Robert Dale Conklin was born on February 16, 1961, in the state of Illinois, United States. By his early 20s, he had already served time in prison for armed robbery and burglary. He was released on parole after serving three years of a six-year sentence and moved to Georgia, where he worked as a McDonald's manager. Conklin was openly gay and met 28-year-old lawyer George Grant Crooks at a highway rest stop. Their relationship became intimate, and the two maintained a romantic involvement leading up to the events of March 1984.

Crooks was a respected graduate of the University of Georgia Law School and had worked as a legislative aide to former Congressman Elliott H. Levitas. At the time of his death, he was practicing law at a firm in Marietta, Georgia. Despite his promising legal career, Crooks’s personal life would end in horror after a visit to Conklin’s apartment.

On the night of March 26, 1984, Robert Conklin invited George Crooks to his Atlanta apartment. The two smoked marijuana and became intimate. According to later statements, Crooks took codeine medication and stayed overnight. Prosecutors allege that at some point during the night or early morning hours, Conklin stabbed Crooks to death with a screwdriver while he was asleep or otherwise vulnerable. The motive, as presented by the state, was never clearly defined, but it was argued that the killing was premeditated and not in self-defense.

In a grisly effort to conceal the crime, Conklin drained the blood from Crooks’s body by placing it in the bathtub and used a variety of tools, including steak knives, to dismember the corpse into ten parts. He packed the body parts into garbage bags and dumped them into a dumpster outside his apartment. Crooks’s personal belongings, including credit cards, wallet, and legal documents, were also discarded.

On March 28, 1984, a maintenance man collecting recyclables found the garbage bags and alerted the police. Authorities quickly recovered the remains and a large cache of forensic evidence from the scene, including blood-stained linens, multiple knives, a rope, and Conklin’s parole card — which was inadvertently disposed of along with the body parts. This detail would later become a key piece of evidence linking him to the crime.