There’s no shortage of laughter in Dennis Perry’s house. Ask him about his grandkids, and he instantly starts to chuckle. And if the subject of fishing or how much he loves his wife, Brenda, comes up, you’re rewarded with a belly laugh.
The kids call him “Papa Sunshine,” a nickname befitting a man whose smile you can hear through the phone. That Perry can laugh at all is something of a miracle – especially after all he’s been through.
In 2003, Perry, who is White, was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison for the brutal 1985 slaying of a Black couple named Harold and Thelma Swain at their church in southern Georgia.
He has always – emphatically – maintained his innocence: throughout his arrest, his trial and conviction, and every single day of the nearly 21 years he spent incarcerated.
In 2020, attorneys with the Georgia Innocence Project and an Atlanta-based international law firm, King & Spalding, presented a judge with a wealth of new DNA evidence to prove what Perry says he knew all along: “You got the wrong man.”
In a matter of months, Perry was free from prison, back home in the loving embrace of his wife and the gaggle of kids and grandkids who adore him. But the wrongful conviction stole decades of his life and with Perry’s exoneration came a tidal wave of new questions: How did the justice system get this case so wrong? And if Perry didn’t murder the Swains all those years ago, who did?
Earlier this month, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took a step toward answering some of those questions, arresting and charging a man they now accuse of the murders at Rising Daughter Baptist Church nearly 40 years ago.
But that arrest, coupled with Perry’s exoneration, has reopened old wounds in this rural Georgia community, and revealed that sometimes, even a broken justice system can’t shatter the human spirit.
The murders of Harold and Thelma Swain
On a Monday night in March 1985, a White man walked into the vestibule of the Rising Daughter Baptist Church in a small Georgia community known as Spring Bluff.
Inside the chapel, the women of the historically Black congregation were holding a meeting. They were joined that night by Harold Swain, 66, one of the church deacons and a beloved member of the close-knit community near Georgia’s coast.
A woman who attended the meeting later told police she excused herself just before 9 p.m. and saw a White man with long, blond hair in the church’s entryway.
“I asked if he wanted something and he (said) ‘yes,’ he wanted to talk to someone and pointed into the church at Deacon Swain,” Vanzola Williams told the Atlanta Journal newspaper the day after the murders.
Swain went to speak with the man and witnesses later told investigators they heard scuffling in the lobby followed by the unmistakable sounds of gunshots. Everyone ducked behind pews or ran for shelter – everyone except for Swain’s wife, Thelma, 63, who ran toward the lobby and her husband.
Another shot rang out and then, silence.
By the time police arrived, Harold and Thelma Swain were dead, and the killer was long gone. Police recovered bullet casings, shirt buttons and three pairs of glasses from the scene. Investigators later determined two sets of glasses belonged to the Swains. But the third pair was believed to belong to the killer, court records show. After a closer examination investigators found several “Caucasian hairs” in the glasses.
That hair was tested for DNA, a decision that decades later would prove key to exonerating Perry and help lead to the arrest of the alleged killer.
But that night, the women of the congregation gave vastly different descriptions of the man in the lobby. Multiple computer-generated sketches were combined into a single composite image of a young White man with long hair and circulated throughout the community.
“You’ve got to put yourself back in that moment in ‘85 when this horrific thing happens inside this historic Black church,” said Joshua Sharpe, an investigative journalist whose award-winning reporting on the Swains’ murder and Perry’s wrongful conviction will soon be released in the book “The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders.”
“The power of this case, and the weight of it, this doesn’t happen anywhere, let alone here. There are all these tips – we’re talking dozens that at some point becomes hundreds of suspects.”
But weeks went by without an arrest, then months, then years. The case grew cold while the Swain family grieved. Harold’s brother, Charlie Swain, and his sister, Pearl Swain Cole, told CNN the sudden loss of their older brother rocked their entire family.
“It was just a hurting thing due to the fact that somebody would go in church and kill someone,” Swain said. “He was very respected. He drove the school bus, and he was a deacon. … No one really hated him.”
The family was at a loss for who would do something so horrific. Then, in 1988, investigators got a boost from an unlikely source: “Unsolved Mysteries.”
That November, the TV series aired a recreation of the Swains’ murder featuring several of the women who’d witnessed the attack and the actual evidence from the crime scene. The episode also broadcast the composite sketch of the so-called killer and soon tips were pouring in again.
Multiple suspects were considered, alibis checked, but still no arrests were made. For more than a decade, the Swains’ murder case remained cold. That changed in 1998, when the Camden County Sheriff’s Office hired a former deputy and gave him a year to reinvestigate the murders.
Within weeks, he’d zeroed in on a suspect: Dennis Perry.
The State v. Dennis Perry
Perry told CNN he didn’t even realize he was a suspect in the Swains’ murder until cops began knocking on his door more than a decade later.
“I kept telling him, ‘Y’all got the wrong one. Y’all have the wrong person,’” Perry recalled. “They wanted to arrest somebody … and that’s what they did.”
On the day he was arrested, Perry said police pulled him over on his way home from work.
“I look in my rearview mirror and there’s pistols and shotguns and everything else pointed at me,” he recalled.
“That day right there is in my mind,” Perry said through tears. “And I’ll never, I’ll never forget it.”
Although he grew up with his grandparents in Camden County, where the murders took place, Perry said back in 1985 he was living with his mother outside metro Atlanta, nearly five hours away from Rising Daughter.
Perry didn’t own a car at the time, so he caught a ride with his neighbor to work each day. During the initial murder investigation, police confirmed Perry’s alibi with his neighbor and cleared him as a suspect, court records show.
But by the time the trial began in 2003, the original investigators had retired and much of evidence that could have helped Perry’s defense team prove his alibi was “lost” or missing from the case file, according to court records.
The glasses found at the crime scene had also disappeared, but not before they could be analyzed, and the “Caucasian hairs” tested for DNA.
The DNA results from the hair excluded Perry, court records show.
And, the “unusual” glasses were examined by an optometrist, who noted the owner was “extremely far-sighted with an astigmatism in his right eye,” court records show. Perry’s eyes didn’t match the prescription, as a test revealed he had “20/20 vision in each eye and no astigmatism.”
“If you look at Dennis’ case, it has to make anyone very concerned that Dennis could have been prosecuted and convicted of murder with absolutely no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene,” Susan Clare, an attorney with King & Spalding who worked on Perry’s exoneration team, told CNN.
Instead of relying on physical evidence, the state built the case against Perry on the testimony of a woman named Jane Beaver – Perry’s ex-girlfriend’s mother.
After the “Unsolved Mysteries” episode aired, Beaver began her own ad hoc investigation into the murders, showing a photo she had of Perry to the women who witnessed the shooting and asking whether he was the White man in the lobby that night.
During the trial, Beaver’s testimony provided a motive and a means for Perry to have committed the murders, court records show. Clare said prosecutors also leaned heavily on the witness’ positive identification of Perry as the man in the lobby – even though Beaver had suggested he was the killer when she showed them his photograph a decade earlier.
Years later, attorneys working on Perry’s exoneration learned Beaver received $12,000 to testify, according to court documents. Clare said the state’s key witness being paid was never disclosed to Perry’s legal team – and that knowledge could have changed their entire defense.
After a weeklong trial, Perry was convicted of the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain.
The case was originally tried as a capital offense and the state had asked for the death penalty. But Charlie Swain said he and his family agreed they didn’t want to see anyone else killed.
“Dennis’ mama thanked me for it,” Swain said. “And I’m glad I did because he would have been the wrong person.”
After the verdict, Perry said prosecutors approached him with an offer: He could serve two consecutive life sentences, but he wouldn’t have the option to appeal.
In that moment, Perry said he was only sure of one thing: “I wasn’t ready to die yet. So, I said, ‘OK, I’ll take that.’”
20 years, 10 months and 6 days
In all the years she’s known her husband, Brenda said she’s never truly seen him mad. Dennis admits it’s not really in his nature.
But that’s OK, Brenda said; she’s willing to be mad enough for the both of them – especially about his conviction.
“You take somebody out of the midst of society and pick them up and drop them down in a pit of hell – in a prison? – they don’t know what to do, how to survive.”
Brenda and Dennis got married while he was in prison, and she said she hated the thought of him in there alone. So, she visited Perry every weekend, oftentimes with the grandkids in tow. On one memorable visit, she said their granddaughter pointed up at the barbed wire surrounding the prison.
“She says, ‘You know, Granny, isn’t it nice of those people to put that barbed wire up there so those bad people can’t get in there to Papa,” she recalled as Perry chuckled. “In her heart of hearts, she really believed they were protecting him.”
But the sad truth was life behind bars was hard for Perry. The family always stressed to the kids that “Papa Sunshine” should never have been sent to prison in the first place.
“They always knew that he was in there for somebody telling a lie,” Brenda said. It took more than two decades for the family to convince the rest of the world of the same thing.
Although he had agreed not to appeal his sentence, Perry said he began writing to the Georgia Innocence Project about his case a few years after he was sent away.
“I prayed a lot,” Perry said, “hoping that one day, some eyes would be open, some ears would be opened – somebody would hear my case because I knew I didn’t do it.”
The Innocence Project took on the case. Years later, in 2018, they brought on Phil Holladay and a team at King & Spalding to help. After meeting Perry for the first time, Holladay said he and Clare were confident he was innocent.
“I walked in the house and my wife said, ‘Well, how did it go?’ And I said, ‘He didn’t do it,’” Holladay recalled, adding that his wife, who’s also an attorney, was skeptical of his certainty.
“I said, ‘Dennis is one of the most gentle people I’ve ever met, and he just wouldn’t have it in him.’”
Perry said he dubbed his legal team his “12 disciples.”
“They never gave up,” he said, “And I thank God for that.”
Maternal DNA leads to an exoneration
But the question remained, if Perry didn’t kill the Swains, who did? Over the years, multiple true crime junkies have asked the same. In 2018, the podcast “Undisclosed” dedicated an entire season to reinvestigating the Swains’ murder and Perry’s conviction.
The following year, Sharpe, who was an investigative journalist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said his interest in the case piqued when he learned about it from the Georgia Innocence Project. It was the first time he’d heard of the murders, he said, even though he grew up down the road.
Sharpe dove into the case and began reexamining the alibis of previous suspects. That included looking into a man named Erik Sparre, whose name had come up early in the investigation into the murders.
“I decided to give him the same benefit of the doubt that I give everybody else: ‘He’s got an alibi, he must be telling the truth, but I’m going to look into it,’” Sharpe said.
On the night of the murders, Sparre said he was working an overnight shift at a local Winn-Dixie grocery store. Sharpe said he began searching for the store’s manager, who police records show had confirmed Sparre’s alibi to investigators.
Eventually, Sharpe said he connected with the manager, who was much older now but categorical about one thing: He never spoke to the police.
“He’s like, ‘I never talked to the cops about this, and I would have known if they asked me about this because it was the biggest thing that happened,’” Sharpe told CNN. “’I definitely would have remembered him calling about one of my employees.’”
What’s more, Sharpe said the man told him the personal details listed in the police file – like his name and address – were incorrect. He later gave a sworn statement with the same denial, according to a court document.
Armed with such an emphatic denial, Sharpe said he continued to do his due diligence by contacting both Sparre and the Georgia Innocence Project for comment. Little did he know his line of questioning would trigger a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Perry’s exoneration.
Christina Cribbs, a senior attorney with the Georgia Innocence Project, said the team sent an investigator to Sparre’s home and asked his mother to volunteer a DNA sample. She agreed, believing it would potentially help clear her son in the case.
Because children inherit their mitochondrial DNA from their mothers, a DNA test can show with a high probability of certainty whether two people are related. This kind of DNA testing has become a critical tool for forensic investigations.
“It just so happened that (Sparre) and his mother’s was a very uncommon (DNA) profile,” Cribbs said. “They were able to compare that to the profile that they had gotten from the hair on the glasses before Dennis’ trial – and it was a match.”
According to court records, the DNA analysis was “able to exclude 99.6%” of the North American population as contributing the hairs found at the crime scene – but Erik Sparre could not be excluded.
When Sharpe called Sparre to discuss the DNA results, he maintained his innocence, as he had in their previous interviews.
Sparre said, “Listen, this DNA is going to prove that I didn’t do that,” Sharpe recalled of the conversation, which was later published in the AJC. “And I said, ‘OK.’ And … you know, it didn’t work out that way.”
Even if 99.6% of the population could be excluded from the crime based on the hair found at the scene, that still leaves more than a million potential suspects in North America alone.
But the DNA evidence was the breakthrough his attorneys needed to prove Dennis Perry could not have been the person wearing the glasses that night.
Perry’s legal team filed a motion for a new trial in 2019, outlining why this new DNA evidence, coupled with years of other facts they had gathered to demonstrate Perry’s innocence, should be enough to overturn his conviction for the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain.
And a judge agreed. After 20 years, 10 months and six days, Dennis Perry was released from prison in 2020. Nearly a year later, he was exonerated.
A world of hurt for three families
On December 9 – nearly 40 years after the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain – the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested Erik Sparre at his home in Waynesville, Georgia.
He was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault, according to a statement from the GBI.
Stephen Tillman, Sparre’s public defender, confirmed his office is handling the case but declined to comment further.
CNN also reached out to several of Sparre’s relatives, one of whom agreed to an interview, but declined to be identified out of concern for the safety of his family.
Over the past four years, the allegations surrounding Erik Sparre have taken a toll on their wider family, he said. This was further compounded when Sparre’s mother, Gladys, died due to previous health issues shortly after Perry was exonerated.
Since Erik Sparre’s arrest earlier this month, his family has struggled to reconcile the allegations with the man they’ve come to know, his relative said.
The two had reconnected in recent years after decades of being estranged. Now, he now wonders if it’s something he will come to regret.
“If I found out that he did do it, I would be upset that I’ve ever allowed him into my life,” the relative said.
“My big fear is that the GBI has a black eye from imprisoning the wrong guy for 20 years, and they’re not going to let that happen again. I guess that kind of makes me wonder what they got, what they know.”
Perry’s exoneration has also opened old wounds for the Swain family, who thought they’d found some semblance of closure.
“After they found that Dennis didn’t do it, it even hurt worse because – who did?” Charlie Swain said. Now, with Sparre’s arrest and the prospect of another trial, Swain and his sister said they hope they will finally have answers.
“We just pray and hope that we will find closure in this lifetime,” he said.
As a wrongfully convicted man, Dennis Perry takes the idea that you’re innocent until proven guilty to heart and he declined to discuss Sparre’s arrest. The 62-year-old is far more focused on soaking up every moment with his family and grandbabies. The 4-year-old, he proudly says, recently learned how to steer a golf cart.
Georgia is one of a dozen states that does not automatically compensate exonerees. The Georgia state legislature passed a bill in 2022 to compensate Perry for the decades he spent in prison.
But at night, when his guard is down, the memories of all he witnessed and experienced during those decades in prison resurface. At least twice a week, Brenda says, he wakes up in a sweat.
“You don’t unsee the things you saw, and you can’t unhear the things you heard,” she said sagely. Perry agrees.
The family still lives in Camden County, less than 10 miles away from Rising Daughter Baptist Church. When he first got home, Perry said he couldn’t bring himself to even drive near the church and he was scared to venture into town by himself.
Now, Perry says he’s proudly embracing his life, bolstered by a profound appreciation for freedom. His license tag reads exonerated.
“They got to read it, and if they run it, it says his name,” Brenda quips. Perry just laughs.
CNN’s Christina Zdanowicz contributed to this report.
