SHELBYVILLE - A 61-year-old man convicted of killing a young girl in 1966 in Tennessee has been charged with murdering her 9-year-old cousin.

Edward McGee was scheduled to be released from prison Aug. 12, but when that day came, he was charged in Deborah Ray’s killing and returned to Bedford County to stand trial.

He had been convicted 42 years ago of killing 8-year-old Phyllis Seibers, who was with her cousin at the time, but never stood trial in Deborah’s killing.

Prosecutors say McGee killed the girls when he found them searching for old dolls at the Shelbyville city dump a few days before Christmas. He was 19. The girls were found dead in a muddy ravine, face down in the water, their skulls fractured.

Legal experts and local officials say it will be a challenge to try a case four decades old. Most of the investigators have died, and the district attorney’s office has a partial file, at best, on the old case.

District Attorney General Charles Crawford won’t say much about the case. In a letter to the parole board, he acknowledged that a conviction now in Deborah Ray’s slaying won’t be simple or certain but that justice must be served.

Crawford said he doesn’t know why the cases were severed, or why the second trial never happened.

“This office is going to do the best it can to do its duty to the people of this district and the victims’ families,” Crawford said.

According to a letter Crawford sent to the Tennessee Bureau of Probation and Parole, McGee has told investigators he doesn’t want to be released into the “free world.”

The concern now, Crawford said, is that McGee might become violent if he can’t adjust to life outside prison.

A preliminary hearing has been set for Oct. 2. Public defender Donna Orr Hargrove and a couple of other assistant public defenders are working on the case.

Hargrove declined comment on whether her client wants to plead guilty and live out his life in prison.

McGee declined an interview through the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office, and the families of the slain children also declined interview requests.

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