Alabama 1999 Double Homicide Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

Cold case in Ozark is hot again nearly two decades later. >> Saturday night in Alabama, July 31st, 1999. Two best friends in a black Mazda 929. Windows down looking for a field party somewhere around Hedland. It is the last weekend before senior year. One of them turned  17 today. They are not worried about anything.

 They are just on a summer night, a little lost, a little late, thinking about nothing except  finding the right road home. They didn’t find the party. They took a wrong turn somewhere in  the dark and ended up 20 m off course in a town called Ozark, a town they hadn’t planned on seeing, a town they didn’t know.

 They stopped  at a Chevron station on East Broad Street, asked a woman inside for directions back to Highway 23. She gave them a clear route home and would later say they were polite, neatly dressed. Worried about only one thing, how long will they get home, one of them was supposed to  be home before 11:30 p.m.

, she finds a pay phone at the front of the building and calls her mother. The voice on the other end sounds  fine. We got lost, she said, but a woman gave us directions. We’re  on our way. Four words before she hangs up. Mom, I love you. The woman who gave them directions is  still in the parking lot when the Mazda pulls out, headlights on, following her route. Exactly.

 She watches the tail lights until they disappear down East Broad Street. She is the  last person outside of one man to see those girls alive. The next morning, a patrol officer spots the car on Herring Avenue, less than a mile from that pay phone. He looks through the windows.

 Both wallets  on the seat. Cash, jewelry, credit cards, a driver’s  license sitting on the dashboard. One window cracked open on the driver’s side. Gas tank almost empty. No sign of anything out of place. He radios it in and waits for the tow truck. 6 hours passed.  Nobody opened the trunk. It wasn’t until nearly 2:00 in the afternoon, 6 hours after the car was first reported, that an investigator found a trunk release inside the vehicle and pulled it.

 What they found inside that trunk took the officers 24 years to understand why anyone could do such. Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. This case went cold for 20 years because the man responsible had no criminal record, no entry in any DNA database, and enough  distance between himself and suspicion, and lived happily in the same community without anyone  ever looking his way.

Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. We reply to everyone. New here? Hit like and  subscribe. It keeps us digging. Now back to Dothan. JB Hilton Green Beasley was born July 31st, 1982  in Troy, Alabama. An incoming senior at Northview High School in Dothan. Her mother, Cheryl, called her a beautiful gift, full of  energy, a passion for dance, the kind of girl who filled a room without trying, cheerleader, junior honor  society member, the kind of kid parents don’t worry about. Tracy

Jean Holllet was born March 3rd,  1982. Also an incoming Northview senior. Her father, Robert Holllet, had been a police officer.  He drowned in Lake Eupfalla when Tracy was 4 years old. The officers in  the area knew her after that, watched over her the way people do when a colleague leaves a child behind.

 Her mother, Carol, remarried a man named Mike Roberts, who raised Tracy as  his own daughter and never called her anything else. Tracy and JB, had been best friends since middle school. If one was somewhere, the other was within arms reach. The night of July 31st was  the last of their summer before senior year.

 They left Dothan around 10 that evening, headed for a  field party in Hedland, being thrown in JB’s honor. Somewhere along the route, they  took a wrong turn. By 11:30, they were in Ozark, 20 miles off course, and Tracy  was on a pay phone telling her mom they were fine. They had directions.

  They were coming home. Marilyn Merritt watched the tail lights disappear. They didn’t get home. The area surrounding Herring Avenue was canvased on foot within hours of the discovery. More than 500 interviews conducted. Biological evidence recovered from JB’s clothing was sent to the lab. A complete male DNA profile was extracted and entered into every database investigators could access.

 The Alabama State System Cottis Interpole forensic experts ran comparisons on more than 70 potential suspects. Not one matched. The profile was real, complete, usable. It just didn’t belong to anyone in any system anywhere in the world. On July 30th, 1999, the day before JB’s birthday, the day before both girls were found, a judge in a civil paternity case ordered a man to submit a DNA sample. He didn’t show up.

He was summoned a second time. He ignored that, too. He eventually  agreed to pay child support instead and made the whole thing disappear without  ever providing his DNA. Someday that would become the gap between a court order that would have put his profile in a database and the night two girls got lost on their way home. Nobody knew that yet.

 A month after the discovery,  a man walked into the Ozark police station voluntarily and said he had information. Over the next four hours, his story  changed six times. The first version had him spotting a black truck near Herring Avenue. By the sixth,  he was an eyewitness to the whole thing, describing a tattooed stranger who had gotten into  the girl’s car, led them to Herring Avenue, and was responsible for what happened while he waited  nearby.

 He was arrested. Dothan thought it was over, but across every version of his story, all six of them, he never once mentioned the biological evidence recovered  from JB’s clothing. The most critical piece of evidence in the entire case. And the man who claimed to have been there had no explanation for it because he hadn’t been there.

 He admitted later he invented  everything for the reward money. The grand jury declined to indict. Other names surfaced. A man who had been near Herring Avenue that night and left town  within days of the discovery. He was later cleared. A man from Mississippi staying in Ozark  who vanished shortly after was tracked down.

He got cleared, too. A blurry security camera image from inside the big little  store showed a small white pickup sitting at the pump while Tracy was on the pay phone. No gas purchased,  driver unidentified. Nobody in Ozark recognized it. It disappeared from the record completely.

 Each lead arrived and collapsed. The DNA profile was the only thing left standing and it pointed nowhere a name could be found. In 2015, an auxiliary police officer came forward with a dramatic allegation. An Ozark officer had confessed to the crime, she said, and the department had covered it up. She repeated the story for years.

 It followed the case like a shadow, feeding distrust, generating headlines, sending investigators down paths that led nowhere. Then in 2022, under oath, she recanted everything. She had lied. All of it. 23 years of a false story. Gone in one courtroom admission. The families kept waiting.

 Carol Roberts said she had not slept through a full night since July 31st, 1999. Not one. She described waking in the dark with the sound  of her daughter’s voice in her head. Mike Roberts, the man who had raised Tracy  as his own, went to every briefing, every hearing, every press  conference for 20 years when there was never anything new to report.

Cheryl Burgoon carried the same  weight from the other side, quieter, just as constant. The DNA profile sat  intact in the evidence file, perfect, usable, pointing at a man no database  in the country could see. In April 2018, investigators in California used a technique nobody in law enforcement  had ever applied to a cold case before.

 Instead of searching for a suspect  in a database of people with criminal records, they uploaded crime scene  DNA to Get Match, a public platform where ordinary people voluntarily share their genetic  information to trace their own family history. The search didn’t  return the suspect.

 It returned his relatives, distant cousins  who shared fragments of his genetic material without knowing it. From those partial  matches, investigators built a family tree branch by branch until  one name fit everything. A man who had been living quietly in a Sacramento suburb for 50 years was arrested at his home.

 Ozark Police Chief Marlo Walker followed that story  with the focus of a man thinking about a specific evidence file in his own department. That following week, he started  making phone calls. In August 2018, he sent the 1999 DNA profile  to Parabon Nanolabs in Virginia. Same technique.

 Upload to the database, find the distant  relatives, build the tree, narrow to a name. Five months later, the  results came back. A list of Alabama families whose genetic markers overlapped with the evidence profile. Each one an involuntary thread connecting an unknown man to a searchable database. Walker sat down with the list and started reading.

 One surname made him stop. He recognized it from high school. A 1992 graduate of Carol High School in Ozark, the same school Walker had attended. library club president athlete. He had served in the United States Navy stationed in Beloxy. Came back to Ozark and settled on Lys Drive in June 1998, half a mile from the big little store, 7/10 of a mile from Herring Avenue.

 He drove long haul trucks for a living, parking his rig at a gas station on County Road 18 when he came home from the road. He had children, several of them, including one with a woman he had been ordered by a judge to submit DNA for just one day before everything happened. In 2013, he founded a nonprofit called Spirit and Truth Lifeline Ministries, preaching, community work, being the kind of man people called a man of God.

 His girlfriend Janette had moved in with him in June 1998. She would later describe their life together as an American dream. church, family, children, growing up, right? He had no criminal record. He had never appeared on a single suspect list in 20 years. Nobody in the Wire Grass region had ever had a reason to look at him twice.

 He had lived in the same community as the families of the girls  he was responsible for harming, the same roads, the same stores, the same small  geography. And nobody had ever had a reason. His name was Coley Lewis McCrainy. Walker called him, told him police were working a cold case and needed community members to help rule  out certain family lines.

 He wasn’t a suspect, Walker said just someone who might help narrow the search toward whoever they were actually  looking for. Mccrainy’s wife, Janette, was with him when the call came. She told him to go. Why wouldn’t she? 20 years of marriage had given her  no reason to hesitate. Mccrainy came in, sat down, let an officer swab the inside of his cheek.

 He didn’t  rush, didn’t fidget, left with the calm of a man who believed he had  nothing to worry about. What he didn’t know was that Parabon’s analysis  had already pointed at him before the meeting was ever scheduled. The swab was confirmation, not  discovery. The DNA from the inside of Mccrainy’s cheek matched the DNA recovered from JB Beasley’s clothing  in 1999.

Not a relative, not a partial match, him. The man who had walked into a police station to  help find someone else. On March 15th, 2019,  Coley Lewis Mccrainy was arrested at a truck stop near Daleville, Alabama.  He was 45 years old. He told investigators he had never met either girl, had no connection to them, was not in Ozark that night.

 Total denial. The reaction that moved through Dothan and Ozark was not the relief people expect when a long cold case finally breaks. It was heavier than that. a church founder, a community man, someone people had waved to on the road, passed in the grocery store, greeted at the gas station for 20 years. He had occupied the same small geography as the families of the girls he had harmed, breathing the same air, driving the same routes, and none of them had ever known.

Janette Mccrainy learned what her husband had done [clears throat] and what her marriage had been built on at the same moment. 24 years after that Saturday night in July, the trial began. 4 days in, Mccrainy took the stand himself. The total denial he had maintained since his arrest was gone. In its place was a new version.

 He said he had met JB at the Wiregrass Commons Mall weeks before that night. She told him her name was Jennifer. He gave her his mother’s phone number. They made plans to meet in Ozark on July 31st. His car broke down at the big little store that night, the same station  where JB and Tracy had stopped for directions.

 He said he saw them there. Said JB gave him a ride to his truck parked on County Road 18. Said they spent time together in the cab. Said she and Tracy drove him home afterward around 12:45 in the morning. said he never connected Jennifer from the mall to the girl from the news until he was arrested 20 years later.

 The prosecution took it apart methodically. JB and Tracy had been lost that night, driving in the wrong direction for over an hour, calling friends for help, focused entirely on getting home before curfew. Every witness at the big little store described  two girls with one thing on their minds. Getting back to Dothan.

 nothing placed a planned meeting with anyone. Mccrainy had said nothing about Jennifer in 2019  when investigators first questioned him. He said nothing for 20 years. The story arrived only after he was charged with capital  offense. Then Janette took the stand, compelled by the prosecution, the same woman who had sat beside her husband in the police  station and told him to cooperate because she believed in him completely.

Under oath, she told the jury that on the night of July 31st, 1999, McCrainy left the house around 1000 p.m. Their usual arrangement had him home by 11:30.  He did not come back until 12:45 in the morning. He told her his car had broken down at the big little store on East Broad  Street.

 She had been frustrated when he got home that late. The chain on the door was already locked. She had to let him in. the same gas station, the same time window,  placed there by his own wife on his own timeline without meaning to. Attorney General Steve Marshall handled cross-examination himself. He walked Mccrainy through the timeline.

 45 minutes, he said, for everything Mccrainy claimed had happened that night. He looked at Mccrainy directly. Happened pretty fast, didn’t it? The jury deliberated for 2 hours. April 26th, 2023. He was pronounced guilty for four counts of capital offense. One count connected to the biological evidence. Cheryl Burgon leaned forward when the foreman read the verdict and tears came down her face.

 Carol Roberts sat completely still. She said afterwards she had waited 24  years for that word and was still numb when it arrived. Mike Roberts was in the front row. He had been in the front  row for 24 years. Every briefing, every hearing, every time  someone said there might be news, every time there wasn’t. He held on long enough to hear it.

 He died less than a year later. He was 74. Judge William Filillmore  sentenced Coley Lewis Mccrainy to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He will spend the rest of his  life there. From a phone inside William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in  Bessemer, Alabama. Mccrainy told a reporter he maintained his innocence.

 “They can call me a cheat,” he said. “They can call me a dog. They can call me a lot of things, but they cannot say  I ended their lives.” JB Beasley, born July 31st, 1982, full of energy, a passion for dance. It was her birthday. She and her best friend loaded up and went looking for a party  being thrown in her honor.

They got lost. They stopped for directions. They called home to say they were on their way. Tracy Holllet was born March  3rd, 1982. Her father died when she was 4. The local police watched over her after that. She stood at a pay phone at 11:38 at night and told her mother she was fine, she had directions, she was coming  home. Mom, I love you.

 Marilyn Merritt watched the tail lights until they were gone. The only item missing from that car on Herring Avenue  from wallets, cash, jewelry, credit cards, a driver’s license sitting right there on the dashboard was a small keychain. White and black letter blocks spelling out three words. Hard to get. Nobody ever found it.

 If you are ever out at night and something feels off, get somewhere lit. Get somewhere public. Call someone and stay on the phone. Tracy called home at 11:38 and said four words. Build the habit of one more call, one more check-in,  one more person who knows exactly where you are. It takes 10 seconds.