No answers. That’s what Becky Drumwright has lived with for more than 26 years after finding her 15-year-old son, Tony Drumwright, shot to death outside their McKenzie home on August 25, 1999.
Everyone who knew Tony described him as a very sweet kid.
He liked riding four-wheelers, playing computer games, and spending Friday nights with friends. He talked about becoming a computer programmer one day.
As a young child, Tony was placed in foster care after suffering neglect and mistreatment in his early years.
Becky and her husband adopted him, and he finally found stability and the kind of home life he had never known before.
His mother described him as “a genuinely happy and kind person.”
Tony’s Murder and Subsequent Investigation
On that tragic evening, Tony’s parents discovered him lying in the backyard with a .38-caliber handgun at his feet. At first, investigators treated the scene as a suicide.
The area was quickly cleaned, and the case closed without a full investigation, according to Becky’s account in previous interviews.
But she never believed her son had taken his own life. Once completed, the autopsy confirmed her doubts.
The forensic report showed that Tony had been shot from roughly three feet away—too far for the wound to have been self-inflicted.
A bullet hole was also found in a closet inside the home, and evidence suggested there had been a struggle in a bathroom.
By March, 2000, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had joined the investigation, and reports surfaced that the case was being treated as a homicide.
Even so, no one was ever charged, and for more than a decade, the file remained dormant.
Cold Case Files Re-Opened
In 2014, newly elected District Attorney General Matt Stowe reopened the case as part of a broader review of unsolved deaths in the 24th Judicial District.
That November, Investigators exhumed Tony’s body in order to search for new forensic evidence.
“It couldn’t have been a suicide. We know it was a homicide. We know he was murdered,” Becky Drumwright said at a news conference that year.
Despite renewed attention and several promising leads, the investigation again went cold.
Stowe left office several years later, and the case returned to the shelves of unsolved Carroll County homicides.
It has been 26 years since Tony Drumwright’s death. His mother, family, and friends are still waiting for answers.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact the 24th Judicial District District Attorney’s Office at (731) 986-5031 or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-TBI-FIND.
