Killer Sentenced For Wastewater Plant Killing

After 14 years, a crime that rocked the wastewater world has finally been brought to a kind of resolution.

"Samuel Lewis Edwards pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and received the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison in the 2000 death of 22-year-old Toyal Edwana Jackson," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, citing the Coweta Judicial Circuit District Attorney.

Jackson was a senior at the State University of West Georgia when she left her apartment one day and never came home. Her body was found at the city's wastewater treatment plant a month later.

"A Carrollton city sanitation worker discovered Jackson’s body on Nov. 30, 2000, while clearing a spray field at a city wastewater treatment facility," the Heard Citizen reported, citing an investigation by the The Times-Georgian.

Edwards, 35, was originally indicted on six counts of malice murder and felony murder in May of last year, according to the Heard Citizen. Edwards was "accused of strangling Jackson and then stabbing her, according to the indictment," a previous AJC report said.

"Before Jackson’s body was found, a witness told Carrollton police that he saw a stocky man pushing a female into the driver’s side of a red Nissan pickup truck, approximately a 1989 or 1990 model, on the night Jackson disappeared," the report continued.

The plea deal was accepted in part because of the weakness of the evidence against Edwards.

"The strengths of the case, as well as the weaknesses, including the complete lack of DNA, fingerprints, or other forensic evidence, were explained to the family in detail and they agreed that today’s plea, as negotiated, was an acceptable resolution to this case,” the DA and Carrollton police said in a joint statement, per the AJC.

Jackson was an early childhood education major and a talented basketball player.  She served as an assistant coach to an eighth-grade girls' basketball team, according to the report.