Georgia 1972 Missing Girl Cold Case SOLVED — 51 Years to Find the Man Next Door 

Georgia 1972 Missing Girl Cold Case SOLVED — 51 Years to Find the Man Next Door 

51-year-old murder mystery solved. Today, the Cobb County District Attorney revealed the name of the man who kidnapped and killed a 9-year-old girl in 1972. On the night of January 13th, 1972, a mother in Marietta, Georgia, went out into the street to look for her 9-year-old daughter. The girl had gone to the laundromat across from their apartment building, a walk of less than half a block. She was not there.

On the pavement beside a parked Volkswagen, her family found a box of laundry detergent spilled open. It sat 85 ft from the laundromat door. That box was the only trace of her anyone found for the next 16 days. When they found her, she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The police kept a hair that was not hers and a piece of cloth.

In 1972, no laboratory on Earth could turn either one into a name. Both her parents died still waiting. Her brother was 10 the night she vanished. He was a grandfather when they finally told him who did it. This is how they finally found the killer. Debbie Lynn Randall was 9 years old, a third grader at Pine Forest Elementary School in Marietta.

 She had a face full of freckles and a gap-toothed smile. And in the school photo her family would hand to reporters for the next 50 years. She is wearing a brown collared shirt and looking straight at the camera. She lived with her mother Wanita, her stepfather, and her two older brothers in an apartment building on First Street.

 The complex was full of children. They were outside constantly in the yards and the parking lot and the stretch of street between the buildings, the way kids were in 1972, back when nobody thought twice about it. Debbie played with dolls. She was the queen of the neighborhood baseball team, which is how her family put it. And at the laundromat across the street, she had a habit.

 She liked to collect the empty soap boxes and [music] stack them. That was the errand she liked. That was the place she liked to go. At Christmas, a few weeks before, she had been given a pair of lavender shoes with red and white beads set into them. They were her favorite thing in the world. On the evening of January 13th, when her mother asked for help with the laundry, Debbie put those shoes on to walk across the street.

January 13th, 1972 was a Thursday, and it was bright and sunny and unseasonably warm for a Georgia winter. The Randall children ate dinner around 5:30, and afterward, the two boys settled in front of the television. There was an episode of the riflemen on and neither of them wanted to move. Juanita was not feeling well that evening.

 She gathered up the family’s dirty laundry and asked her oldest son Melvin to take it across the street to the laundromat with his sister. Melvin was 10 years old and he was sick too and he did not want to leave his show. He said no. That refusal is a thing Melvin Randall has carried for more than 50 years. So, Wanita asked her husband instead, and he agreed to walk over with Debbie and the laundry.

 Around 7:00 in the evening, the two of them left the apartment at 7:27 First Street and crossed to the laundromat, a place called Duds and Suds. It was a distance a child could cover in under a minute. Debbie had walked it many times. What happened next is the part the record cannot fully give. At some point that evening on that short stretch of ground between the laundromat and her own front door, Debbie Lynn Randall was alone. It was dark by then.

There were cars parked along First Street and lights on in the apartments [music] and a laundromat full of machines running. And in the space of a few minutes, on a street she had crossed her whole life, 85 ft from a door she could see, she was gone. Her family started looking almost immediately. Bonita and her husband went out into the street and called for her.

 They checked the laundromat. They checked the parking lot. They knocked on the neighbors doors. And then they found the detergent. It was a box of laundry soap spilled open on the ground beside a Volkswagen parked on First Street. It was roughly 85 ft from the laundromat door. It was the only physical sign that anything had happened to her at all.

 At 9:40 that night, Juanita called the Marietta Police Department and reported her daughter missing. Officers came out and worked the scene, and what they took from it was thin. They found small fingerprints on the door of that Volkswagen set at a downward angle, the kind of marks a child’s hands might leave. They recovered the spilled box and that was very nearly all of it.

There was no witness who saw her taken. There was no vehicle description, no scream anyone remembered, no struggle anyone had turned to look at. She had been steps from home in a neighborhood full of people at an hour when the street was not empty. Not a lonely road, not an isolated field. 85 ft of pavement in front of her own apartment complex with the lights of the laundromat right there in front of her.

Whoever took her did it in the time it takes to cross a street. Subscribe so you don’t miss how a hair and a piece of cloth finally gave her killer a name. What happened in Marietta over the next 16 days is the sort of thing that does not happen anymore. There were no Amber alerts in 1972.

 No cell phones, no way to push a child’s face onto a screen in a million hands at once. So the town did it the only way it could. It went out and looked. They called it Operation Debbie. The Marietta police worked it and the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office worked it and around them assembled a volunteer force the county had never seen.

Ham radio operators coordinated the grid. Civil defense workers from Cobb and Marietta joined in. A group called the Concerned Citizens Committee organized neighbors and strangers alike. Students came, church groups came. People who had never met the Randall family took days off work and walked into the woods.

 By the end, roughly 4,000 people had searched for Debbie Lynn Randall. They went through wooded lots and drainage ditches. They walked empty buildings and abandoned houses. They covered ground across Marietta and out into Cobb County and they found nothing at all. In a town that size, 4,000 people is not a search party. It is a significant fraction of the population out in the cold in a long line looking for a third grader.

Her school photo went up on polls and in shop windows across the county. For more than two weeks, Marietta essentially stopped and the whole of it was organized around finding one 9-year-old girl and bringing her home. On January 29th, 1972, 16 days after she disappeared, a group of students from Southern Tech found her body in the woods south of Windy Hill Road near P Ferry Road.

She was a few miles from home in woods that hundreds of volunteers had already walked past. They were young men who had volunteered a day of their own time to help look for a missing child and they were the ones who found what was left of her. Some of them never got the image out of their heads.

 She had been sexually assaulted. She had been strangled. The men who worked that scene were not sentimental people. But the case marked them and it marked the town. Morris Nicks was a young man in Marietta then. He remembered the day she went missing for the rest of his life. The investigation that followed was not a lazy one.

 Detectives ran down hundreds of leads. They interviewed suspects and checked alibis and knocked on doors across Cobb County. They pulled in men with records. They chased tips that came from other states. They also got the things that come with a famous case. People confessed who had not done it. Some were attention seekers. Some were mentally ill men who believed what they were saying.

Every one of those confessions had to be run to the ground and disproved. And every one of them burned weeks that could have gone somewhere else. Detectives even sat down with psychics, which is exactly how thin the ground had gotten. And there were the men who never confessed to anything, who simply had the bad luck to fit a man with a record living in the wrong part of the county, driving the wrong kind of car.

 Some of them stayed on that list for decades. They were interviewed and reintered. Their neighbors knew they had been questioned about the little girl from First Street. Not one of them had touched her, and it would take a laboratory 30 and 40 years later to prove it. None of it produced the man who did it. The file got thicker and the leads got thinner and the years started going by.

Debbie’s mother and father lived in that same town on that same street with the knowledge that whoever had taken their daughter had never been found [music] and might be anyone and might be anywhere. They stayed. They did not move away and they did not stop using the laundromat. Oneanita went on doing the family wash in the same building her daughter had walked out of and never come back to.

 And John Randall started keeping a wooden box of Debbie’s school photographs and the newspaper clippings from the search. He added to it and kept it for 50 years. Melvin Randall grew up carrying his no. He became a man and then a grandfather. And the whole time the question of who killed his little sister stayed open. He lived his entire adult life inside a case that nobody could close.

The case went cold and it stayed cold. For decades, the only thing anyone could say for certain about her killer was this. He had been within 85 ft of her front door on a Thursday night in January of 1972. Subscribe so you don’t miss the genealogy work that found him in a cemetery 51 years later. There was one thing the Marietta Police Department did in 1972 that would matter more than anything else they did.

 They kept the evidence. When they processed the scene and when the coroner examined her body, they recovered two things that had come from the man who killed her. a hair which was not hers and a piece of cloth. In 1972, that was almost worthless. An examiner could put a hair under a microscope and describe its color and its shape and say it was consistent with a certain kind of person.

 Consistent was the ceiling of the entire science. It could never say this came from this man. It could only ever say maybe. So both went into an evidence envelope and the envelope went into storage and there they sat while the world changed around them. Everything that happened afterward depended on a decision nobody thought much about at the time.

Evidence degrades. Paper envelopes sit in rooms that get hot and damp. Departments move and boxes get lost. And files from a case nobody can solve are exactly the files that go missing. The biological material from a January night in 1972 had to survive five decades of that intact enough for a machine that had not been invented yet to read it.

It did. That is not a small thing. And the district attorney would make a point of saying so out loud 51 years later. In October of 2001, detectives sent the hair to the FBI for testing. By then, DNA science had arrived and the lab was able to develop information from it. That test did not give them a name.

 What it gave them was the ability to start crossing names off. Suspects who had been on the list for decades were eliminated one after another because the evidence said they had not done it. In May of 2015, the cloth went out for an updated analysis and that one went further. From it, a lab produced a partial DNA profile of an unknown male.

43 years after Debbie Lynn Randall was taken off First Street, her killer finally existed as something more than a theory. He was a genetic profile, incomplete and nameless, sitting in a file in Cobb County. By 2015, the case belonged to the cold case unit of the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office. One of the detectives on it was Morris Nicks.

 The same Morris Nicks who had been a young man in Marietta the day she disappeared. He had spent 28 years with the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office. He came back for this in 2016. Working from the preserved evidence, investigators developed a fuller DNA profile. It told them something important. There had been only one man. Whatever had happened to Debbie in those minutes on First Street, one person did it.

 And his genetic profile was now sitting in their hands. Nyx went to work on the list. There were three or four men who looked, in his words, like really good suspects, and he spent enormous effort on them. [music] Every one of them was eliminated. Then in May of 2018, they ran the profile through COTUS.

 Kotus is the national DNA database. It holds genetic samples [music] taken from convicted offenders. And when a crime scene profile is entered, the system compares it against every one of them. It is the tool built for exactly this moment. The one that is supposed to take an unknown profile and hand back a name. It came back with nothing.

 No match anywhere in the country. That result was a wall and it looked like a dead end. It was not. It was the truest thing the case had produced in 46 years, and nobody in the room could read it yet. Because Cotus can only find a man whose sample somebody took. It compares crime scene DNA against offenders who have been arrested, convicted, swabbed, and entered.

 The most advanced tool in American forensics had searched every one of those men and found nothing. and it would have found nothing every single time they ran it for as long as they cared to keep running it. Nobody in that room knew why. They only knew the answer was no. What broke the case was not the database. It was the family tree.

Genetic genealogy asks a wider question. It takes the killer’s crime scene DNA and goes looking. Not for him, but for anyone who shares enough of it to be related to him. And the pool it searches is not a police database at all. It is the public ancestry sites. The ones millions of ordinary people have uploaded their own DNA to hunting for cousins and grandparents and family history.

 The unknown man from the cloth had never given a sample to anyone, but his relatives had. The cold case unit brought in outside expertise and worked with DNA Labs International, a private laboratory in Florida. From the partial profile, analysts built a familial DNA profile and started constructing a family tree. They worked backward through public records, matched branches, narrowed generations.

It is slow, unglamorous work. It is genealogy done by people who know what they are looking for. And the tree closed in on a single man. Investigators found his living relatives and went to them, explained what they had, and asked for DNA samples to compare. The family agreed. They had no idea what they were about to be told, and they gave their samples anyway.

The comparison pointed exactly where the tree had said it would. After 51 years, [music] the case had a name. For 51 years, the man who killed Debbie Lynn Randall had been an unknown male on a lab report. He had never been questioned. He had never appeared on a suspect list. He had never been on anyone’s radar at all.

 His name was William B. Rose. Rose was 24 years old in January of 1972, and he lived in Mapleton, Georgia, [music] about 20 minutes from Marietta. But he was no stranger to the Randall’s apartment complex. Family and acquaintances of his lived there, which gave him reason to be around those buildings, those yards, that street, his record was nothing.

 An arrest connected to alcohol. There was not one thing in his history that would have made a detective in 1972 look at him twice for the abduction and murder of a child. Investigators do not believe he knew Debbie. Ron Alter, the cold case detective who worked the final stretch, put it plainly, “The children in that complex played outside all the time, and Rose was around.

 He had almost certainly seen her before, running in the yards, stacking her soap boxes at the laundromat window. If he drove past her that night, Alter said he saw her. It was a crime of opportunity. A man who simply happened to be standing there and a child who happened to walk past him. There was a reason William Rose had never been questioned.

 And it was not only that nobody suspected him. In 1974, 2 years after he killed Debbie Lin Randall, Rose died by suicide. He was still in his 20s. Why he did it is not known. Investigators have not claimed to know and his family [music] did not know because his family had no idea what he had done. They learned it from a detective more than 50 years afterward.

 Nobody can say whether he thought about Debbie Lin Randall in those two years or whether the two facts have anything to do with each other at all. There is no confession, no interview, no statement of any kind. The file holds what he did. It will never hold. Why? Everything that came after happened in a world he was no longer in.

 The hundreds of leads, the false confessions, the psychics, the men who spent decades under suspicion and were cleared, the FBI test in 2001 that crossed names off a list. The profile in 2015, the COD search in 2018, run against a database of living, arrested, swabbed offenders. While the man they were hunting lay in a cemetery in Cobb County, a short drive from the street where he took her.

Of the 51 years this case was open, William Rose was alive for two. To be certain, the district attorney’s office did the last thing left to do. They went to his family and explained what the genealogy had found. And the family, who had never suspected a thing, gave their consent. Then they opened his grave.

 They took DNA from his remains and compared it to the profile pulled from the cloth that Marietta police had preserved since 1972. It matched. Morris Nicks had been a boy in Marietta the day she vanished, and a detective in the room when the answer finally came. Technology does not get old, he said. It does not retire. It does not quit.

It found him in the grave. On September 18th, 2023, the Cobb County District Attorney stood in front of cameras and said the name out loud for the first time. Flynn Broady laid out the evidence. He thanked the Marietta Police Department for recovering the hair in the cloth in 1972 and for keeping them safe for 51 years.

Then he named William B. Rose as the man who abducted, raped and murdered Debbie Lynn Randall. He also said the hard part. There would be no trial. There would be no sentence, no courtroom, no moment where anyone had to stand up and account for what had been done to a 9-year-old girl. The answers, Broady said, would not bring her back.

 And no justice could be extracted from the man who did it. he would have to answer to a higher power. Melvin Randall was there. He was a grandfather of two by then and he was the only one left. His mother had died of leukemia in 2018, 5 years before this. His father had died in 2022. He had missed it by a single year.

Melvin stood up and thanked the detectives. He said he wished his mother could have been there and that he believed she knew now wherever she was and that it was finally over. Then he said something about the family of the man who killed his sister. They were struggling too. He said it had been hard on them the way it had been hard on his own family and he did not have any animosity toward them.

He wished them well. A 9-year-old girl in lavender Christmas shoes carrying a box of laundry soap across a street she had crossed a thousand times on a warm January evening in 1972. 85 ft from a door she could see. A man who had no reason to be a suspect and never became one. A hair and a piece of cloth in an evidence envelope in Marietta.

A town [music] that sent 4,000 people into the woods and came back with nothing. 51 years. A mother who died waiting. A father who died waiting [music] with that wooden box still on a shelf in his house. And a brother who said no to a chore on a Thursday evening and has spent every year since living inside that answer.

The box of detergent was the first thing anyone found. For a very long time, it was the only thing.