Jonathan Alexander Warren pleaded guilty to murdering Morgan Bauer. (Mug shot: Newton County Sheriff’s Office; image of victim: City of Porterdale Police Department)
One of two people charged with murdering a woman who is said to have been strangled, cut up, burned, and violated, has admitted to carrying out the crime.
Jonathan Alexander Warren, 34, has pleaded guilty to the murder of Morgan Bauer. As Warren lacked a deal with the state, the judge followed the prosecution’s request he spend life in prison without parole, according to The Newton County District Attorney’s Office in Georgia.
That leaves Katelyn Goble as the remaining defendant.
“Warren entered a non-negotiated plea and asked the Court to be sentenced to life with the possibility of parole,” prosecutors wrote regarding the plea hearing on Wednesday. “The State argued that life without parole was the appropriate sentence based on the facts of the case. After hearing argument from both sides, the Court agreed with the State and sentence[d] Warren to Life Without Parole.”
Warren pleaded guilty to malice murder, tampering with evidence, concealing the death of another, and necrophilia.
When she disappeared at the age of 19 in February 2016, Bauer had recently moved from South Dakota to Atlanta with just $20 to her name.
She was last seen alive in leaving a nightclub where she danced. Cops announced charges in August 2023, more than seven years after the disappearance.
Authorities at first accused of Goble of only covering up the crimes, but she was indicted on charges including murder in October.
“I didn’t want her to really go to Atlanta. It was something that was really worrying me,” Bauer’s mother, Sherri Keenan, told Dateline in a 2016 report. “But Morgan does everything 100%. She’s a ‘go big’ kind of girl.”
The mother described a rocky transition process.
“She was planning on staying with somebody that she had talked to on Craigslist,” the mother told Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB.
Having arrived there initially unemployed, Bauer was supposed to clean the home for the roommates until she got a job, but the roommates had some sort of falling out.
“From what I understand she’d left her clothes there because she didn’t know what to do,” said Keenan. “And then she went to go try to find a place to stay, a hotel, and that’s what brought her to dancing.”
She remembered her daughter in glowing terms.
”When she walked in a room, you knew she was there,” Keenan said, according to Dakota News Now in January 2023. “She just commanded a whole room. She was beautiful and funny and her laugh could just completely take you away. She was kind.”
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