Resolution: Family remembers Queen White as her killer pleads guilty, sentenced to life without parole

Bringing a nearly 36-year-old murder case to a close, Timothy Tyrone Foster pleaded guilty to the murder of a 79-year-old schoolteacher and accepted a life term in prison without parole.

Foster’s case began in 1986 with the murder of Queen Madge White. He’d burglarized her home on Highland Circle and attacked her with a piece of wood when she’d woken up, Rome Circuit District Attorney Leigh Patterson told the court.

She had been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted and then strangled. He had been arrested and sentenced to death. Foster’s case made headlines later when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2016, because a prosecutor had struck Black jurors to get a conviction, and the case was sent back for retrial.

But, Patterson argued Friday as part of the plea hearing, the case is and always was about the retired school teacher. She’d returned from church that night with her sister and was looking forward to a short trip to Marietta the next day.

“This case is about what happened to Queen Madge White,” Patterson said who spoke of the loving, church going person who had been murdered that night on Aug. 27, 1986. “She reminds me of the woman who was mentioned in Proverbs 31. A woman of virtue is worth more than rubies.”

Patterson described the crime in bitter detail before talking about White again, a woman described by neighbors as “immaculate” and “kind.” She had taught at Johnson School for 40 years and attended the North Broad United Methodist Church. Her husband, Otis White, had died in 1972 and on their shared grave an inscription reads “together forever.”

Born in 1906, she’d lived through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. She’d been loved by her neighbors, the community and her family.

That night, Patterson said, White’s sister asked her if she’d locked the doors to her home.

The crime

That night was nearly 36 years ago, on Aug. 28, 1986, when police found White on the floor of her home. Foster had snuck over from his apartment on Stonewall Street and removed a window-mounted air-conditioning unit to enter the home.

He ransacked the home before killing White and stashed several suitcases worth of stolen jewelry and items in an abandoned home nearby before later retrieving it.

Police combed the community for clues and a month later hit pay dirt — an ex-girlfriend of Timothy Tyrone Foster turned him in.

It started when Foster attacked his then girlfriend Lisa Stubbs and she fled. Stubbs told police that Foster had said he killed White. On top of that, Foster had stashed items taken from White’s home in her home.

During 2021 hearing, former Rome police detective Wayne Craft testified Stubbs approached police with the information and identified items that only police knew had been stolen from White’s residence. They then arrested Foster.

Foster confessed to the killing and police found White’s possessions, which had been stolen from her home, in his home as well as the homes of his two sisters.

Foster, who is now 54, was 18 at the time of the murder.

There was never much question of whether or not Foster had committed the crime. Years of appeals generally centered around his mental capacity and went to the Georgia Supreme Court more than once. But a claim of prosecutorial misconduct in the 1987 trial took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court...and back to Floyd County.

U.S. Supreme Court and retrial

His case had been appealed a number of times on the state level before getting to the Supreme Court, which cited Batson v. Kentucky in its 2016 ruling overturning Foster’s conviction.

That precedent — set just prior to Foster’s original trial — holds that prosecutors cannot strike potential jurors on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.

Justices ruled 7-1 to overturn the conviction on a number of factors, but some of the most damning evidence came from former DA investigator Clayton Lundy’s notes — recovered 19 years later — had the name of each potential Black juror highlighted only because prosecutors were planning a defense against discrimination claims.

That and other markings on the notes, including having three of the possible black jurors identified as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3,” showed an intent to single out black jurors.

Lundy’s notes also ranked the possible black jurors against each other in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”

Adding to that, additional testimony later pointed to the justification of the ruling.

Prior to the original trial for Timothy Tyrone Foster in 1987, a man who was then an assistant district attorney for Floyd County testified during a pre-trial hearing in 2019 that he heard the district attorney at that time and his lead investigator arguing about the case.

As he walked up the steps Harold Chambers, who was then a sitting judge, testified he heard then District Attorney Steve Lanier arguing with his chief investigator Clayton Lundy.

“Mr. Lundy told Lanier they had to put a black person on the jury,” Chambers said. “Lanier kept saying ‘no, I’m not going to do it.’”

Chambers said Lundy then told Lanier “If you don’t put a black juror on this jury this is going to come back to haunt you.” As he approached they quit talking and Chambers said he didn’t mention it to anyone at that time or for years afterward.

Lanier served three terms as DA from 1985 through 1996. He passed away in July 2018. In 2016, Lanier denied to the Rome News-Tribune that he’d struck jurors on the basis of their race and said he was floored by the decision.

After his conviction was overturned, Foster was brought to the Floyd County Jail in March 2017 from Georgia’s death row in Jackson. In 2018, the state expressed its intent to seek the death penalty.

Resolution and remembrance

“Our family has known what you put Aunt Queen through for years,” White’s nephew Tony McCollum told Foster in the court. He was delivering mail in 1986 when a family member pulled up and told him what had happened.

It shattered the family.

They spoke of how close “Aunt Queen” was with her sisters and how they had to go in the ransacked home to clean up after the crime. They spoke of the lasting trauma the murder had caused and how that trauma had been revived with each appeal.

“When my mother had purchased Aunt Queen’s bed I couldn’t stand for it to be in the house,” Tammy McCollum Cox said. She missed and loved her aunt but seeing the bed reminded her what had happened to her aunt.

However, they also spoke of their aunt’s loving nature and devotion to Jesus Christ and they spoke of needing to forgive Foster for what he had done to their aunt, and to their family.

“Aunt Queen got the death sentence executed by Mr. Foster, she didn’t get it overturned by the supreme court,” Tim McCollum said. “But I forgive Mr. Foster as Aunt Queen would have.”

Foster didn’t speak on his behalf during the sentencing but answered that he understood the proceedings when asked by Floyd County Superior Court Judge William “Billy” Sparks.

At the end of the hearing, Judge Sparks addressed Foster specifically.

“Mr. Foster you have wasted your life but in doing so you unfortunately wasted another,” Sparks said. “Today you have done the only thing you could to end it and my hope is you have peace for the rest of your life.”