Killer of Macon woman who was gunned down at random along Riverside Drive pleads guilty

An Atlanta-area man who drove into north Macon on a Sunday morning in the summer of 2016 and, apparently at random, shot and killed a stranger — a woman he just happened to see as she walked along Riverside Drive — pleaded guilty Thursday to fatally shooting her.

Sterling Bell, 32, of DeKalb County, was sentenced to 20 years in prison without parole for voluntary manslaughter in the death of Kendra Roberts.

Bell gave no explanation for the shooting and police have only theories about what may have prompted him to gun her down and vanish — almost without a trace.

Roberts, 27, was shot twice in the face and once in the back of the head. Her body was found a few hours later at about midday on Aug. 7, 2016, along Riverside near Bass Road, just south of the Riverwalk Apartments where Roberts lived with her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend, with whom she had argued earlier that morning before marching off in distress, soon became a suspect — though wrongly so — and was charged with murder and jailed for about nine months.

The charges against the boyfriend were dropped in 2018 after police in Atlanta seized a gun from Bell, which was later test-fired by federal agents and determined to be the weapon that killed Roberts.

It was by sheer chance that the gun, a 9mm Glock 19, was linked to bullet shell casings found near Roberts’ body.

An ATF agent tasked with examining and test-firing seized guns from Atlanta-area police departments happened upon the Glock, which police in Clarkston near Stone Mountain had seized from Bell’s truck when Bell was arrested on a failure-to-appear-in-court warrant.

Thursday’s plea came as a surprise during the third day of testimony in Bell’s murder trial.

Prosecutors said Bell, a former Buford High School football player and a Marine who according to his family and investigators suffered from mental health problems, had not been aware that a pretrial plea deal had been offered to him.