by Seamus McGraw

(Continued)

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"Back off now or you're dead,"

Godwin was mulling those clues early Sunday morning when the telephone rang. He lunged for it to keep it from waking his sleeping wife.

The ID on his phone read "Unknown Number."

A man's voice came on the line, he said.

"You better back off now or you're dead," the caller said. "And then he slammed the phone down," Godwin recalled.

Godwin said he did not hit *69 which might have revealed the origin of the call. "I don't have that service. I mean, you have to pay extra for it. That's a service I don't have."

Godwin said he is convinced that the call was related to his work on the Tara probe, though at this point, he says, he does not know who made it.

GBI

He said he is taking the threat seriously enough to report it the state authorities in North Carolina, who would have jurisdiction in the case, and also said this morning that he plans to contact agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with whom he has been sharing information to let them know about the potential threat. A spokeswoman for the GBI said early Monday that the department had not received any information about the alleged threat, and that under ordinary circumstances, such a case would be handled by the authorities in Godwin's home state, and if necessary by the Irwin County Sheriff's Department in Ocilla. Noting what he claims are strained relations with the Irwin County Sheriff's Department, Godwin said he had not yet notified them of the threat.

Godwin also said he has reason to suspect that the threat was not out of the blue or spur-of-the-moment. In fact, days before the threat actually surfaced, there were rumors about it, Godwin said. "When I was coming back, driving back on TuesdayI got a phone call from, I think it was the Albany paper's guy, and he asked me if I'd been threatened and I sad, 'nah,' " Godwin recalled. "I said 'why do you ask?' and he said he heard that I had been threatened."

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