ROCKINGHAM — Deputies say a Richmond County man is accused of killing his wife nearly a decade ago.
According to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, 58-year-old Jerry Dean Guinn, of Safie Third Street in East Rockingham, was arrested Wednesday and charged with an open count of murder in the death of Angela Jacobs Guinn.
Chief Deputy Mark Gulledge said Wednesday evening that the victim died from a gunshot wound, but investigators did not have any other details available.
He said the case has remained open for the past eight years and the arrest stems from new leads worked by sheriff’s office investigators within the past month.
Investigators brought Guinn in to the sheriff’s office for questioning on Wednesday and later obtained a warrant for his arrest, Gulledge said.
Guinn was booked into the Richmond County Jail without bond.
Guinn’s criminal history has been clean the past 15 years, according to records with the N.C. Department of Public Safety Division of Adult Correction. Prior to 2000, however, records paint a different picture.
He spent two days shy of a year behind bars — from March, 18, 1999 to March, 16, 2000 — following a conviction on three counts of driving while impaired — from one incident in 1993 and two within a month in 1998.
In 1990, Guinn was convicted on a felony charge of selling a Schedule II controlled substance, resulting in a nearly three-year sentence.
Records show he was first convicted in mid-1982 on misdemeanor charges of possession of a Schedule IV controlled substance and assault attempting to inflict serious injury, for which he was given probation.
That probation was revoked in 1984 when he was convicted on a felony forgery charge and he served nearly a year in prison.
Angela Guinn’s murder was one of seven in Richmond County that year, according to statistics from the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation. Numbers show that 2007 and 2008 both saw he second-highest occurrence of murders in the past 11 years, with 2012 topping the list with eight.
Her obituary states she was the owner of Mom’s Kitchen in Rockingham and died at the age of 41 at her Essie Mae Lane home — off Battley Dairy Road near the South Carolina border — on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.
There are no other Daily Journal archives related to this case, aside from a 2010 letter to the editor from Lori Jacobs in response to letter by a relative of another unsolved murder victim.
“We still have no answers to the real truth of who did it or what happened” Jacobs wrote. “We have given all the evidence we came up with, but always a door slams in our face.”
All defendants facing criminal charges are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in court.
Reach reporter William R. Toler at 910-817-2675 and follow him on Twitter @William_r_toler.