It’s on to the Georgia Supreme Court for the appeal of Charles Edward Owens, who was convicted in the nearly 28-year-old contract slaying of Rebecca McGuire Heath.

Troup County Superior Court Judge Allen Keeble has denied Owens’ motion for a new trial. Friday’s order gives no explanation for the ruling, and Keeble declined to elaborate when contacted Monday.

Defense attorney Edward H. Wasmuth Jr. of Atlanta said Monday he had not been aware of the ruling, but will now meet with his client and “certainly file an appeal” to the state Supreme Court.

Heath’s nine months’ pregnant body was found in the back seat of a car on Smokey Road in rural Troup County on Aug. 31, 1981. Owens, 58, of Columbus, who is serving two consecutive life sentences for the murder, claims he never got a hearing after he filed his original motion for new trial on May 3, 1984, and that omission alone entitles him to a new trial.

Wasmuth agreed to represent Owens without compensation at the request of the appellate section of the Georgia Bar Association, which saw it as a case that had languished for lack of appellate counsel.

Prosecutors said Owens and Gregory Hughes Lumpkin, 56, apprehended Heath from her home in Phenix City, Ala., and drove her to LaGrange, then shot her through the right eye. The victim’s husband, Larry Heath, who hired the two hit men, was executed in Alabama’s electric chair after he was convicted of murder during a kidnapping.

Lumpkin got a hearing on his motion for a new trial, Wasmuth said in court papers, but Owens’ case “fell into an abyss. … No record exists of any action ever having been taken on Mr. Owens’ motion for new trial.”

“A 25-year delay in the resolution of a motion for new trial is unprecedented and presumptively prejudicial,” he said. “… This case was a fairly high-profile murder case, one that should not easily have been forgotten.”

Wasmuth claims the state also failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rebecca Heath was killed in Troup County and not at her home in Phenix City, and the trial court “did not instruct the jury that venue is a jurisdictional fact that must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Senior assistant district attorney Lynda Caldwell, who represented the state at the May 22 hearing on Owens’ latest motion for new trial, said she believes the verdict ultimately will be upheld.

“I wouldn’t want to speculate on why” Owens didn’t get a hearing on his original motion, she said.

Owens had been sentenced to death in Alabama, but the conviction and sentence were overturned on appeal. Owens then pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence that runs consecutive to the life sentence he received in Georgia.

Ken Davis, district attorney in Phenix City, said if Owens were to receive a new trial in Troup County and be acquitted, he would be transferred to Alabama to begin serving the life sentence there.

Joel Martin can be reached at jmartin@ lagrangenews. com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 235.