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Larry B. Poole
An arrest has been made after residents of Misty Grove Lane had been constantly wary for a month or longer.
“A man was seen creeping around people’s yards in the early mornings and at night around Misty Grove Lane,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard R. Sills described. “One woman reported that her doorbell rang, and a Black man was outside pointing a gun at her.”
The case began in mid-January with a 911 call about a “fake dead woman” on a woman’s porch, Sills said.
The fake dead woman turned out to be a sex doll in a box that was delivered to the caller’s house, but the woman who lived there hadn’t ordered it. The doll represented an unauthorized debit on the woman’s charge card account, according to Sills.
“And since that call, we’ve had a rash of calls from that neighborhood as well as Harmony Farms,” he said, describing most of the calls as complaints of a prowler but a few were of missing items.
So, the sheriff had his deputies patrol the neighborhood more often and canvass the area for the unknown prowler and look for residences with outdoor security cameras. Deputy Dan Boutwell went door-to-door on the quest with success, according to Sills.
“We found enough camera footage from the neighborhood to identify him,” Sills said.
While looking at the video footage that revealed the man “rambling around people’s yards at night,” Boutwell recognized the man in the video as one he had talked to on his door-to-door inquiry.
“And so, he went back to that residence, and the guy was gone,” Sills said. “But he had been staying there with his girlfriend and she said she had taken him to Milledgeville and dropped him off at The Manor.”
Warrants were obtained, and Putnam County deputies went to the Milledgeville Manor apartment community around 6 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 4, and arrested the suspect, identified as Larry Poole, on the misdemeanor charge of loitering.
Sills said the case is still under investigation and he and his investigators “don’t know yet from an evidentiary standpoint” if the sex doll or the few theft incidents are connected with the case.
Poole is being held in Putnam County jail without bond because he already was a fugitive from the Georgia Dept. of Community Supervision, which has been looking for him since 2022, Sills said.
“He has a rather long rap sheet with numerous arrests and convictions – possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, numerous criminal trespasses, entering autos, theft by receiving stolen property, terroristic threats, cruelty to children, financial transaction card theft, financial transaction card fraud – just a straight hoodlum, and you can say Sheriff Sills says that,” Sills said.
Larry Bernard Poole, 38, of Scott Hill Road, Milledgeville, faces charges of loitering and parole violation, according to jail reports from the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office.