A man convicted of killing five people, including a 3-year-old child, near Moultrie in 2004 has walked out of a Georgia prison this month, more than a decade after he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms without parole. Alexander Woods III's convictions were vacated on appeal, and prosecutors now say they have no legal path to try him again.
Woods was convicted in May 2013 on 15 counts, including five counts of malice murder, in connection with a November 8, 2004 shooting inside a home near Moultrie, according to the Moultrie Observer. As Action News 5 reported, Woods was released this month after his convictions were vacated, and District Attorney Bradfield Shealy has confirmed that retrying him is not possible.
The victims of the 2004 shooting were Jaime Cruze Resendez, 24; his wife, Katrina Darlene “Tina” Watts Resendez, 29; their 3-year-old son, Juan Carlos Resendez; Katrina's mother, Betty Faye Watts, 50; and the family's housekeeper, Liliana Alegria Aguilar, 30. The Moultrie Observer's reporting notes that four of the five victims spanned three generations of the same family and were discovered inside the home by returning schoolchildren.
A Conviction Built on a Co-Defendant's Testimony
Woods' original conviction rested heavily on testimony from co-defendant Johnny Jerry Thompson, who pleaded guilty in November 2011 to five counts of felony murder and agreed to serve life sentences in exchange for testifying against Woods, per the Moultrie Observer's account. That testimony, the outlet's reporting indicates, provided the primary direct link connecting Woods to the crime scene.
A third suspect identified in the initial investigation, Anthony “Amp” Davis, was found shot to death in Lowndes County in January 2005, before formal charges could ever be brought against him. Investigators had identified Davis as Thompson's enforcer during an earlier drug-related investigation, according to the same Moultrie Observer reporting, leaving one fewer potential witness even before the case went to trial.
Appeal Centered on Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
The path to Woods' release began in August 2021, when the Supreme Court of Georgia, in Woods v. State, vacated a trial court order that had denied his motion for a new trial. The court ruled that his claims of ineffective assistance of trial counsel required further judicial evaluation, according to Justia Law. Under Georgia post-conviction law, defendants raising such claims must satisfy the two-prong Strickland standard, showing both that counsel's performance was deficient and that the deficiency prejudiced the outcome of the trial.
DA Shealy announced in 2022, and reconfirmed this month, that a retrial was impossible because Thompson refused to re-testify or otherwise assist prosecutors. Without Thompson's sworn testimony, the Moultrie Observer's reporting states, the state lacked adequate admissible evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a new trial.
One of Only Two Death Penalty Cases in Decades
The 2004 Resendez family killings were one of only two cases in Colquitt County since 1983 in which local prosecutors filed official notices to seek the death penalty, according to the Moultrie Observer. Before those modern cases, the county had not pursued a capital prosecution since a 1973 police officer shooting. The other death-penalty case came in May 2016, when Jeffrey Alan Peacock shot five friends inside a home and set fire to the structure, a case that ended in his June 2019 conviction and five consecutive life sentences, as reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Both the 2004 and 2016 cases involved five victims shot inside rural residences near Moultrie.
Security concerns also shadowed the case in its earlier stages. In April 2013, a Colquitt County Jail employee was terminated after refusing a polygraph exam during an internal investigation into an unauthorized cell phone found in the day room housing Thompson, the Moultrie Observer reported at the time, citing sheriff's office policy requiring staff suspected of facilitating inmate contraband to cooperate with polygraph testing.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Georgia Courts
Woods' case is not an isolated one. A statewide legal analysis published by the Georgia Law Review in 2022 found that ineffective assistance of trial counsel and compromised co-defendant witness testimony account for a significant portion of overturned felony murder convictions in the state's superior courts. Overturned murder convictions in Georgia, the analysis found, frequently trace back to trial defense deficiencies that ultimately force courts to order new trials.
For the surviving family and the Moultrie community, the outcome leaves a painful and unresolved chapter open. The legal mechanics behind Woods' release reflect constitutional protections around effective counsel and the evidentiary bar required to sustain a murder conviction, even as the case that put five people in the ground more than two decades ago now appears unlikely to ever return to a courtroom.
