Leap of faith

Poulnot grew up a “spoiled brat” only child in Decatur, the son of Jack Poulnot, a Rich’s Department Store manager who’d fought in World War II and Korea with the Army, and Stella Poulnot, an American Cancer Society secretary. As a boy, he loved to take apart complex things — lawn mowers and radios mainly — for the challenge of putting them back together.

At Atlanta’s Briarcliff High School, Poulnot played quarterback, compensating for his relative shortness — 5 feet 11 inches — with a powerful arm. He graduated in 1965, and his arm was strong enough to win him the quarterback job at The Citadel, where he says his studies often took a backseat to being hazed.

After two years of electrical engineering studies, he quit to join the Army. Poulnot served for three and a half years, ranked up to lieutenant and was deployed overseas but won’t discuss it. It’s the one subject over the course of several conversations that rendered him silent.

Back home in 1971, at a legendary nightclub off Peachtree Road called Uncle Sam's, he spotted a pretty girl — Donna — sitting at a table with her sister and asked her to dance. They exchanged numbers, were married in a Gainesville church the next year, and together they attended Woodrow Wilson College of Law at night, while Poulnot clerked full-time for a downtown Atlanta law firm.

It was there his interest in investigative work — and the satisfaction of helping clients navigate legal waters they didn’t necessarily understand — was born.

Poulnot graduated law school in 1975 but failed to pass the Georgia Bar Exam. He didn’t sulk for long, as a large firm offered him a lucrative job examining real estate titles in booming Gwinnett County. Poulnot’s income allowed Donna to quit her stressful job handling child neglect cases with the Division of Family and Children Services and stay home when their children, Julie, now 38, and John, 30, were born.

They bought a large home near Brookwood High School and didn’t want for much, but Poulnot couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d sold out and ignored his calling.

In 1995, Poulnot decided to use his law degree to become licensed and launch his own private investigation company.
His son John, in grade school at the time, remembers being awed by the concept of P.I. work when his father came home with the news.

“It was certainly cool, and fascinating,” says John.

But for a greenhorn in his late 40s entering an industry where reputation is paramount, it wasn’t easy, and the family had to downsize houses in 1998. Attorneys were initially reluctant to give Poulnot a chance, so when a couple of jobs finally came, he had to prove himself, even if it meant hiding in bushes with equipment befitting a James Bond movie.

Questionable theory

While maintaining his regular case load, Poulnot began pro bono work on the Gaines case, interviewing hundreds of people with some connection to the missing man. He slept maybe four hours a night. Over time, tips led him throughout the Southeast. Various scenarios of what may have happened to Gaines constantly tossed in his mind.

He can’t count the number of false leads he pursued. The vague phone calls, weird emails, input from psychics. For years, it kept coming. On each anniversary of Gaines’ disappearance, fresh media reports brought new waves of tips.

The false information would beget other bad leads, and they would feed on themselves, mushrooming into a time-killing distraction that brought Gaines’ family no closer to closure — Mr. X told Mr. Y that he killed Justin Gaines and the body’s at C location, and players A, B, C and D were there, and they saw the whole thing.

Poulnot took it upon himself to check every facet of this maddening alphabet. He consulted with a retired detective he revered, who said he’d done everything right. Still, he was haunted by the notion he had missed something, that he hadn’t tried hard enough.

Almost every day for eight years, something has reminded Poulnot of Gaines. Whether in the middle of the night or while driving his car at noon, he’s besieged by the same question: Where are you, Justin?

Over rolling hills dotted with black cattle, down twisty country roads, Poulnot drives his BMW to a Lake Lanier marina on a peerless March afternoon. At the end of a steep driveway, he parks in a lot and casts his eyes to Dock B, which juts into green-blue water, with banks of red clay beyond. Squirrels scamper in the leaves, and crows caw overhead.

Back in 2008, a tip that Gaines’ body had been dumped in these coves brought Poulnot here with another volunteer. From daybreak to late evening, they searched the murky waters with sonar equipment but found nothing. A dive team from Hall County tried, too, with similar results.

But after years of investigating — and following confessions last year by Walton County resident Thelma Ballew, 51, and her son, Dylan Glass, 28, who’ve both had numerous arrests — Poulnot, like Sheriff Conway, believes this marina holds the key to Gaines’ fate.

There’s a long list of possible players, and a few aspects remain muddled, but based on statements from Ballew and Glass and other information he’s collected, Poulnot believes Gaines’ final night unfolded as follows:

As Gaines struggled to find a ride home from the nightclub, he was lured into a vehicle by one or two females who’d proposed going to a house party in Snellville, at a home near Gaines’ mother’s house. Poulnot believes a plan unfolded to rob Gaines, and at the home he was assaulted by several people in the garage; he fought back but was overtaken, choked to unconsciousness, fatally shot, wrapped in plastic and taken to Lake Lanier in the back of a work van, to a dock where one possible accomplice kept a houseboat.

According to Poulnot’s theory, this crew weighted the body and dumped it in the lake. They kept watch over the area in fear it would resurface. And when it did a few days later, they loaded the body into a large toolbox and trucked it to a remote location near a river on the easternmost side of Walton County.

That theory triggered large-scale excavations by authorities in Walton and Gwinnett counties around old wells near the Apalachee River last September — the second major dig in Gaines’ case in as many years. Both efforts attracted headlines but produced no evidence.

Ballew later admitted she’d lied about seeing the body dumped in a well — and subsequently was charged with making false statements — but the remainder of Ballew’s story regarding Gaines’ death and the lake checks out, according to Poulnot and Conway.

Still, nobody faces murder charges related to Gaines’ disappearance at this point.

Danny Porter, Gwinnett County District Attorney, says winning a conviction solely on the testimony of criminals is not impossible — it happens frequently, in fact — and prosecutors don’t necessarily need physical remains to prove Gaines was murdered.

A bigger hurdle is convincing Gwinnett’s top prosecutor that Ballew, Glass or any of their cohorts had anything to do with Gaines’ disappearance. Over the years, their statements have been inconsistent with one another, and their versions of the truth have varied widely, according to Porter.

“Every yo-yo that gets locked up in Walton County claims to know something about the Gaines case,” says Porter.
Still, Poulnot is resolute. Weeks after the meeting at the marina, he emails a statement he hopes reaches anyone who may have harmed Gaines: “There is no statute of limitations on murder, and we will never give up until you have been arrested, tried and convicted.”