The husband and son of murdered mom Debbie Collier have spoken out about her death, two weeks after her body was discovered with severe burn marks.
She left the home she shared with her husband, Steve, on September 10. Later that day, she sent her daughter, 36-year-old Amanda Bearden, a chilling text that said, “They are not going to let me go, love you.” Collier also sent Bearden $2,385 over Venmo.
Collier’s husband told the Daily Mail late last week that his wife “was a beautiful woman and I loved her.”
“It has been a long two weeks and I’m very tired,” he told a reporter while fighting back tears. “My wife was a wonderful person.”
Collier’s body was found 60 miles from her home in Athens, Georgia, in a ravine, The Daily Wire previously reported. She was found one day after her daughter reported her missing.
Police were able to use the Sirius XM satellite radio in Collier’s SUV to track her movements after she left her home that Saturday. They tracked the SUV to an area off U.S. 441, 60 miles north of where Collier lived, and alerted the Habersham County Sheriff’s office, which searched the area. Then, using a K-9 unit, police searched the woods near where the SUV was discovered and found Collier’s body in a ravine that could not be seen from the highway, WXIA-TV reported.
The Habersham County Sheriff’s office said in its incident report that an investigator “observed a nude female laying on her back, grasping a small tree with her right hand,” about 30 feet from the road. The report also said Collier had “charring to her abdomen” and that the remains of a burned tarp was found nearby.
Jeffrey Bearden, Collier’s son, asked for “respect and privacy” during “the darkest and most harrowing time for my family.”
“I have been incredibly hurt and disturbed by some of the reporting and information shared regarding the investigation into my mother’s death,” he added in an email to Fox News.
Fox did not specify what Bearden was referring to regarding the reporting surrounding his mother’s death. The New York Post recently reported that Collier’s daughter Amanda is in a physically abusive relationship with a man who allegedly threatened violence against her entire family last year.
“If you or your family ever come near me again I will hurt them,” the boyfriend, former amateur MMA fighter Andrew Giegerich, allegedly wrote to Amanda in a handwritten note.
Giegerich told the Post last week that he and Amanda’s phones had been confiscated after Collier’s death, a fairly standard part of a homicide investigation.
“They’ve interrogated all of us. The people who are closest to [Debbie] are kind of looked at as suspects right now,” Giegerich told the outlet.
Neither Giegerich nor Amanda have been named suspects or persons of interest in Collier’s death.