Rare murders of women come to light as Georgia prisons set homicide record

When a prisoner at Lee Arrendale State Prison was found dead in her cell this spring, Hallie Reed called her mother in a panic. Reed was in the same mental health unit as the dead woman, Sherry Joyce, and she told her mother that she’d asked to be placed in protective custody and been turned down.

Reed then abruptly ended the call, leaving her mother, Samantha Reed, to wonder just what had made her 23-year-old daughter so fearful.

Within days, Samantha had another call, this one from the warden. Hallie, too, was dead.

Months passed with no explanation from the Georgia Department of Corrections about what happened to Reed and Joyce, but recently filed arrest warrants reveal a stunning explanation. The warrants allege that both women were strangled to death by the same person, a 22 - year-old prisoner, Jeanni Geuea, who had only recently arrived in the mental health unit.

According to the warrants, Reed and Joyce were killed eight days apart in late April and early May, raising concerns that the GDC failed to take the necessary steps to protect the most vulnerable women in its care — those with significant mental health issues confined to a unit that’s supposed to be closely monitored.

“I have a bigger problem with the GDC than I do with the girl who may actually have done this,” Samantha Reed said. “They didn’t do their job. The people there to protect Hallie failed miserably.”

Homicides inside women’s prisons are extraordinarily rare, and the killings at Lee Arrendale, the largest of the state’s four facilities for women, add an alarming twist to an unprecedented year of violent deaths within the Department of Corrections. Already in 2024, there have been at least 43 homicides in Georgia prisons, surpassing the 2023 total of 38, then a record for the state, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The new homicide numbers show once again how stabbings, beatings and strangulations play out with alarming frequency in facilities that are so understaffed that often no correctional officers are around to intervene.

“Prisons do not have to be violent places — they should not be, and these numbers far exceed anything else going on in the country, anywhere, with the possible exception of Alabama ,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “This is not normal. This is not acceptable. And this is indicative of a very toxic, dysfunctional culture and management of this agency.”

In response to questions from the AJC about the record number of homicides, the GDC said prison system staff members have worked diligently to run safe facilities and blamed the deaths on the violent nature, gang affiliations and mental health issues of those in custody.

“Individuals who come into our system with violent offenses rarely give up their criminal activities,” GDC spokesperson Lori Benoit said in a statement.

The AJC also asked the GDC for information about the circumstances of the deaths and why steps weren’t taken to prevent Geuea from allegedly killing twice within days at the Alto facility. It also sought an answer for what may have gone wrong at Lee Arrendale, especially as it pertains to the protocols in a mental health unit.

Benoit didn’t respond to those questions, nor did she provide an explanation as to why the questions weren’t answered.

The GDC’s lack of transparency on the murders has been particularly frustrating for Reed and Joyce’s families, both of whom were in the dark for months about how their loved ones had died.

Samantha Reed didn’t know until August, when the agency’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Ammons, responded to an email Reed sent. Ammons acknowledged that Hallie Reed’s death was being investigated as a homicide and that the GDC was investigating whether Joyce’s death was connected.

Members of Joyce’s family had no idea what was going on until they were contacted by an AJC reporter working on this story in late August, and they still hadn’t heard from the GDC when Geuea was arrested in late September. After being told by Lee Arrendale’s warden, Carmon Edwards, that Joyce, 61, had “passed,” they assumed she died peacefully from a heart attack. Learning otherwise — and learning it from someone outside the GDC — has left them shocked and angry.

“You would think since they put those warrants out they would contact the family and say, `We’ve got a different story to tell you now,’” said Joyce’s brother, Dean Joyce. “But they haven’t.”

Dean Joyce is himself a former GDC employee, having worked 25 years for the agency as a construction supervisor and manager before retiring in April. That the GDC failed to keep his family apprised of developments in the investigation of his sister’s death isn’t a surprise, he said.

“You don’t know how corrupt the Department of Corrections is until you’re there,” he said. “You don’t understand that nobody cares.” The attitude within the agency, he said, is “just let me get through this day here and we’ll worry about everything else tomorrow.”

The surprising deaths of the women came amid a deadly summer in which by the end of August the state had exceeded last year’s record of 38 homicides. At least 20 prisoners and a kitchen worker were killed from June through September, the AJC found.

In March, the GDC stopped releasing initial manner of death findings in its monthly mortality reports and will no longer reveal whether individual deaths are homicides. But using death certificates, arrest warrants, coroner information, GDC incident data and family accounts, the AJC has continued to identify how inmates have died.

While the agency won’t reveal names, Benoit said in her statement that the GDC had investigated 46 prisoners’ deaths this year as possible homicides as of Oct.11.

The killings of Reed and Joyce represent another grim milestone: Georgia now has had three women prisoners killed in two years, and all three were killed in Lee Arrendale’s mental health dorm. The three killings push the state into an extraordinary spotlight that suggests deep lapses in security protocols and the approach to handling people with significant mental health issues.

The mental health unit at Lee Arrendale, known as A Unit, is the only one maintained by the GDC for incarcerated women classified as Level III or Level IV, meaning their impairment prevents them from being housed with the general population and requires special treatment.

The other woman killed in A Unit, Angela Anderson, 39, was also strangled to death. A 41-year-old inmate, Leticia Land, has been arrested but court records show she had not yet been indicted for the killing, which occurred in September 2022.

The last available data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that only nine women died as a result of homicides in state prisons across the country between 2001 and 2019. As for Georgia’s prisons, the data compiled by the AJC, covering 2015 to present, shows that no women were killed until Anderson’s death in September 2022.

“Homicides in women’s prisons are extremely rare, and the thought that the same person could have allegedly killed two different fellow prisoners in a span of days is mind boggling, and it really speaks to a failure of appropriate management of the situation,” said Deitch, of the University of Texas.

Separated in age by nearly 40 years, Joyce and Reed had little in common beyond both having mental health issues that put them in A Unit and the circumstances that now surround their deaths.

Joyce grew up in Mount Vernon, spent four years in the Air Force and then descended into a life dominated by drugs, according to her family. She was sentenced to life in prison at 28 for taking part in an armed robbery in Toombs County that left a man dead, and she was eventually found to be suffering from schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, family members said.

Reed, raised on military bases and later in Fort Oglethorpe, was a teen when she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, according to her mother. She had been incarcerated since 2022 when a series of incidents, including an altercation in the Catoosa County jail, resulted in a five-year sentence for violating her probation from a traffic offense.

The warrants for Geuea’s arrest contain few details. They simply allege that she strangled Joyce to death on April 27 and did the same to Reed on May 5. In both cases, Geuea is charged with felony murder, aggravated assault and riot in a penal institution.

At the time of the killings, Geuea had only served two months of a two-year prison sentence for violating probation in Clinch County. The sentence was imposed after Geuea was arrested for new offenses while on probation for making terroristic threats, an incident stemming from an argument with another woman.

Geuea’s mother, Tammy Palmer, said she was shocked to learn of her daughter’s arrest for the prison killings. “This is not our Jeanni,” Palmer said, adding that her daughter has mental health issues but never did anything to indicate she was capable of murder.

Palmer said learning of her daughter’s arrest has raised all sorts of questions, such as what exactly happened, how her daughter’s care was being managed and what the system did in response to the first death. “I feel like they failed all three of them,” she said.

The GDC’s publicly released incident reports for the two deaths, provided to the AJC by the agency in response to requests under the Georgia Open Records Act, are also short on details. As the GDC has done with all such reports, it redacted entire pages, citing a statute that allows the agency to withhold details from open investigations.

The incident reports identify certain “involved” staff, but it’s unclear who, if anyone, was on duty and if the prison was adequately staffed when the killings occurred. GDC staffing records show that 44% of the correctional officer positions at Lee Arrendale were vacant in April. Joyce was killed on a Saturday and Reed on a Sunday, and several people with direct knowledge of the prison say staffing is stretched even thinner on weekends.

“That was the main thing about being in the mental health unit, that Sherry would get 24-7 care and observation,” said Sheila Clark, one of Joyce’s sisters. “Somebody’s not doing their job.”

Hallie Reed’s last sequence of calls to her mother provide some measure of insight.

Samantha Reed said Hallie called her on the day of Joyce’s death to say she was afraid she’d be blamed for it. Samantha said she asked Hallie who would possibly blame her. According to Samantha, Hallie replied, “guards,” and then ended the call.

Because Hallie often got off the phone that way, Samantha said she put the matter out of her mind, just as she eventually dismissed Hallie’s comment about wanting to be placed in protective custody.

Now she believes her troubled daughter was, in her own way, signaling that she knew her life was in danger and nobody at the prison wanted to do anything about it.

“They’d put her in protective custody before,” Samantha Reed said. “Why not this time? They either should have moved her or (Geuea). You don’t leave a situation like that alone until you find the truth.”

At ajc.com, read details on how more than 170 people were slain in Georgia prisons since 2020.

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