After a 59-year-old Georgia mom sent a bizarre and worrying text message to her daughter, she was found naked and dead while clinging to a tree in a ditch. The mother, Debbie Collier, sent the cryptic text message to her daughter, writing, “They are not going to let me go. Love you,” before investigators eventually found her remains in a ditch after she had been stripped naked and apparently burned alive.
Collier sent the bizarre text message to her daughter on September 10, 2022, along with a payment of $2,385. Her desecrated remains were found the following day, on Sunday, September 11, 2022, in a small, steep ravine in a wooded area of Tallulah Falls, Georgia.
Now her daughter has come forward to claim that her mother suffered from mental health problems.
“They are not going to let me go. Love you. There is a key to the house in the blue flower pot by the door,” Collier sent via a message through the cash payment app Venmo.
The investigator who found Collier’s burned remains “observed a nude female laying on her back, grasping a small tree with her right hand.” The investigator also noticed that she had “charring to her abdomen” and was next to a burned blue tarp that was next to a red tote.
Investigators believe that the cause of Collier’s death was homicide rather than suicide.
Collier sent her daughter cash through the Venmo app along with the bizarre message indicating that she was not going to make it out of the ordeal alive. Her daughter was 36-year-old Amanda Bearden.
Bearden (above) tried to call her mother after receiving the strange Venmo message, but Collier did not answer the phone call. Instead, the call went to voicemail, and Bearden did not know what was going on. She reported Collier missing to Athens Clarke County Police.
Georgia authorities connected to the case suggest that Collier might have been a victim of a violent kidnapping before she was found stripped of her clothes and found dead in the Georgia ditch.
Habersham County Sheriff’s Office Col. Murray Kogod said: “Further search resulted in locating the body of a female subject down an embankment close to where the bag and tarp were located.”
While investigating the women’s death, Georgia police learned that Collier had rented an SUV on September 10, 2022, and left her home with only a debit card and her driver’s license. They tracked the location of the SUV because of its SiriusXM satellite radio. They found the dead woman sixty miles north of her home in Athens, Georgia.
An autopsy will be conducted by a medical examiner to determine Collier’s cause of death.
Debbie leaves behind her adult daughter as well as her husband, Steve, whom she married in 2013. Debbie Collier worked as an office manager at Carriage House Reality in Athens, Georgia, for a number of years.
Steve last saw his wife at 9 pm the night before she vanished without a trace.