Georgia Notary in Judge’s Disputed Will Case Stripped of Commission

THE CENTER SQUARE—The notary public who certified that a Georgia judge’s brother signed a will 12 days before his death once certified another signature for the judge’s family—by a dead woman, an investigation by The Center Square found.

After The Center Square started asking questions about her work, Jacquelyn Walker has been stripped of her notary license.

Two years before DeKalb County Judge Rhathelia Stroud filed a family will that’s now being challenged as an alleged forgery, the same notary verified the signature of the judge’s sister-in-law on a different legal document, a warranty deed transferring ownership of a timeshare vacation resort property. Walker officially recorded that the woman appeared before her with the signed deed in November 2023—three weeks after the woman had died of cancer, records show.

That discrepancy prompted the agency that commissioned her, the Fulton County Clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts, to revoke her notary status on Tuesday. The revocation notice says Walker’s commission is “hereby revoked, effective immediately” and orders her to destroy her notary stamp. Walker will have a chance to appeal.

“I’m looking at the warranty deed. I see the death certificate,” the elected Superior Court clerk, Ché Alexander, told The Center Square. “It’s clear that this was notarized after the person had passed away.” 

Walker, a longtime acquaintance of Judge Stroud, would later notarize a signature on the will of the judge’s brother, which his children say isn’t their father’s handwriting. The notary’s role is part of a continuing investigation by The Center Square into Judge Stroud’s actions around the will that, if upheld as valid, would allow her to take control over her brother’s estate.

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Falsely notarizing a document isn’t just cause for discipline by the commissioning agency, it would also violate state law, according to an official with the National Notary Association.

“It definitely doesn’t look good,” Brooke Merritt, the professional organization’s government affairs and policy planning director, said after reviewing the 2023 warranty deed. “Notaries are prohibited from notarizing if they know that a document is false.”

The Superior Court Clerk’s office received copies of the 2023 deed and the woman’s death certificate in March from the judge’s niece who is challenging the will, but didn’t launch an investigation because the niece didn’t include a police report. Alexander said while there’s no written policy or state law requiring that, she needs a parallel law enforcement investigation to protect herself from civil liability. And if the allegations are true, the North Georgia property transaction behind the deed has to be investigated too, she said.

“If that was a fraudulent document and they did that three weeks after she died, that warranty deed should be null and void,” Alexander said in July. “But somebody has to prove that.”

The niece initially balked at the clerk’s requirement, saying she didn’t understand how she could call police about a deed from her late father’s files that she wasn’t party to, much less a victim of. But then she decided to contact the Atlanta Police Department in late July. She resubmitted her complaint to Alexander’s office, this time with a police report attached.

“It’s major, because that’s her credibility,” Gemina Stroud said after The Center Square informed her of Alexander’s decision to decommission Walker. “If she signed before like that, for the same family, why would I believe this time would be different?”

The notary involved repeatedly declined to speak about this story. For months Walker has not responded to phone messages or emails, and when a reporter for The Center Square knocked on the door of her Atlanta home on July 21, she said, “I don’t have no comment,” and closed the door.

Read full story at The Center Square.