(Editor’s note: The following story appeared in the Sept. 9 edition of the Jeff Davis Ledger and is being reprinted with permission. The victim in this case, Nicky Orvin Bamberg, was a resident of Appling County and a large portion of her family lives in Baxley.)

A Jeff Davis County jury took less than 40 minutes to find Sonya Bamberg and her son, Damon Bamberg of Montgomery County, guilty of murder in connection with the Jan. 18, 2008, shooting death of Damon Bamberg’s estranged wife, Allison Nicole “Nicky” Orvin Bamberg.

The jury found both defendants guilty of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, attempted aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, and criminal damage to property. Presiding Judge Amanda Williams issued a directed verdict of acquittal on a seventh charge of cruelty to children.

Judge Williams ordered a pre-sentencing investigation and scheduled a sentencing date of Sept. 28.

The jury heard testimony for four days before both the prosecution and defense rested around 6:22 p.m. on Thursday. By 7:00 p.m., the jury notified the court they had reached a verdict.

Prosecutors Jan Kennedy and David Perry called more than 30 witnesses as they meticulously laid out a mountain of circumstantial evidence for the jury to consider. The defense called only two witnesses. Neither defendant took the stand.

The evidence revealed the story that Damon and Nicky Bamberg had been involved in a difficult divorce proceeding for over a year when in November, 2007, Damon took out a $50,000 life insurance policy on Nicky. The beneficiary was Damon’s mother, Sonya.

On Jan. 14, 2008, the divorce was finalized. Four days later, on Jan. 18, Nicky Bamberg took her and Damon’s two children to Ladson’s convenience store in Uvalda to exchange the children for visitation with their father for the weekend in Mount Vernon where Damon lived with his mother. Prior to their separation, Damon, Nicky and their children all lived with Sonya Bamberg in Mount Vernon.

Damon and Sonya Bamberg told investigators that a brief altercation erupted between Damon and Nicky outside the convenience store. The defendants claimed Damon injured his arm in the altercation and they immediately left the store to go to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department to file an assault report on Nicky Bamberg.

But investigators came up with a different scenario. According to trial testimony, approximately two minutes after Nicky Bamberg left Ladson’s, the defendants drove a 1971-72 Chevrolet Chevelle, with the two small children in the back seat, in pursuit of Nicky Bamberg, who was traveling on Hwy. 221 toward Hazlehurst. Driving 80-85 mph, the pair caught up with Nicky’s vehicle a short distance off the Uvalda Bridge on the Jeff Davis County side of Altamaha River.

Damon Bamberg, the prosecution alleged, fired two shots from a .45 caliber handgun at Nicky Bamberg’s vehicle, shooting out the back window. Nicky Bamberg immediately used her cell phone to call her father, Gary Orvin, in Baxley, telling him someone was shooting at her as she returned to Hazlehurst from Uvalda.

Nicky Bamberg pulled her car to the side of the road at the gas line station near the Bullard Creek Wildlife Management Area. The prosecution theorized that Damon and Sonya Bamberg pulled along side Nicky Bamberg’s vehicle, Damon Bamberg got out of the vehicle, walked to the driver’s side door of Nicky Bamberg’s car, and shot her twice, once at point blank range as she tried to scramble away towards the passenger side of the car.

Damon and Sonya Bamberg then drove at a high rate of speed to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department to file the assault report on the incident at Ladson’s and to establish what they thought would be an alibi clearing them of Nicky Bamberg’s murder.

The prosecution called the victim’s father to the stand to begin its case. He was followed by a stream of Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents and Jeff Davis County sheriff’s deputies and emergency personnel.

The lead investigator in the case was GBI Agent Deborah “Betsy” Rollins. Rollins quickly became suspicious of Damon Bamberg when she met him at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department for an interview several hours after the shooting. During her testimony, she said, according to telephone records, Nicky Bamberg’s last telephone call was placed at 6:05 p.m. on Jan. 18, when she called her father.

Rollins also testified about a search of the Bamberg’s Mount Vernon residence where they found a calendar with the dates Jan. 18-19 containing a hand written message, “Hell begins.”

She also testified about executing a search warrant at the residence on May 23, 2008, where investigators found .45 caliber magazines and ammunition buried in a chicken coop behind the Bamberg residence.

Rollins also testified that her investigation revealed that Damon and Sonya Bamberg arrived at the Montgomery Sheriff’s Office some time after 6:30 on the night of the shooting.

Rollins identified a box she retrieved from Marc Bamberg of Vidalia, Damon’s brother and Sonya’s son. The box once held a .45 caliber handgun, the same type of firearm investigators determined fired the fatal bullets and cartridges found at the scene of the shooting and along the highway where Nicky Bamberg’s vehicle was first fired at. The week after the shooting, Marc Bamberg reported the firearm stolen.

Prosecution witness Shawn Floyd provided key testimony on Tuesday when he told the jury about his traveling toward Hazlehurst on Hwy. 221 on Jan. 18 and crossing the Uvalda Bridge around 6:08-6:10. He said he saw a vehicle matching the description of the vehicle in which Sonya and Damon Bamberg was riding headed away from the crime scene at a high rate of speed. Floyd also said he saw Nicky Bamberg’s vehicle on the side of the road, with the driver’s side door open and a leg sticking out of the car. He said he assumed the driver had stopped to use a cell phone and thought nothing amiss. Later, Floyd heard of the shooting and contacted the Jeff Davis County Sheriff’s Department to tell officers what he had seen.

Defense attorneys attacked Floyd’s testimony but the witness was convincing and held firm to his belief that the Bamberg’s vehicle was traveling 80-90 mph. As a 13-year veteran of drag racing, Floyd testified convincingly not only about his estimate of the speed the vehicle was traveling, but also about the “moaning” sound of the engine as the vehicle passed, a telltale sign that the vehicle was being pushed to high performance.

Jeff Davis Sheriff’s Department Investigators John Lee and Chief Deputy Wayne Waldon also supplied key testimony. Jurors were shown a video tape the two made in Waldon’s patrol car as the two simulated the route they believed the defendants took on the day of the murder. Starting at Ladson’s store, Lee drove his vehicle at a speed of 55 mph toward Hazlehurst. Waldon left two minutes later. Traveling at 85 mph, Waldon was able to catch Lee’s vehicle on the Uvalda Bridge. During another trial run, Waldon drove at 80 mph and caught Lee’s vehicle at the exact point where investigators found shell casing believed to have been the first shots fired at Nicky Bamberg’s vehicle.

Lee and Waldon pulled their vehicles over at the scene of the shooting and Lee got out of his vehicle and into Waldon’s from there, the two traveled to Mount Vernon, using a route that included Old River Road, and drove to the Sheriff’s Department in 18 minutes.

Lee and Waldon conducted the simulated trips 5-6 times. The slowest time recorded for the entire trip, from Ladson’s to the crime scene and then to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, took 25 minutes.

Lee testified that if the shooting occurred at 6:08-6:09, 3-4 minutes after the phone records show Nicky Bamberg called her father to first report that someone had fired at her vehicle, the killer could have easily arrived at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office at 6:26-6:27.

But there was a problem with the prosecution’s time line: defense witness Harvey Leon Prater, the dispatcher at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, had written in his log that Damon Bamberg walked into the office at 6:16 p.m. on the day of the shooting.

Prosecutor David Perry, however, countered the log and Prator’s testimony, finally getting the witness to admit that he did not know if the time he wrote on the log was correct.

Prosecution witness Burtis Taylor brought some comic relief to the proceedings as he had the entire courtroom laughing loudly during his testimony. Taylor, who was a trustee at the Jeff Davis Detention Center several months during the time Damon and Sonya were held in the jail, testified that Sonya Bamberg told him she was in the vehicle when Damon shot Nicky Bamberg.

He also said that Sonya Bamberg conspired with him to go to her home in Mount Vernon, dig up the magazines and ammunition buried in the chicken coop, get the murder weapon from Marc Bamberg, and carry those items to Baxley. In Baxley, he was to hide the firearm and ammunition at Nicky Bamberg’s mother’s residence, and could find his way to the residence by using a map drawn by Sonya Bamburg.

While Taylor testified that he was unable to get a weapon from Marc Bamberg, the information he elicited from Sonya Bamberg led investigators to dig up the magazines and ammunition buried in the chicken coop.

James Darwin Fowler III of Vidalia also testified for the prosecution. A former friend of Marc Bamberg, Fowler had Marc Bamberg to do some work on a vehicle he owned. He paid him for the work by giving him a .45 caliber handgun. Fowler also testified that he met Damon and Sonya Bamberg at Marc’s home, and while he and his then-girlfriend were standing around a fire pit in the backyard, Sonya Bamberg asked Fowler about killing her son’s ex-wife for $25,000.

Fowler’s then-girlfriend, who is now his wife corroborated Fowler’s testimony about Sonya Bamberg’s offer.

Other witnesses testified about Damon Bamberg’s volatile nature, including Bamberg’s first wife, Andrea Culpepper Bamberg, who now lives in Arizona. Andrea Bamberg testified that she and Damon lived with Sonya Bamberg during their marriage, just as Nicky and Damon did during their marriage. Andrea Bamberg’s marriage to Damon ended shortly after he stuck a machete to her throat during a disagreement over her wanting the couple to move out of Sonya Bamberg’s house into a home of their own.

The only defense witness other than Dispatcher Prater, was Michael Branson, a 17-year certified mechanic who, in February, 2007, inspected the Chevelle the prosecution established was driven by the defendants on the night of the shooting. While Branson basically testified that the vehicle was in a dangerous, run-down condition, Perry was able to elicit testimony from Branson that there was no reason the vehicle couldn’t run 100 mph. It just couldn’t do it safely.

During closing arguments, Sonya Bamberg’s attorney, Newell Hamilton, attacked the prosecution’s reliance on circumstantial evidence and contended that the timeline questions constituted reasonable doubt. He also stressed the fact that no gunshot residue or blood splatter or any physical evidence was found to connect them with the murder.

Damon Bamberg’s attorneys, Lee Joyner and Chad Taylor, also attacked the evidence, pointing out that tire tracks and footprints found at the scene of the murder did not tie his client or the vehicle he was driving to the murder.

Assistant D.A. Kennedy used a projector to aid her in her closing argument, beginning with the statement that the defendants had the motive, the opportunity and the intent.

Kennedy stressed 10 points: The $50,000 life insurance policy, the long and bitter divorce including a threat by Sonya Bamberg that she’d see Nicky Bamberg dead before she got the children, the offer to James Fowler to murder Nicky Bamberg for $25,000, the fact that the murder was committed with a .45 caliber handgun similar to the one owned by Marc Bamberg and subsequently reported stolen, Shawn Floyd’s testimony about seeing the vehicle fleeing the scene, inmate Don Ellis’ testimony that Damon Bamberg told him in the detention center that Nicky Bamberg leaned away from her assailant in an attempt to escape — a fact verified by an autopsy report and a fact that only the shooter would know, Burtis Taylor’s information derived from Sonya Bamberg that led investigators to the bullets and magazines buried in the chicken coop, the defendants’ attempt to establish an alibi at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, the fact that no weapons were found in the defendants’ vehicle despite the fact that Damon Bamberg was commonly known to carry both knives and guns in his vehicle, and the incriminating statement found on the calendar in the Bamberg’s Mount Vernon home.

Last week’s trial was marked by heightened security in the courtroom and courthouse. When the jury sent word it had reached a verdict, deputies quickly surrounded the table at which the defendants sat and remained there until the jury was dismissed and the two weeping defendants were removed in handcuffs from the courtroom.

While a large contingent of Nicky Bamberg’s family and friends filled the courtroom behind the prosecution’s table, there were few people present in support of the defendants. In a particularly tense portion of the trial Thursday morning, Judge Williams ordered Sonya Bamberg’s sister out of the courtroom for an hour because of a disruption she caused the night before the judge discussed the potential testimony of Sonya Bamberg’s mother, testimony that was never presented before the trial.

While Sonya Bamberg sat quietly and mostly expressionless during most of the trial, Damon Bamberg appeared to treat the trial with humor, particularly when witnesses would identify him from the stand.