Harold Swain and his wife, Thelma, were killed at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Waverly. | Google
Published on December 10, 2024 at 11:37 am
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A 61-year-old man has been arrested 39 years after church deacon Harold Swain and his wife were murdered inside their Camden County church, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Erik Kristensen Sparre, of Waynesville, Georgia, has been charged with two counts of murder and two more of aggravated assault in the 1985 murders at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Waverly, just north of Woodbine.
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Swain, a 66-year-old deacon at Rising Daughter Baptist Church on U.S. 17, was at a Bible study class with wife Thelma when a man walked in and shot them. The case remained unsolved until 2000, when Dennis Perry of Jacksonville was arrested then convicted of the murders and sentenced to two life sentences.
In 2020, Perry’s conviction was overturned based on new DNA evidence pointing to another man at that crime scene 39 years ago, investigators said. The Georgia Innocence Project and Perry’s attorneys said two hairs found in a “pair of unique eyeglasses” at the crime scene proved he was not the killer.
On May 13, 2020, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Camden County Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant at the home where the late Gladys Sparre and her son Erik lived to determine how he may have had in the shooting, investigators said at the time.
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Erik Sparre was booked into the Camden County Jail.
An earlier version of this story misidentified the woman in a photograph that is no longer shown. She was Harold Swain’s sister, not his wife.
