Friday's Internet Edition, July 25, 2008.

GRAD NIGHT More than 150 seniors at Roane County High School picked up their sheepskins during commencement ceremonies at the school Friday night. Prior to the ceremony seniors Aaron Parsons and Rebekah McCutcheon (right) compare artwork on their mortarboards. DAVID HEDGES/SPENCER NEWSPAPERS

Now that police have come up with a suspect in the case, a brother of the victim is not surprised.

“I figured it was about time for them to catch the guy,” Dwayne Stump, 46, of Spencer said. “Whoever did it had to sneak up on him or know him pretty well.”

Mac Ray MacFarlane of Bristol, Va., was charged April 30 with the 1982 murder of 28-year-old Arastus Gene Stump. During a hearing last month in Tennessee, where the murder took place, MacFarlane’s former wife, Donna Burroughs, testified MacFarlane told her about 24 years ago that he had shot Stump.

“He told me that he had killed him,” she said, according to a report in The Murfreesboro Post.

Two fishermen found the victim’s headless, decomposed body near Percy Priest Reservoir in Rutherford County, Tenn., on April 28, 1982, about a month after he had disappeared.

The Rutherford Sheriff’s Dept. Cold Case Unit reopened the case in July 2007. Police testified last month that a photograph taken in 1982 showed a coroner fitting skull fragments together. A forensic pathologist determined a hole piercing the skull came from a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Burroughs also said MacFarlane drank Miller beer. A half-empty bottle of Miller was found at the scene. Police testified that Stump and MacFarlane knew each other because they worked together and had committed an armed robbery together.

“He had some ups and downs with the law,” Dwayne Stump, second youngest in a family of 12 children from the Stumptown area, said of his brother, who was known as Gene. “But he was a pretty good guy. He took care of family and stuff. He liked to get along with people.”

MacFarlane, who legally changed his name from Randy Ray McFarlin, was considered a strong suspect at the time of the murder, police said.

During his original statement, McFarlane said he gave Stump two bottles of Miller beer and $180 in cash because Stump told him he was going to Ohio with a woman. He said Stump gave him three guns and that he had received Stump’s $677 income tax refund check in the mail and had his wife deposit it in his account to pay him back for money Stump owed him.

In a second statement in April, MacFarlane said he never got Stump’s guns and said he couldn’t remember cashing the check.

When the Cold Case Unit formed last July, police found MacFarlane’s three previous wives. The women reportedly told detectives that MacFarlane made admissions about the murder. All three also said they were afraid of him.

Burroughs, who was married to MacFarlane from 1978-92, testified that her former husband had talked about the murder four times with her while he was drinking or angry. Once, she said, he asked if she wanted to be buried at the lake with Stump. She also said MacFarlane once told her he killed Stump so he could have his job.

MacFarlane was arrested at his job at Tri-City Extrusion in Bristol, Tenn., where he was a plant engineer. Following the two-hour hearing, a judge sent the case to a grand jury for a possible indictment in July. MacFarlane was being held without bond at the Rutherford County Adult Detention Center.

Another of Stump’s brothers, Clifford, 52, also lives in Spencer. He said another brother, Steve, who lives in Tennessee, will probably follow MacFarlane’s case for the family.

“Twenty-six years; that’s a long time,” Clifford Stump said. “We’re just waiting to see what’ll happen.”