing a favor for a family member would be savagely slain by someone who authorities termed, “a straight psychopath.”

In the year 2000, thirty-seven-year-old Shailesh S. Patel was living in Locust Grove, Georgia with his wife and two children. Shailesh had moved to the United States from India in 1985, and worked in various jobs in North Carolina and Georgia over the ensuing decades, first finding employment in a textile company before later running a series of hotels across the region and eventually owning a gas station in Albany, Georgia. In fact, he had only recently sold the gas station and moved to Locust Grove, and was preparing to take the next step in his career.

In early April, Shailesh got a call from his brother-in-law Vishnu. Vishnu and his family had to attend a wedding in California, and needed someone to run their convenience store in their absence. The store, an E-Z Mart attached to a Phillip’s 66 gas station, was located in the small town of Adel, Georgia, about one-hundred-seventy miles south of Shailesh’s home in Locust Grove. Shailesh readily agreed, as he was between jobs, and was always ready to come to the aid of a relative. In fact, Shailesh had apparently been thinking of moving to Adel permanently, as he perceived it as having less crime than the town where he had been living, even though Vishnu had actually been held up at knifepoint at his E-Z Mart only about five months before Shailesh arrived, and other relatives warned him to be careful when going there.

Shailesh traveled to Adel somewhere around the 3rd or 4th of April; he stayed in Vishnu’s home and ran the convenience store for several days without incident. He very quickly got into a routine of closing up the store shortly after eleven p.m., and then driving the thirteen miles to the town of Nashville, Georgia to get something to eat, as there was a dearth of vegetarian food available in Adel.

On the night of April 7th, though, it seems that Shailesh didn’t drive to Nashville for whatever reason. He reportedly closed the store at around eleven-twenty p.m., accompanied by one of the store’s other employees, but then chose instead to simply walk from the store to Vishnu’s house, which was only a few blocks away. It was the last time he was seen alive.

The following day, a Saturday, workers at the convenience store became concerned when Shailesh didn’t show up, and called the police when attempts to contact him went unanswered. Authorities arrived at Vishnu’s home on North Gordon Avenue at about one in the afternoon, and found the front door standing wide open. One glimpse into the house was all the police needed to know that something utterly appalling had occurred.

The walls of the living room were splattered with copious amounts of blood. Shailesh Patel lay in the middle of the carnage, his body completely battered; he had been viciously beaten, stabbed multiple times, and in a horrifying coup de grâce, his killer had then bashed in his head with a heavy, cabinet-style television set.

According to Shailesh’s relatives, they were not informed of his murder by the police or by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who had been called into the case immediately. They claim to have found out about the crime from a friend who lived in Adel, and further assert that no authorities contacted them about Shailesh’s death until several days after the incident. Even more shockingly, Shailesh’s brother Haribai, in an interview with the Murderville podcast, maintained that the GBI officer he later spoke to implied that the Patel family would have to help pay the expenses to have the case investigated properly.

Whether this allegation is true or not, it does seem that police very quickly reached a dead end in the homicide inquiry. Although there was reportedly a great deal of physical evidence left at the scene, as it had been so brutal, authorities had no suspects and made no arrests. The only significant clue released to the public was a composite sketch of a thin white male in his early thirties with long, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. This individual was seen in the area several hours before the crime took place, and police had reason to believe he may have seen something germane to the investigation. This man, whoever he is, has never come forward.

Authorities seemed to be operating under the assumption that the murder was a robbery gone wrong, although it was unclear what, if anything, was taken from the home, and whether Shailesh had been followed from the store, or whether he had surprised an intruder already in his brother-in-law’s house.

Likely contributing to the robbery hypothesis was the fact that less than two years previously, in the fall of 1998, a woman named Donna Brown had been robbed and shot in front of the Taco Bell where she worked; the restaurant lay less than two miles from the E-Z Mart. Though the perpetrator for this crime was quickly arrested, some doubts swirled over whether police had collared the wrong man.

It is also unknown whether investigators looked into a link between Shailesh’s death and the robbery that had occurred at the E-Z Mart in October of 1999, in which a stocky black male had brandished an X-Acto knife at Vishnu Patel and punched him in the face before fleeing with the money from the register.

The grisly killing of Shailesh Patel is still considered an open case by the GBI, but there has been no significant movement in the investigation for more than two decades, and the Patel family are still waiting for answers.