By Joe Johnson
An Athens man who is accused of murdering a woman he lived with last year has requested a separate trial on charges he allegedly raped another woman at the same location.
Douglas Keith Carter, 56, was arrested in January by Athens-Clarke County police for allegedly killing 56-year-old Lisa Lawson Kilbury on Aug. 30, 2018 by “striking the victim multiple times with multiple objects,” according to the arrest warrant.
The same day he was arrested, on Jan. 9 of this year, police served Carter with additional warrants for allegedly sexually assaulting another woman in the same Boley Drive where Kilbury died.
A grand jury subsequently charged Carter with malice and felony murder, rape, aggravated sodomy and four counts of aggravated assault, according to an indictment filed in Clarke County Superior Court.
The residence where Kilbury was killed and the other woman sexually assaulted was described by Clarke County Coroner Sonny Wilson as a two-room dwelling in a pasture with goats behind a house in the 400 block of Boley Drive.
Carter reportedly had been homeless prior to moving in with Kilbury at that location a year prior to her death.
According to an Athens-Clarke County police report, Kilbury’s lifeless body was found the afternoon of Aug. 30 after Carter called 911 to report the woman was not breathing. The coroner pronounced her dead at the scene.
Carter reportedly had called 911 earlier that same day to report that Kilbury was complaining of extreme pain, but the woman refused treatment.
The murder warrant was signed and served on Jan. 9, the same day Carter was charged with allegedly raping the other woman, and soon after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Division of Forensic Sciences informed local authorities that Kilbury’s death had been ruled a homicide as the result of blunt force trauma.
Defense attorney David Williams on June 13 filed a motion to sever the murder from the rape case.
“The evidence on counts one and two involving murder and aggravated assault would not be admissible in a trial on counts four through eight alleging sexual assault, and vice versa,” the defense motion states.
Williams alleged in the motion the offenses from the two cases “were joined for the improper purpose of injecting evidence of bad character against (Carter.)”
Carter pleaded not guilty to all charges and he is being held without bail at the Clarke County Jail.