GA v. Katelyn Goble

Katelyn Grace Goble is thirty years old and on trial in Newton County Superior Court in Covington, Georgia, on a five-count indictment that includes malice murder in the death of Morgan Bauer. She has pleaded not guilty to every count. She is presumed innocent. The burden rests entirely with the State of Georgia, and it never shifts.

Morgan Bauer was nineteen years old and two weeks into a new life in Atlanta when she stopped answering her phone on February 25, 2016. She had promised her childhood best friend she would check in every single day so nobody would ever have to sit and wonder. The call never came. For seven years Morgan's mother handed out thousands of flyers, called news stations, worked with missing-persons organizations and paid for a billboard with her daughter's face on it, while the world believed a free spirit had simply disappeared into a big city.

Morgan Bauer had not been missing since the first week. Her remains were recovered from a wood line behind a house in Porterdale in the summer of 2023, and they were recovered because Katelyn Goble told investigators where to look. An investigator showed her an aerial photograph of the property and asked her if she knew where Morgan was. She picked up a pen and circled a spot. That single fact is this whole case, and both sides own a piece of it. The State says it is the act of a woman who had finally run out of road. The defense says it is the act of a woman who was never a killer, who came forward when nobody could have made her, and who handed a grieving family the only answer anyone was ever going to get.

Her co-defendant, Jonathan Warren, has already pleaded guilty and is serving life without parole. So the question in front of this jury is the one that every witness, every message, and every recording of Goble's own voice circles back to: was she a party to a killing, or a terrified witness to one? We are not here to convict her and we are not here to acquit her. We are here to watch whether the State can carry a burden this heavy. Start with the background report below, then follow every day of trial with us.

Coverage begins the day proceedings do. Start with the background above.