A trail that zigzagged from an Ohio hotel to a Georgia Cracker Barrel and a Florida beach has produced an arrest more than four decades after a salesman was killed. Ohio prosecutors say discarded items discovered behind the restaurant in Dalton, Georgia, days after the murder, helped them charge 62-year-old Randy Lane McAllister of Columbus in the 1985 death of 44-year-old traveling auto-parts salesman John Christopher Warren, NBC News reports.
Warren was found dead Oct. 17, 1985, in his room at a Holiday Inn in Middletown, Ohio, near Cincinnati. His Oldsmobile and other belongings were taken, authorities say; the car later turned up in Redington Beach, Florida, about 1,000 miles from the crime scene. The case sat unresolved until 2019, when Warren County, Ohio detectives sent evidence from Ohio, Georgia, and Florida to a lab for fresh analysis. That testing led investigators to McAllister and an unnamed accomplice who has since died, prosecutors say. Authorities have not publicly detailed how the Cracker Barrel evidence was first tied to the murder.
McAllister is accused of killing Warren "while committing or attempting to commit the offense of aggravated robbery," according to a two-count indictment. He pleaded not guilty to murder and aggravated murder during a court appearance Tuesday, where prosecutors said Warren was beaten and strangled, WKRC reports. Prosecutors asked for bond to be set at $1 million, noting the "extreme violence" of the killing and McAllister's three prior felony convictions, most recently for felonious assault in 1992, per Fox 19. The judge, noting that McAllister has lived a law-abiding life for the past 35 years, set bond at $500,000.
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