WALNUT GROVE, Georgia — A cold case about cold cuts is heating up in Walnut Grove concerning a stolen 500-pound mascot from the 1980s, and so is a plan to fix a decades-old offense.
For nearly a quarter century, a fiberglass pig stood atop Kelly’s BBQ sign, serving as a landmark in the small town - until 1999.
"It was a big mystery, the talk of the town," Christy Eberhardt, the owner, said.
One fateful day in 1999, workers showed up to work, and customers arrived to pig out, but “Kelly’s Pig” was nowhere to be found. It disappeared. Now, Eberhardt said there's not a day that passes without them talking about the pig.
"I thought, man, somebody took the pig! It's gone," Blake Sears, a patron, said, "There's a landmark wiped away."
Recently Sears and his friend Jessica Malloy have teamed up to uncover a mystery about the pig. Sears said everyone has a theory about how the pig disappeared.
"That a banker took it for a collection, that another BBQ Restaurant stole the pig," Sears said, adding a few others, "that it's been thrown into a rock quarry, sank, burned, you name it, we've heard it."
Whoever the BBQ pig bandits are, it’s inspired folks in Walnut Grove to band together and dig through the mud. For another customer, the entire logistics of taking the pig are already harebrained.
"Who would be dumb enough to put something that big in their truck," Chip Newman, a restaurant patron, asked. "Where would you hide it."
But even if the two are unable to get the answers they want, they've set up an online fundraiser for the restaurant to get a “Pig 2.0.” With the whole town now working to bring home the bacon or find the original, the town is determined to find some closure.
"The pig is part of the Walnut Grove! And the people want it back," Eberhardt said.
Kelly's BBQ filed a police report in 1999 reporting the theft, but the police never identified a suspect.