Arrest Made in 1999 Alabama Double Teen Homicide: Decades-Old Cold Case Solved

Arrest Made in 1999 Alabama Double Teen Homicide: Decades-Old Cold Case Solved

Every year their family and friends gathered at the murder scene. Keep praying every day that the Lord will just make it impossible for him to sleep. That’s what I pray. And that the law enforcement will be led to the right person. They prayed for an arrest. Ozark police say they never gave up. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t do something on the case.

 Now, investigators believe they have their big break. A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. The trunk lid rises 6 in on a hidden lever, and the officer standing over it takes one involuntary step backward.

 Two girls, 17, still dressed for a birthday party. A spent shell casing rests against a bare ankle. Neither girl has a single mark on her clothes to suggest a struggle, no torn fabric, no scraped hands, nothing that looks like a fight for her life. This car has sat 40 ft from a pay phone for 6 hours in broad daylight while people walked right past it on their way into a convenience store and not one person thought to check the trunk.

30 m away at that exact hour, a man folds his hands at the front of a small town church and leads the congregation in prayer. His voice doesn’t shake. His hands don’t shake. He asks the room to bow their heads and they do because that is simply what you do for a man like him.

 He will not become a suspect for 20 years. Investigators will sit across a table from him more than once during that time, thank him for his cooperation, and let him walk back out the door. He is standing at the pulpit right now. Welcome back to Crime Watch Central, where cold cases don’t stay cold. Drop a comment telling us where you’re watching from. New here? Hit like and subscribe.

Now, let’s find out who these two girls were. Their names were JB Beasley and Tracy Howlett, 17, best friends since middle school, both from just outside Dothan, Alabama. On the night this story opens, they weren’t lost in any figurative sense. They’d simply taken a wrong turn on the way to a birthday party, ended up in the wrong town, and stopped to ask a stranger for directions the way anyone would.

 12 hours later, they were the discovery in that trunk you just saw. This case would eventually be broken by a piece of technology nobody in 1999 could have imagined. A public genealogy website built for people curious about their ancestors. Used instead to build a suspect out of family trees and probability.

 That part of this story is a genuine triumph. one of the first cases in the country to prove a cold case could be reopened by science alone with no witness and no confession. It would go on to change how hundreds of other unsolved murders across the country were investigated. But it isn’t the only story here. Somewhere in Dothan, during the same 20 years this case sat untouched, a man built a career, a marriage, a ministry.

 He stood in rooms full of people who trusted him completely. And not one of them, not his neighbors, not his congregation, not even the police who eventually walked up to his door ever had a reason to look twice at him. That was never technologies failing. Genetic genealogy did exactly what it was built to do the moment someone finally pointed it in the right direction.

 The 20 years before that, the years when he was simply allowed to exist unquestioned, a mile from where he’d left two girls, is the part somebody should have to answer for. Summer of 1999, JB Beasley turned 17 on July 31st. An honor roll student, a cheerleader, the kind of daughter her mother, Cheryl Burgon, called a gift without exaggeration.

Tracy Howlett was her closest friend, had been since middle school. Find one of them and you’d generally find the other close behind. Dothan was the kind of small southern town where everyone assumed they knew their neighbors, where a summer night usually meant nothing worse than a late curfew. That night, the two of them climbed into JB’s Black Mazda and set out from Dothan for a birthday party in Headland, a town about 10 mi north.

 It should have been a short familiar drive. They never made it. Somewhere along the way, in the dark, they missed a turn. And instead of reaching Headland, they ended up more than 20 m in the opposite direction in a town called Ozark with no idea how they drifted that far off course. A little after 11:30 p.m., the Mazda pulled into a small convenience store and gas station on Ozark’s east side.

The store had already closed for the night, but a woman named Marilyn Merritt and her daughter happened to still be there. JB and Tracy climbed out and asked for directions back toward the highway that would take them home. Merritt would remember them clearly and warmly afterward, not because anything seemed wrong, but because nothing did.

 The car was spotless, clean inside and out. The girls were polite, a little embarrassed about being late, worried about missing curfew. Merritt pointed them toward Highway 231, gave them clear directions, and watched them thank her. Nothing about the moment stood out. Two strangers, two lost teenagers, a quick exchange at a gas station.

But it was also, though no one in that parking lot could have known it, the last ordinary moment either girl would ever have. At the pay phone on the corner of the store, Tracy called her mother, Carol Roberts, to let her know they were on their way. Carol picked up. Tracy’s voice was steady, a little sheepish about getting lost. Nothing more.

 They had directions now. They were close. She’d be home soon. The last thing Tracy said before hanging up was that she loved her. Merritt watched from the parking lot as the black Mazda pulled out, turned right exactly as she’d directed, and disappeared down the road toward the highway.

 It was the last time anyone would see either girl alive. Inside the store, a security camera pointed at the gas pumps had been quietly running the entire time. It caught the blurred shape of a small white pickup truck parked at one of the pumps at almost the exact minute Tracy was on the phone. No purchase was ever logged at that pump.

 No one in Ozark recognized the truck. No one ever came forward to say it was theirs. For years afterward, that blurry unclaimed truck would be the only other thing on that tape besides two girls asking a stranger for directions home. The next morning, August 1st, Carol Roberts and the Beasley family reported the girls missing.

 They hadn’t come home all night. That same morning, a black Mazda was found sitting on Herring Avenue in Ozark, less than a mile from the pay phone Tracy had used the night before. Ozark police were called out to look at what appeared to be nothing more than an abandoned car. It hadn’t been in a wreck.

 There was no damage, no sign it had been forced off the road. The driver’s window was cracked open a few inches. The doors weren’t even locked. On the dashboard sat JB’s driver’s license. Inside both of their wallets, cash, jewelry, credit cards, all of it untouched in plain view. Whoever left this car here hadn’t wanted any of that. The only thing missing was JB’s keychain, a small strip of blocks spelling out the words hard to get.

Ozark officers ran the plates, found they belonged to Dothan, and called Dothan police to come collect a vehicle they assumed was simply going to be towed away. The car sat there in plain daylight on an ordinary residential street for 6 hours before anyone thought to open the trunk. 6 hours while officers waited on a tow truck while neighbors walked past on their way to work while a missing person’s report for two 17-year-olds already sat on a desk across town.

 Nearly 2 in the afternoon came and went before a Dothan investigator still waiting on that tow truck found the interior lever that popped the trunk without a key. JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet were both inside. Each had been shot once in the head at close range. There was no sign either girl had fought for her life. No torn clothing, no defensive wounds, but their bodies told a story their faces couldn’t.

 Tracy had scratches on her arm and briars caught in the fabric of her pants. Her brand new sneakers bought only the week before were caked in mud. Both girls pant legs were soaked to the knee. At some point that night before they died, they had walked through wet grass or damp ground somewhere that had nothing to do with a gas station parking lot.

 And there was one more detail, the kind investigators don’t share lightly. From the position of the bodies inside that trunk, it was clear one girl had been placed in first and the other laid on top of her afterward. Someone had taken the time to arrange that. Someone hadn’t been in a hurry. Robbery was ruled out within hours. Nothing of value had been touched.

Whoever did this hadn’t come from money, and this wasn’t where they’d been killed, either. Herring Avenue was simply where their bodies were left. 2 months later, the Alabama State Crime Lab delivered a finding that reframed the entire case. Semen recovered from JB’s bra, underwear, and skin along with an unidentified palm print lifted from inside the trunk lid.

 District Attorney David Emory said publicly what the evidence already suggested. This had been a sexual crime or had grown out of one. Finding whoever left that sample would mean finding the killer. At that point, nothing else in the case file came close to it. That theory turned out to be correct. Finding him would still take another 20 years.

 Meanwhile, 30 mi from Herring Avenue, an ordinary truck pulls up to a gas pump in the dark. A man climbs down, pays in cash, checks his mirrors out of habit, and pulls back onto the road toward home. Nobody at the pump gives him a second look. He isn’t hiding. He doesn’t need to be. Whatever happened tonight, he already knows exactly what he’ll say if anyone ever asks.

 And for the next 20 years, nobody will. He will drive this same stretch of highway thousands more times over the next two decades, past Herring Avenue, past the store where two girls once asked a stranger for directions, past a memorial that will eventually go up in their names, without anyone in a badge, ever once asking him to pull over. Exactly 1 month after the girl’s bodies were found, on September 1st, 1999, a 28-year-old part-time mechanic named Johnny Barentine walked into the Ozark police station and said he knew something about the case. He lived less

than a mile away from where the Mazda had been abandoned. Over four recorded hours, Barentine told six different versions of what happened that night. In the first, he’d simply seen a black truck speeding away from Herring Avenue. By the fourth, he’d given a ride to a stranger covered in tattoos. By the sixth, and most detailed, that tattooed stranger had gotten into the girl’s car at the store, forced them to Herring Avenue with Barentine following, pulled them out, and shot them both while Barentine listened from his own vehicle.

Police arrested him immediately. Reporters ran with it. For a few days, an entire grieving community, exhausted by a month of unanswered questions, let itself believe the nightmare was over. It wasn’t. The cracks showed almost instantly. In none of Barentine’s six versions did he ever mention a sexual assault, despite physical evidence already confirming one had occurred.

 The neighbor he’d named as the tattooed killer turned out to have an airtight alibi for the entire night. And when Barentine’s own DNA was finally tested against the evidence collected from the scene, it wasn’t a match. Neither was the neighbors. Brought before a grand jury, Barentine finally admitted the truth.

 He had invented the entire story from the truck to the tattoos to the gunshots, hoping to collect the reward money being offered for information. He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t known anything. He had simply watched a community desperate for answers and decided to give them one, even if it was fiction. The grand jury declined to indict him.

 He walked free, but the case didn’t reset to where it had been before he showed up. It was worse. Investigators had spent a month and real resources chasing a story that never existed. While whoever actually left that DNA sample kept living exactly the life he’d been living before any of this happened. While the case sat frozen, Coley Mccrainy’s life moved forward exactly the way anyone’s does.

 He married a woman named Janette. They had children. He built a career as a longhaul truck driver, logging hours on the same highways that ran past Herring Avenue, and founded a ministry, eventually preaching regularly at a local church, a role built entirely on being trusted, on people believing he was exactly who he presented himself to be.

 Cheryl Bergun and Carol Roberts aged in a way that had nothing to do with the ordinary passage of time. Every July 31st, they relived the same night, the same pay phone, the same last words, the same car turning right into the dark and never turning back. The Ozark Police Department’s file on the case stayed technically open, though nothing new had been added to it in years.

 The DNA sample recovered from JB’s body sat in a lab waiting on a criminal database that had nothing to compare it to because the man who left it had never once given that system a reason to notice him. The 2000s became the 2010s. Children who had never heard the names JB Beasley or Tracy Holllet grew up in the same neighborhoods where those names were still spoken.

 By the time the case passed its 15th, then its 18th anniversary, it had become one of Alabama’s most well-known unsolved murders. Revisited in anniversary news segments, picked apart in true crime forums, discussed in Dothan every summer when the heat came back and brought the memory with it. None of that discussion solved anything.

 It only meant two mothers kept hearing their daughter’s names attached to a question nobody could answer. 20 years is not a figure of speech in this case. It’s a preacher’s oldest children graduating high school. It’s a wife celebrating 20 wedding anniversaries. It’s two mothers turning a birthday into a day they had to survive year after year.

 while the man responsible drove past the exact spot where he’d left their daughters more times than either of them could have imagined. Investigators, to their credit, never stopped trying. Early on, a man from Michigan who couldn’t account for several hours that night was flown in and questioned three separate times.

 His DNA didn’t match. A man from Mississippi who vanished from Ozark right after the killings was eventually tracked down and tested. His didn’t match either. The blurry white truck caught on the store’s security camera that first night was never identified and its driver was never found. Every name the case produced led to the same dead end.

 A test, a clearance, and silence. while the one man they never thought to test kept living exactly where he’d always lived. This video took us nearly a week to put together. Real court records, real transcripts, two decades of dead ends. If it’s got you hooked so far, take a second and hit like and subscribe.

 It’s genuinely what keeps Crime Watch Central chasing cases like this one down. Now to California, where everything was about to change. In April 2018, the country’s attention turned to California, where police announced the arrest of Joseph James D’Angelo, the Golden State Killer responsible for at least 13 murders and more than 50 sexual assaults across the 1970s and 80s.

 He’d evaded capture for over 40 years. What finally caught him wasn’t a new witness or a lucky break, but a technique never before used in an American criminal case. Forensic genetic genealogy. The idea was almost deceptively simple, even if the science behind it wasn’t. Traditional DNA databases only hold samples from people who’ve already been arrested or convicted.

 Which is exactly why a man with no record, no history, nothing on file anywhere had stayed invisible to every system built to catch him. Genetic genealogy didn’t need his DNA on file at all. It only needed a distant cousin somewhere down his family tree, curious enough about their own ancestry to upload theirs.

 Investigators fed the 20-year-old sample from JB’s body into the same public databases. Millions of ordinary people used to find long- lost relatives and started building outward not toward a suspect but toward a family. Third cousins narrowed to second, second narrowed to first. Branch by branch, a family tree closed in on one name.

 Ozark Police Chief Marlo Walker followed the D’Angelo case more closely than most people in law enforcement because he was thinking about a file sitting in his own department. A DNA sample that had waited nearly 20 years without a match. Two girls who still had no answers. Two mothers he knew personally were still waiting for one.

 He reached out to Parabon Nanolabs, the same company that had helped identify D’Angelo, and asked them to run the 1999 sample through public genealogy databases, build out Alabama family trees, and see where the branches led. Parabon accepted the case. Months later, they sent back a list. Walker read through it slowly.

 Then he stopped on one name he recognized from his own high school years. Kohley Mccrainy, 45 years old, born and raised in the Dothan Ozark area, a longhaul truck driver, a pastor at a local church, married to a woman named Janette with two children, no arrests, no criminal history. Nothing in 20 years of investigation had ever connected his name to this case for the simple reason that nobody had ever had a reason to look.

 Ask anyone in Dothan about Kohley McCrainy and you’d have heard the same thing. A familiar face, a man people waved to in their yards. Someone his congregation genuinely respected. That reputation was exactly why his DNA had never crossed paths with a criminal database in 20 years. Walker didn’t approach him as a suspect. A suspect could lawyer up or disappear or simply say no.

 and if the family tree was even slightly off, Walker risked burning the one lead this case had produced in 20 years. So instead, he reached out to an old classmate and asked him to come down to the station as a local resident helping with an investigation, nothing more. Sitting across the table, Walker told him plainly, “You’re not a suspect, but I need a DNA sample so we can identify the person we’re actually looking for.

” Janette sat beside her husband that day and encouraged him to cooperate. She had no reason not to. Mccrainy agreed without hesitation. He sat still while an officer swabbed the inside of his cheek, calm, unhurried, chatting like two men catching up after years apart. while the family tree Parabon had already built pointed directly at him before he’d even walked through the door.

 If he understood what was coming, nothing in his manner showed it. The results came back within weeks with no ambiguity at all. Kohley Mccrainy was a match to a statistical certainty investigators almost never see in a case this old. When investigators laid the results in front of him, Mccrainy denied everything. He said he didn’t know either girl.

 He said he’d never been in Ozark on the night of July 31st, 1999. Not one word of it was true. And within weeks, the evidence would prove it. On March 15th, 2019, 20 years almost to the week after two girls pulled out of a gas station parking lot and vanished, Kohley Mccrainy was arrested and charged with capital murder and rape.

 Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty. The shock in Dothan and Ozark wasn’t that the case had finally been solved. It was who had solved it for them simply by existing in plain sight. A pastor, a father, a truck driver half the town could name on site. Someone they’d nodded to on the road sat near in church made small talk with about the weather.

 Not once in 20 years had anyone, including the police investigating their own community, thought to ask where he’d been that night. Not one tip, not one anonymous call, not one uneasy neighbor who thought something felt off about him. In 20 years of a town obsessing over this case, his name never once came up. For 20 years, the man responsible had gone to work, raised children, and stood at a pulpit every Sunday, while less than an hour away, two mothers sat at home waiting for a phone call that never came. Carol Roberts couldn’t speak for

several minutes when she heard the news. Cheryl Bergun cried. Both women had waited 20 years for this exact moment. And now that it had arrived, there was no relief in it. Only old grief resurfacing next to a fragile new hope that a trial would finally bring real answers. Mccrainy gave police none of that same honesty.

 Investigators questioned him for roughly 27 hours after his arrest. During that time, according to his own attorney, he asked for a lawyer at least eight times and wasn’t granted access to one. It’s a genuine problem with how the arrest was handled. Not because it casts doubt on his guilt, which the DNA had already settled beyond question, but because it’s a real failure of process, the kind that should never happen, even when investigators are certain they finally have the right man.

 Two decades of getting it wrong should have made this the one part of the entire 24-year case they finally got exactly right. The trial itself took even longer to arrive than anyone expected. Delayed once by the CO 19 pandemic and again in 2022 when too few prospective jurors showed up to seat a jury at all. The case didn’t finally open in a Dale County courtroom until April 2023, 24 years after the murders.

 Judge William Filillmore presided as Coley Mccrainy, now 49, sat at the defense table facing four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. Over a trial that stretched nearly 2 weeks, prosecutors laid out physical evidence, expert testimony, and a reconstruction of that night built entirely from what the evidence could prove.

 In the gallery, Carol Roberts and Cheryl Burgon sat in the row reserved for victims families. Then Mccrainy did something few defendants in his position ever do. He took the stand himself. The man who’ told police in 2019 he’d never met either girl now told the jury an entirely different story. He said he’d met JB months earlier at a Dothan shopping mall, that she’d introduced herself as Jennifer, that they’d exchanged numbers and stayed in touch, and that the two of them had arranged to meet in Ozark that very night. His

truck, he claimed, had broken down at a gas station. He said he happened to run into the girls at the pay phone and that they’d offered him a ride to where his truck was parked. in the cab. He said he and JB had consensual sex afterward. He said the girls drove him home and he never saw them again.

 As for why he’d spent nearly 20 years denying he even knew them, including a flat denial the moment DNA put him at the scene. He told the jury he’d been afraid his wife would find out about the affair. It fell apart under the first real question. There were no texts, no calls, no witnesses, nothing to suggest JB Beasley and Coley Mccrainy had ever exchanged a single word before that night.

 Marilyn Merritt, called back to the stand more than 20 years after she’d given two lost girls directions, testified plainly they were simply trying to find their way home. No meeting to keep, no rendevous, nothing in either girl’s voice or manner that night to suggest anything but two teenagers worried about curfew. And Tracy’s 11:35 p.m.

 phone call to her mother, a girl telling Carol Roberts she was on her way home, not on her way to keep a secret date, undercut the story even further. Prosecutors reconstructed what the evidence actually showed. Mccrainy approaching the girl’s car after they left the store, forcing them to another location, one with the wet grass and briars that explained the mud on their shoes and the soaked hems of their pants, raping JB, shooting both girls, arranging their bodies in the trunk and driving the car to the street where it would later be found. A story invented

on the stand decades after the fact, offered only when science had already told the whole truth without his help. The most devastating witness of the entire trial wasn’t a police officer or a forensic expert. It was Janette Mccrainy. The woman who had sat beside her husband in 2019, encouraged him to cooperate and had no reason in the world to suspect him of anything.

On the witness stand, she testified that her husband had gone out on the night of July 31st, 1999, and hadn’t come home for hours. He could never explain to her satisfaction then or since. 24 years of marriage, and this was the answer he’d left her with. She had trusted him for 20 years. She had helped hand police the evidence that would convict him, believing she was simply helping identify some stranger.

Now, she sat in a courtroom under oath and testified against the man she’d married, the man who let her believe for years that his worst secret was infidelity, not murder. On April 25th, 2023, after nearly 2 weeks of testimony, the jury retired to deliberate. The next day they returned guilty on all four counts.

 Two counts of capital murder for shooting into an occupied vehicle, one for each girl, one count of capital murder during the course of a rape, and one count of capital murder of two or more people. The following day, they returned again to decide his sentence, life in prison, without the possibility of parole. Not the death penalty prosecutors had sought, but a sentence that meant Kohley Mccrainy, now 49, would never again walk out of a prison gate.

 When the verdict was read, Carol Roberts sat speechless for several minutes before finally saying she was stunned that after 24 years, someone was finally being held accountable. Cheryl Bergun leaned forward in her seat and broke into tears the moment she heard the word guilty. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who personally prosecuted the case, stood before reporters afterward and said plainly that two young girls had lost every chance to grow up, to build the lives, careers, and families they should have had. No verdict, he acknowledged, could

undo that or give either family the 20 years back. But after 24 years, it finally answered the one question both families had carried like a weight with no name. Coley Mccrainy is now serving out that sentence at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, still filing appeals, still seeking a new trial years later.

In a phone interview to a national news outlet from behind those walls, he continued to insist he hadn’t done it, telling the reporter that people could call him unfaithful, call him a liar, call him whatever they wanted about the affair, but that he wasn’t a killer. 20 years of silence.

 A jury that heard the evidence and didn’t hesitate. A wife who testified against him. And still from prison his own defense of himself never once mentioned the two 17-year-old girls whose lives he ended, only the reputation he was still trying to protect. The Beasley Howlet case became one of the first in the country to prove that forensic genetic genealogy could crack a cold case with no criminal record, no reliable witness, and no evidence beyond a single DNA sample stored for two decades.

 In the years since, hundreds of other cold cases across America have been reopened using the same method, from decades old murders to unidentified remains. finally given names back. Families who had stopped expecting an answer have started receiving phone calls they’d long since stopped waiting for. Every case solved this way means one more family finally set free from decades of not knowing.

And one more reminder that the technology only works once someone decides to actually use it. What this case leaves behind isn’t just a resolved mystery. It’s a handful of specific practical lessons and they’re worth saying plainly rather than in vague terms. Share your real plans before you go.

 The exact location, not just a party. If those plans change, call and update someone immediately, the way Tracy did from that pay phone. A single phone call is often the only thing standing between she’s running late and nobody knows where she is. Turn on realtime location sharing with someone you trust, especially at night, especially somewhere unfamiliar.

 There’s no reason left with the technology already in most of our pockets for anyone to simply vanish off the map for hours. If you’re ever stranded after dark, stay in the locked car and call for help rather than approaching a stranger for directions. And remember what this case proves better than almost any other.

 Dangerous people rarely look dangerous. Sometimes they look exactly like someone you’d trust completely. Someone who spent 20 years standing at the front of a room asking people to bow their heads. Trusting your instincts even when you can’t fully explain them is not paranoia. It’s the one thing that might have changed how this particular night ended.