On 9 September 2025 I had the opportunity to meet Joshua Sharpe and Dennis Perry in Jesup. Sherna Spearman Lott of the Wayne County Library served as the moderator for a discussion about Sharpe’s new book, The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders. Dennis Perry was that man. His long incarceration came with high personal costs. His wife divorced him and he lost both his parents. One bright spot of that time was reconnecting with Brenda, who he’d known years earlier. She believed in his innocence and they married while he was still in prison. Brenda was there, too. You’d never know the ordeal they’d been through. They weren’t bitter or occupied with the past. They were humble and optimistic.

The Man No One Believed begins with the murder of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Camden County in 1985, and bravely makes its way through predictable roadblocks of institutional racism, corrupt cops, and elected officials. The Georgia Innocence Project reported on one of those roadblocks “...Sheriff William Smith offered $40,000 of seized drug-related civil forfeiture money to a friend and former sheriff’s deputy to solve the murders. Within a week, the deputy had determined that Dennis Perry was the lead suspect, almost entirely due to information generated by a single informant who was seeking a $25,000 reward.” With those forces working against justice, it’s no wonder it was so long coming. To Dennis Perry and, especially, the Swains.

In the year 2000, an election year, Perry was convicted of the crime and received a double life sentence. In The Man No One Believed, Joshua Sharpe reveals flaws in the justice system, while tracking down leads that were purposely obfuscated in the initial investigation. He had doors slammed in his face and drew the ire of locals who knew more than they were saying, if they were saying anything at all. A native of Waycross, he knew the area and he knew when he was getting the silent treatment. He focused on a local White supremacist who was said to have bragged about committing the murders. The suspicious death of a key figure in the case drew concerns for Sharpe’s safety from his editors and sources. Jackie Johnson, the same district attorney who refused to prosecute the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery fought to keep Perry in prison and re-open the 35-year-old case. The work of the Georgia Innocence Project and volunteer attorneys from King & Spalding, reported by Sharpe, helped ensure Dennis Perry’s 2020 release.

Erik Sparre of Waynesville was arrested without incident and charged with the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain in 2024. Dennis and Brenda Perry have gotten on with their lives and hopefully, justice will be done for the loved ones of Harold and Thelma Swain.