MURDERER: Lynn Turner

Greediness leads to the heartbreaking and untimely deaths of two emergency service workers.

Julia Lynn Womack was adopted as a baby by the Womacks, given a life of expensive toys and spoiled rotten by the couple. But when Lynn reached 5 years old her parents would divorce and her mother Helen would get full custody. A few short years later, Helen would re-marry but Lynn would struggle to accept her new step-father causing tension in the family. Things started to look up but when Lynn reached her early teens she started to abuse substances, leading her to stay at an Atlanta drug clinic.

In her early 20s, Lynn would begin pursuing a job in law enforcement but instead took on the role of a 911 operator. She even took a civilian role with the undercover narcotics unit in Tennessee. This new career path would eventually allow Lynn to meet a large group of friends that widely consisted of police officers and law enforcement personnel. It was this friendship circle that introduced her to her future first husband.

In 1991, Lynn went to a gathering of officers before they headed out for a night of dancing. There she would meet Glenn Turner, a man described as a “big teddy bear” with a passion for motorbikes and a love for his family. He worked at Cobb County Georgia Police Department as a motorcycle officer. Glenn’s sister Linda would later go on to tell different interviewers that Lynn could “go from being sweet

Lynn started to shower Glenn with expensive gifts and affection, one of the gifts was getting them both tickets to a NASCAR event. They soon started dating, Glenn putting Lynn on a pedestal while friends thought that the pair were too different to work out. One of many examples was Lynn wanted a high-class life whereas Glenn was content with a middle-class lifestyle.

A year after meeting the couple had been together for a few months when Lynn applied to become a police officer. She passed the physical exams with flying colours but when the psychological exam came around, Lynn failed and was not allowed to join the force. She told Glenn that it was humiliating for her to remain as a dispatcher and with his support began to search for a higher-paying job. When nothing to her taste came around, Lynn started calling in sick to work regularly.

Despite the reluctance from friends, Glenn showed off an engagement ring to he had gotten Lynn for Christmas.

Two months after Christmas, Glenn would move in with Lynn and they set their wedding date for August 1993. Before the wedding, Lynn somehow convinced Glenn to change his life insurance so that she would be the main beneficiary. It’s unsure if Glenn knew of the amount of debt that Lynn had gotten into with her home and car payments as well as credit card debt. It worked out that Lynn’s home and car debts nearly amounted to her yearly take-home pay.

Glenn’s mother Kathy would later talk of the time Glenn and Lynn came to the family home to announce their engagement. “They came to the house to tell me theye were getting married and she didn’t have anything to say to me. I thought that was very strange because I thought ‘I’m going to be her mother in law and she’s not going to say anyhing to me and show me any love or anything’.”

Once again, despite what friends and family were saying, Glenn and Lynn married on August 21, 1993, at Mariette Baptist Church. Once again, Lynn made no effort in bonding with her future in-laws just as she had every time she would be around her in-laws.

The relationship between Glenn and Lynn started to fall apart before the honeymoon had even finished. Lynn supposedly got upset over the fact that Glenn had booked the family cruise rather than the luxury version of the trip. Glenn would soon start complaining to work friends that Lynn was having “female problems” so the couple were no longer engaging in their sex life. Just six months into the relationship the couple were sleeping in separate rooms. Glenn still would cater to whatever his wife wanted and Lynn was still spending their money without limit, even going as far as to buy herself a new Datsun 240Z. Her spending habits forced Glenn to take on a second job at a gas station to keep up with bills. His sister said that Lynn put Glenn on a budget for his final year of life, “twenty bucks a week”.

Eventually, Glenn decided to try and leave his marriage. On the 22nd of February 1995, Glenn called his riding partner in a panic. Dunkerton answered the call, reportedly getting told that Lynn had threatened to shoot Glenn with his service revolver and he was told that “if anything happens to me look at Lynn,”. Glenn’s warning would leave a haunting air in the following days.

Towards the last few days of February, Glenn fell sick, he had severe flu-like symptoms along with vomiting and diarrhoea. It was so bad that Glenn would call sick at work, missing three days before he was admitted to Kennestone Hospital’s ER. There he would be given intravenous fluids to treat dehydration and medication for the vomiting. He was then released from the ER.

According to Lynn, Glenn returned home and took a sudden turn for the worst at midnight. He was allegedly hallucinating and trying to jump off the balcony because he “thought he could fly”. He would then try to drink gasoline in the basement. Lynn managed to get Glenn up to bed before he got hurt or hurt himself.

On the morning of March 3rd, Glenn was a lot better. Lynn made him some green Jell-O and went to run some errands. She returned a few hours later and found her husband of 18 months dead in the bed where she left him.

Glenn’s autopsy reported that he had an enlarged heart and irregular heartbeat which was listed as his cause of death. His mother Kathy would later deny the autopsy results since her son “never had any such thing that I knew about.”. Due to her suspicions, Kathy carefully scoured over the autopsy report, making a list of questions that she had about the report. At the top of her list was what was the green substance in his stomach. Kathy would assume that it was green Jell-O since that was all he could stomach whilst sick but still, she was suspicious of the substance. Kathy tried to get further testing done but was simply told that she would need to go private for that to happen. It worked out that the tests Kathy would need to be done would work out to thousands of dollars which she didn’t have. Kathy knew that Lynn was somehow involved in her son’s death but she didn’t know how.

While Kathy was pouring her soul over her child’s autopsy report, Lynn had fled the county just four days after Glenn’s funeral. She cut off Glenn’s family and she would get an apartment, listing Randy Thompson as an occupant.

Randy Thompson was a Forsyth County sheriff’s deputy who later accomplished his dreams of being a firefighter. He was a jocular and kind-spirited person that was always protecting his family even when he was a child. Randy’s sister would recall a time when they were kids when she had an epileptic seizure on the school bus and Randy had done his best to help his sister. According to his sister, Randy had “tried to hide me because he knew that it bothered me to be seen that way.”. Randy was, aside from a great brother, a divorced father of one.

Lynn and Randy had started having an affair less than a year after she married Glenn. Randy had no idea that Lynn was still married, Lynn having told him that she was a widow. At the beginning of their involvement, Lynn did the same as she did with Glenn, showering Randy with expensive gifts and week-long trips.

In the summer months of 1995, Lynn would use some of Glenn’s life insurance pay-out to purchase a home for herself and Randy. It had been just a short few months since her first husband had passed away. January 1996, Lynn would give birth to her first child, a daughter called Amber and soon after she’d have a son called Blake. Both children were fathered by Randy.

Randy’s family said that Lynn was a good mother but she refused to marry Randy. “He gave her an engagement ring but she never wore it — the reason she gave us was that her fingers had swollen and she couldn’t fit it on her hand. I’m sure it hurt him a lot,” Was how Randy’s sister Kimberly would explain Randy and Lynn’s relationship. It has been suggested that Lynn resisted getting married to Randy because she may no longer be eligible for Glenn’s pension if she re-married.

By 1997, Lynn had convinced Randy to make her the main beneficiary of his life insurance policy, and in the following year, Lynn suggested that Randy increase the policy amount from $100,000 to $200,000. Randy had done what Lynn suggested but at this point, their relationship had started to sour. Lynn claimed that Randy had hit her in the mouth with his fist and he was charged with battery, he was fined $400 and sentenced to 10 months of probation. After this Randy began to struggle emotionally and on two separate occasions, he took an overdose of pills.

In 1999, Randy would leave the house and leave Lynn “for his sanity” was what he told his sister.

Randy wanted to remain as civil as possible for the children that the two shared. He would go out for a dinner with Lynn on January 19th, 2001, it’s unclear what the intentions of the dinner were but Randy still returned home from dinner and instantly started to feel sick. Randy experienced severe flu-like symptoms alongside vomitting and diarrhoea. He struggled to keep anything down other than fluids and Jell-O. He would go to the emergency room, he was given intravenous fluids for dehydration and medication for vomiting and he was released. When Randy made it back to his apartment he took a drastic turn for the worse.

He would call a fellow firefighter Paul Adams asking for him to come over. Paul made it to the apartment finding Randy surrounded by overturned furniture, disoriented and panicked, Randy would question Paul “do you think I’m going to die?”. Paul stayed for a short while, making sure that Randy was ok before he had to leave. The next morning, Barry Head another firefighter would go to check on Randy at his apartment. There he would find Randy, dead on his couch with a blanket wrapped around him.

Randy’s autopsy deemed his death natural causes, an enlarged heart and an irregular heartbeat. The same day that Randy was buried, Lynn called his insurance company. She was shocked that his $200,000 life insurance policy had been cancelled due to non-payment.

Not long after the death of Randy Thompson, Kathy Turner found out. In an unclear order, Glenn’s family and friends met with Randy’s family and friends alongside journalist Jane Hansen. They would find out how suspiciously similar the two deaths actually were.

Pressure from Hansen and the two families would lead to a re-evaluation of Randy’s autopsy results. A forensic pathologist from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) found that Randy had a significant amount of calcium oxalate crystals in his kidney tissue, which is a clear sign of ethylene glycol poisoning. Ethylene glycol is one of the main ingredients in anti-freeze.

Detectives started to look into the case as a homicide and in July of 2001 officials exhumed Glenn’s body to test for ethylene glycol. It was confirmed that he too had signs that he was poisoned with anti-freeze. Both Glenn and Randy had been killed by ethylene glycol poisoning.

Lynn would be charged for both murders just over a year after Randy was buried. She was sentenced to a life sentence for both murders. On August 30th 2010, Lynn’s life sentence ended when she was found dead in her prison cell it was ruled a suicide via overdose of blood pressure medication.

(originally posted on medium.com/@natasha.leigh)