Dateline is here with another spine chilling case, this time it’s from Georgia. Some cold cases stay cold because there are no answers left to find, others stay cold simply because no one is looking. For two Georgia families, the line between those two realities came down to a single piece of legislation, a podcast, and a refusal to let the people they lost be reduced to a file number.
Tonight, Dateline’s A Window of Time revisits the story of Tara Baker and Rhonda Sue Coleman, two women whose cases were separated by over a decade but whose names are now permanently linked in Georgia law. here’s a breakdown of the story we’ll get to wath unfold on Dateline.
The devastating case Dateline has picked up for this episode
On the evening of January 18, 2001, Tara Baker, a first-year law student at the University of Georgia, was last seen by a friend outside the library around 7:30 p.m. She was 23 years old, one day away from her birthday, and by all accounts someone who had poured everything she had into building a future.
The following morning, firefighters arrived at her Athens apartment to find it on fire and Tara’s body inside. Prosecutors would later tell a jury that she had been sexually assaulted, stabbed in the neck, strangled with a printer cord and left on her bedroom floor. Her bed was then deliberately set on fire using a blanket pulled from the living room, an act described as an effort to destroy evidence. The case that followed would haunt Athens for the next 25 years.
For Rhonda Sue Coleman, the timeline is different but the weight is the same. Rhonda was 18 years old when her body was found in a wooded area in Montgomery County, Georgia, on May 20, 1990, three days after her abandoned car was discovered on a roadside in Hazlehurst. An autopsy was completed but no cause of death was determined. She simply disappeared, and then she was gone, and no one has ever been charged. The reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in her case currently stands at $150,000.
In 2020, a UGA student named Cameron Jay Harrelson created a podcast called Classic City Crime, and the first season was entirely about Tara Baker’s story. As he went deeper down the rabbit hole, Cameron made a significant discovery.
As he saw, there was a federal law that allowed families to request cold case reviews, but it was limited to cases within federal jurisdiction. Every unsolved murder in Athens fell outside its reach. Cameron then reached out to the Coleman family, brought both families together, and in the spring of 2023, the Coleman-Baker Act passed unanimously in the Georgia House and Senate, allocating $5 million to a new GBI Cold Case Unit.
This helped out another family in Georgia who lost their daughter. Virginia Baker, Tara’s mother, said at the time that she hoped it would help other families. The arrest of Edrick Lamont Faust in May 2024 made Tara’s case the first to be solved by the newly formed GBI Cold Case Unit. The key was updated DNA technology that separated Faust’s DNA from that of Tara’s then-boyfriend, then matched it to Faust through a national database.
After a two-week trial in February 2026, a Clarke County jury found Faust guilty on all 12 counts, including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated sodomy and arson. Judge Lisa Lott sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences plus 45 years in prison.
Sadly, Rhonda’s family is still waiting and the GBI has confirmed that her case remains active with an assigned agent and that over 150 interviews and investigative acts have been completed in the past year alone. The Coleman-Baker Act ensures it stays that way, and hopefully she will get justice soon.
Dateline is available to stream on Peacock.
Edited by Nibir Konwar