(April 10, 2025) The District Attorney’s Office for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit announced today that on April 10, 2025, Larry Jenkins, Jr., 49, was convicted of two counts of Malice Murder, two counts of Kidnapping with Bodily Injury, one count of Armed Robbery, and one count of Theft by Taking. After a four-day jury trial in Glynn County Superior Court, a jury came back with a verdict that found Jenkins guilty of all charges. Shortly after the guilty verdicts were returned, a sentencing hearing was held where the District Attorney presented numerous victim impact statements. After Judge Stephen G. Scarlett Sr. reviewed the victim impact
statements, he sentenced Jenkins to serve four consecutive life sentences with the possibility of parole, which was the maximum sentence that could be imposed. The case was prosecuted and tried by District Attorney Keith Higgins.
This trial was the third time that Jenkins was tried and convicted for the same crimes. He was previously convicted for the crimes in 1995, but that conviction was overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court because Jenkins’s defense counsel had a conflict of interest, and they failed to adequately investigate a possible defense. Jenkins was then re-tried and convicted for the same offenses in 2014, but that conviction was overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court because it decided the prosecuting attorneys should not have presented evidence of Jenkins’s confession. At trial, District Attorney Higgins presented fifty-nine exhibits and testimony from twenty-five witnesses, which included the reading of transcribed testimony from five witnesses who died after they testified at one of the previous trials. The trial evidence showed that on January 8, 1993, Larry Jenkins, who was 17 years old, kidnapped Terry Ralston, 37, and her son, Michael Ralston, 15, from their family-owned laundromat that was on Macon Street in Jesup, Georgia.
After forcing them to travel in Terry Ralston’s van from the laundromat to a more secluded area in Jesup, Jenkins then made Terry and Michael walk from the van into a wooded area where he made them lay face down on the ground, and he callously murdered them by shooting them with a .22 magnum handgun. After murdering the Ralstons, Jenkins then picked up friends with the
van he stole from Terry, and he travelled to a nightclub in Waycross and to a house in Alma, where he and his friends spent the night with some girls. On the next day, Jenkins and his friends travelled back to Jesup where they went to several businesses and cashed in hundreds of dollars’ worth of quarters that Jenkins had stolen from the laundromat. Jenkins was apprehended after the police observed the stolen van in Jesup, and he fled from the van. When he was arrested, Jenkins had Michael Ralston’s learner’s license in his pocket.
After sentence was imposed, District Attorney Higgins stated “that I did everything I could to make sure that this conviction will stick and withstand any appeal. Going forward, I will do everything I can to make sure that Jenkins will never be free to hurt anyone else.”
The District Attorney’s Office is grateful to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Jesup Police Department, and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office for their investigative work in the case, and the District Attorney’s Office is especially grateful to the many witnesses who were willing to come to court and testify after so many years.
