ALABAMA 1979 Cold Case Solved — The Killer Was Her Fiancé’s Best Man 

It was the second Saturday of June 1979, one of those South Alabama evenings when the heat finally breaks at sundown and the whole town of Pine Level smells like cut grass and honeysuckle and charcoal from a 100 backyard grills. Cheryl Lynn Pitman was 22 years old and she was 3 weeks from her wedding. Her dress was hanging in her mother’s sewing room.

 The invitations had gone out on cream colored card stock. That night, while her fiance, Danny Morrow, was at his bachelor party at the fish camp on the P River, Cheryl had driven to her best friend’s house to address the last of the thank you notes for the shower gifts. And at 10:15 p.m., she had hugged her friend at the door and said, “Three more weeks.

” A 4-minute drive home. She never made it. And three weeks later, on the Saturday that was supposed to have been her wedding day, the man who would have stood beside Dany at the altar holding the rings, the man who had been his best friend since little league, stood beside him instead at her graveside with his hand on Dany<unk>y’s shoulder and told him he would get through it.

 He said it every year for 44 years. But to understand how this ended, you have to know how it began. Pine level sits in Kahaba County in the wiregrass country of southeast Alabama, where the peanut fields run flat to the pinewoods and the churches outnumber the stoplights 10 to1. In 1979, the population was 2200. There was a courthouse square, a Piggly Wiggly, a Dairy Queen, a Chevrolet dealership, and a high school whose football team had won the state title in 1974 and had not let anyone forget it.

 Men drove Chevy pickups with Crimson Tide stickers and listened to Bear Bryant’s radio show like scripture. Women ran the church suppers and the bridge clubs. Teenagers cruised the square on Saturday nights and parked at the river. The whole town had waited in gas lines that spring, and the whole town had complained about it at the Dairy Queen.

In June, the days were long and gold, and the evenings were full of fireflies, and every porch had a ceiling fan and a picture of tea. Nobody in Pine Level locked a door. The sheriff was somebody’s cousin. Cheryl Lynn Pitman was the younger of two daughters. Her father, Buck, ran the Peanut Warehouse.

 Her mother, Dot, sewed and had made every prom dress in pine level for 20 years and had made Cheryl’s wedding dress by hand. Cheryl worked as a clerk in the county probate office where she recorded deeds and marriages and births, and she had a habit that the whole courthouse remembered. She kept a tin of butter cookies in her desk drawer and gave one to every child who came in with a parent.

 And by 1979, there was not a 5-year-old in the county who did not know where the cookies were. She drove a yellow 1976 Chevy Vega that Dany had bought her at his father’s dealership at cost. She played piano at the Methodist church on the Sundays the regular pianist was sick. And she was going to marry Danny Morrow on Saturday, June 30 at 2 in the afternoon.

 And then she was going to go to nursing school in Dothan because Dany had said he would work two jobs to pay for it. Dany<unk>y’s best man was WDE Crenshaw. He was 24, Dany<unk>y’s age, and they had been inseparable since they were eight when WDE’s family had moved to Pine Level, and Dany had been the first boy to speak to him. They had played football together on the 1974 championship team.

WDE worked at Mororrow Chevrolet, Dany<unk>y’s father’s dealership, and he had helped pick out the Vega. He had been at the Pitman House so often that Dot set him a plate without asking. He was going to hold the rings. Pine Level would have told you Wade Krenshaw and Danny Morrow were the closest thing to brothers the town had ever seen.

 That was the last summer any of them believed it. On Saturday, June 9th, 1979, Dany<unk>y’s bachelor party started at the fish camp at 600 p.m. Wade Krenshaw was there because he had organized it. At 7 Doth, Cheryl drove to the home of her best friend, Sandra Peavey, on Church Street with a shoe box of thank you notes. They wrote until 10.

At 10:15, Sandra walked her to the door and hugged her. And Cheryl said, “Three more weeks.” And Sandra said, “21 days.” And Cheryl laughed and got in the Vega. Home was 4 minutes away across the square and down Peanut Street. Sandra watched the taillights turn the corner. She would tell investigators and then her own children and then her grandchildren that Cheryl had honked twice at the corner the way she always did and that she had waved at the dark.

She never arrived. At 10:45 p.m. Dot Pitman looked out the kitchen window. At 11:15 she called Sandra. Cheryl had left an hour ago. At 11:30 Buck drove the four minutes to Church Street and back. At 11:45, he called the fish camp and asked for Dany. Dany came to the phone. He said Wade had left the camp around 9:30 to get more ice and had come back at 10:45 and said the Piggly Wiggly had been out.

Buck told Dany to come home. At 12:10 a.m., Buck called the Kahaba County Sheriff. At 6:30 Sunday morning, a man named Otis Bell, walking to open the Dairy Queen, found the yellow Vega parked behind the building, nosed against the dumpster out of sight of the square. The keys were in it.

 The shoe box of thank you notes was on the seat, the top one addressed and stamped. Cheryl’s purse was on the floor. The passenger seat had been pushed all the way back. Two days passed. On Tuesday, June 12, at 7:45 in the morning, two men fishing the Pea River below the highway bridge found Cheryl in the shallows, the Kahaba County Coroner ruled the death a homicide. She had been strangled.

 She had fought. On the front of her blouse, near the second button, was a small stain that the state lab in Montgomery typed as blood. Group AB. Cheryl was O. The blouse was sealed in a paper bag and placed in a box labeled 790144. The case went to investigator Lamar Dunn, 46, of the Kahaba County Sheriff’s Office, who had gotten a butter cookie from Cheryl’s drawer for his granddaughter 3 weeks before.

 He would later say he could not go into the probate office for 2 years. The first suspect was the fiance. It always is. Danny Morrow had been at the fish camp with 14 men from 6 o p.m. until 11:50 when Buck’s call came and every one of them said so. That took a day and it nearly killed him. The second suspect was a man named Roy Lee Tatum, 31, who had been released from Kilby prison in April after serving time for assault and had been seen at the Dairy Queen on Saturday afternoon.

Dunn found him in Enterprise and questioned him for 9 hours. Tatum had been in the Coffee County jail on a drunk driving charge from 9 to p.m. Saturday until Monday morning. It held he was cleared by June 20. And then there was the best man. Dunn interviewed Wade Krenshaw on June 14 because Dany had mentioned the ice.

WDE said he had left the camp at 9:30, driven to the Piggly Wiggly, found the ice machine empty, driven to the Jity jungle in Elba, found it closed, and come back at 10:45 empty-handed. Nobody at the Piggly Wiggly remembered seeing him. Dun noted on page 33 that Krenshaw had a scratch, left side of jaw, states from shaving.

He asked Krenshaw’s blood type. Crenshaw said he did not know. His father, who managed the sales floor at Morrow Chevrolet and was a deacon at First Baptist, told the sheriff that the boy had been Dy’s best friend for 16 years and that the family did not appreciate the question. The sheriff, who bought his cars at Mororrow Chevrolet, told the Dothan paper in July that the killer was almost certainly a drifter who had come through on Highway 84.

The wedding day came on June 30. Dany sat in the Pitman living room in a suit and did not speak. Wade Krenshaw sat beside him. Dot. Pitman put the dress in a garment bag and hung it in the closet and it stayed there. While the sheriff’s office chased drifters along Highway 84, the Pitmans tried to live.

 Buck went back to the warehouse because peanut season did not wait. Dot stopped sewing for a year. Sandra Peavey mailed the thank you notes herself, all of them in July. And Danny Morrow, who could not sleep, sat on the Pitman porch most nights that summer, and most nights Wade Krenshaw sat with him and told him he would get through it. Then the years came.

 By 1982, the Vega had been sold. In 1983, Dany married a girl from Ozark, and Wade was his best man. and Dot Pitman sat in the fourth row and cried and Wade held the rings. By 1989, 10 years had passed, 10 years. Dot said the words at the supper table on the anniversary, and Buck got up and went out to the porch. Every June 9th, the family and Sandra put a tin of butter cookies on the counter of the probate office, and every clerk who came after Cheryl kept the tradition going.

Every June 30, Dany drove to the cemetery alone. Lamar Dunn retired in 1996 and took a copy of the file home in a box that lived in his gun cabinet. He read it every June. The Dairy Queen was torn down in 2003 and the dumpster with it. WDE Krenshaw took over as general manager of Morrow Chevrolet in 1998 when Dany<unk>y’s father retired and Dany who ran the service department worked beside him everyday.

Buck died in 2007. Dot Pitman was the one who never let go. She kept the dress in the closet and every June she wrote to the Alabama Bureau of Investigation asking whether the blouse from box 790144 had been tested with anything new. In 2001, she was told the stain was degraded. In 2010, the same.

 She was 88 in 2023, and she still wrote. Every case on this channel represents weeks of digging through records, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that deserved better. If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, please take a second to like this video, subscribe, and let us know in the comments where in the world you’re watching from.

Now, let’s get back to Cheryl. The case had been cold for 43 years when a state investigator who was born in 1986 opened box 790144. Her name was Special Agent Tamara Whitfield. And in 2022, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency created a cold case unit for the Wirgrass counties. She read the Pitman file in a weekend.

She noticed page 33. She noticed the ice that nobody saw him buy. She noticed the sheriff bought his cars where the suspect’s father worked. She wrote the name on a legal pad and circled it. She sent the blouse to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in recovering Dena from old degraded stains. In February 2023, the lab reported a full male profile.

No match in the national criminal database. So, the lab used forensic genetic genealogy, a method that uploads the unknown DNA to public ancestry websites, the same sites ordinary people use to trace their family trees, and works backward from distant cousins through birth and church records until the branches narrow to one man.

On Thursday, April 13th, 2023, at 8:20 in the morning, Tamara Whitfield opened the genealogologist’s report at her desk in Dothan. The profile belonged to a man descended from the Cshaw family of Kahaba County. One son, born in 1955, who had moved to Pine Level in 1963, played on the 1974 championship team and worked at Morrow Chevrolet for 46 years.

She looked at the legal pad. She looked at the report. She said out loud, “He held the ring.” She drove to Dot Pitman’s house that afternoon. She did not say the name. She said there was a match and that it was someone who had been in the file since 1979 and that it was someone who had eaten at her table. Dot 88 asked one question.

 Was it someone who had stood at the grave? Whitfield said yes. Dot closed her eyes. She said he held Dany up. I watched him hold Dany up. Wade Krenshaw was 68 in 2023. He had retired from the dealership in 2021. He was a deacon at First Baptist like his father. He had two sons. He still had Sunday dinner with Danny Morrow and his wife once a month.

 He had never been arrested. In hindsight, there had been signs, the scratch, the ice, and a note on page 48 from Sandra Peavey saying that Cheryl had told her in May that Wade had been making things strange since the engagement, showing up at the probate office at lunch, and that she had asked Dany to say something, and Dany had laughed it off.

Dunn had underlined it. Whitfield needed a confirming sample. On April 29 at the Pine Level High alumni football game, an agent watched Krenshaw finish a cup of sweet tea in the bleachers and drop it in the trash can at the end of the row. When the stands cleared, the agent collected it. On May 22nd, 2023, the lab confirmed it.

The blood on the second button of Cheryl Pitman’s blouse belonged to Wade Krenshaw. Whitfield went to Danny Morrow first. She sat in his kitchen and told him he did not speak for a long time. Then he asked whether he could be there. On the morning of Thursday, June 8th, 2023, one day before the 44th anniversary, at 7:15 a.m.

, Wade Krenshaw was on his porch with coffee when three unmarked cars pulled into his drive. Danny Morrow got out of the second one. Tamara Whitfield read the warrant. Crenshaw sat down his cup and looked at Dany. According to the arrest report, he said, “I told you you’d get through it.” Dany said, “You did.” Pine Level did not know how to hold it.

First Baptist held a prayer meeting that night, and the deacons sat in the front pew and could not speak. Men from the 1974 team drove in from three counties and stood in the church parking lot. Sandra Peavey, 66, told the Dothan paper that she had told Dunn about the probate office in 1979 and had never been called back.

Then the grief turned. People remembered him at the grave. They remembered him holding the rings at Dany<unk>y’s second wedding. They remembered Sunday dinners. Court documents show that in October 2023, faced with the Dena and Sandra Peavey’s statement, Krenshaw pleaded guilty to murder.

 On November 3rd, 2023, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was 68. Dot Pitman, 88, sat in the front row with Danny Morrow beside her. Dany read the family statement. He said that he had loved the man for 60 years and that the man had sat on the porch with him every night that summer and that he wanted him to sit with that. Prrenshaw stared at the table.

 Lamar Dunn, 90, sat in the second row with the box from his gun cabinet. Cheryl Lynn Pitman, was 22 years old. She gave a butter cookie to every child who came into the courthouse and she had a handmade dress in her mother’s sewing room and 21 days to go. She had a whole life in front of her that belonged to her by right and it was taken by the man who was supposed to hold the rings.

After the sentencing, Dot took the dress out of the closet for the first time in 44 years and gave it to Sandra Peavey’s granddaughter who was getting married in June. She told reporters, “I made it for a wedding. It’s going to a wedding.” The Pitman case was the first solved by Alabama’s Wiregrass cold case unit, and two more have since been reopened from evidence that sat like Cheryl’s blouse in a paper bag on a shelf in Montgomery.

The years have a way of burying things, but they do not destroy them. A stain on a second button. A bag of ice nobody saw. A scratch blamed on a razor. These things wait. The truth is patient in a way that people are not. What seemed settled in Pine Level in 1979 was never truly closed. It was only waiting for someone who did not buy her car from the suspect’s father.

So, we want to hear from you. Is life in prison at 68 justice? Or did Wade Krenshaw get 44 years he never deserved? What do you make of Dany who found out his best friend of 60 years had done this and asked to be there? And what detail stays with you most, the ice, the rings, or the dress? Justice came for Cheryl Lynn Pitman after 44 years.

Stories like hers remind us that truth, however late, always finds its way to the light. If you believe that too, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. And if you want more solved cold cases, the links are waiting in the description. Thank you for watching.