Alabama 1999 Double Teen Homicide Cold Case Finally SOLVED — Arrest Shocks Community

20 years or so, this part of Herring Avenue in the city of Ozark became a shrine. In fact, if you look right over there, you’ll see the crosses. They’ve been in place since 1999. The very site where the bodies of Tracy Holllet and JB Beasley were found in the trunk of Beasley’s vehicle.

 The long wait on who the alleged killer is appears to be over. For 24 years, two mothers waited for a name. The man who killed their daughters lived less than a mile from where the girls were found. He filled up at the gas station. He stood in line at the store. On Sundays,  he preached. He’d built his own ministry.

 A husband, a father of two. The kind of man nobody in that town ever thought twice about. Not a neighbor, not a friend. Not even his own wife ever knew. Two 17-year-old girls were shot and left in the trunk of a car. The man who did it left behind DNA specific  enough to convict him the moment anyone found a match. Nobody found one.

 Not for 24 years. Now, go back back to the night before any of this was true. July 31st, 1999. JB Beasley  turns 17. She’s a cheerleader at North View High in Dothan, Alabama. The kind of girl people remember being in a room with, not because she announced herself, but because the room changed a little  when she left.

 Her best friend, Tracy Howlet, is 5 months older and has been inseparable from her since middle school. Not the kind of closeness you have to explain  to people, the kind they can just see. Tonight, there’s a birthday party waiting for them 10 mi up the road in Headland. JB gets behind the wheel of her black Mazda  929.

Tracy climbs in beside her. Two 17-year-olds, a warm summer night, a party to get to. They never find it. Somewhere along the way, they miss a turn. Instead of 10 miles to Headland, they drive more than 20 in the wrong direction into  a town called Ozark that neither of them knows at all.

 After 11:30 that night,  the Mazda pulls into the big little store, a Chevron station that closed its doors half an hour earlier. A woman named Marilyn Merritt is in the parking lot with her daughter buying sodas. Two polite, neatly dressed girls walk up and ask her for directions back to Highway 231. That’s all they want.

 No trouble, no shortcuts, just the way home. Merritt gives them clear directions. While that’s happening, the store’s own security camera is recording something nobody in Ozark  will be able to explain for the next 20 years. A small white pickup truck  parked at the gas pump. Engine off. not buying gas. The man behind the wheel doesn’t move.

He just watches. Tracy walks to a pay phone at the front of the store and calls home. Her mother, Carol, picks up. Tracy tells her  they took a wrong turn, but a woman gave them directions and they’re on their way. Then, before she hangs up, she says four words. Ordinary words.  The kind you say without thinking on your way out of a room. Mom, I love you.

 That is the last anyone ever hears from either girl. By morning, Carol Roberts has already called JB’s family. Both girls should have been home hours ago. Before 9:00, both families have called  the police. At almost that same hour, an Ozark patrol officer notices a black Mazda 929 sitting on Herring Avenue, a quiet street a block from the county hospital. It isn’t  crashed.

 It isn’t hidden. It’s just parked there like someone stepped out and never came back. Doors unlocked. A window  cracked. Mud streaked across every panel. The tank almost empty. Police run the plates. Dothan  registration. They send a Dothan investigator out to have it towed. He looks through the windows.

  JB’s driver’s license is sitting right there on the dashboard. Both girls wallets are on the seats. Cash still in them. Jewelry, too. Whatever this is, robbery, isn’t it? And then he waits for the tow truck for hours. Six of them. Officers circle that car, look through the glass, run the plates again, and not one of them opens the trunk.

Less than a mile from the pay phone where Tracy said she was on her way home. It’s almost 2:00 in the afternoon when the investigator finally finds a trunk release lever  inside the car. He pulls it. JB Beasley and Tracy  Howlet are inside. Each of them shot once in the head. One shell casing  is found near Tracy. A second is never found.

 Tracy is underneath JB above her. Both girls are still fully clothed. Both of them are wet from the knees down. Mud and grass and thorns  scratched into Tracy’s arm, into the fabric of her pants, into a brand new pair of shoes she’d bought just  the week before. Wherever that happened, it wasn’t Herring Avenue.

 That road is paved and it’s dry. Somewhere between the pay phone and this trunk, these two girls stood in wet grass in the dark. No one will ever be able to tell you exactly where. Nothing has been taken. The cash, the jewelry, the credit cards, all of it still there. Just one small keychain is missing.  Blocks of white and black spelling out two words: hard to get.

 It will never turn up again. The first autopsy finds no sign  of sexual assault. Nothing in either girl’s system. Investigators are standing  in front of a double murder with nothing stolen, no motive, no suspect, no way in. That silence lasts 2 months. Then the Alabama State Crime Lab sends back  a report.

 Semen found in JB’s bra, in her underwear, on her skin. An unidentified palm print lifted from the underside of the  trunk lid. Dale County’s district attorney, David Amory, says it plainly. What happened to JB was sexual in nature. Whoever left that sample is the man who killed them. This is the moment the case is supposed to break open.

 The DNA is not a rumor, not a theory. It is a biological fingerprint that can only belong to one person on the planet. They run it against Alabama’s own database. Nothing. They run it against Coodis, the FBI’s national system. Nothing there either. Sit with that for a second. The sample is perfect,  complete, undeniable.

 And it belongs to a man who has never been arrested, never been convicted, never given a single law enforcement agency in the country a reason to log his name anywhere.  Dothan doesn’t know who he is, but they know he’s out there. A reward fund climbs past $15,000. The state adds 10,000 more. 500 interviews.

 Every block within a mile of Herring Avenue walked on foot more  than once. More than 70 men agreed to give a sample. Every single one of them was cleared. About 4 weeks after the trunk was opened, a 28-year-old mechanic  named Johnny Barentine walks into the Ozark police station on his own and says he has information.

 For 4 hours, his  story keeps changing. First, it’s a black truck he saw near Herring Avenue. By the sixth version, he’s the man  who watched from his own car while a tattooed stranger got into the girl’s Mazda,  led them to Herring Avenue, and shot them both. He’s arrested that same day. For a little while, Dothan believes it’s over.

 Except in every version Barentine tells,  he never once mentions anything sexual happening to JB. The exact detail that’s supposed to explain why any of this happened. The neighbor he names has a confirmed alibi. The DNA clears both of them completely. When Barentine finally sits in front of a grand jury, he admits the truth.

 He made the entire thing up for the reward money. He was never there. He never saw anything. The grand jury refuses  to indict. Weeks of work gone. Two more leads  are coming and they close the same way. After that, the case doesn’t move. Not for nearly two decades. What finally  breaks it open is a murder case in California.

 one that has nothing to do with Alabama and everything to do with what happens when someone decides to try one more thing with  a sample that has been sitting in a lab for 19 years with no one to match it to. Stay with me. Investigators run down every lead that comes in. Every one of them collapses. A man seen near Herring Avenue that same night leaves town  within days, unable to account for several hours of his evening.

 Investigators fly to Michigan three separate times to question him. His DNA clears him. A man from Mississippi staying in Ozark vanishes right after the murders. They find him, take a sample, and clear him. And that white pickup truck from the security footage, the one sitting at the pump while Tracy was on the phone with her mother.

 Police release the image to the media. Nobody ever comes forward. Nobody ever explains it. The truck just disappears and so does the man who was inside it. As completely as if neither of them were ever there. Three leads, three dead ends. The file gets thinner, not thicker. Years start to  pass. Not in dramatic leaps.

 In the quiet accumulation of birthdays  nobody gets to have. The original detectives retire or move on. New investigators  inherit a folder they can’t do anything more with. Every so often, someone pulls the DNA profile and runs it again. The database keeps growing. 2005, 2010, 2014. Every time the answer is the same, nothing.

Kodis only holds the DNA of people who’ve been arrested or convicted. And the man who left that sample has never been either, which  means he could be standing 3 ft behind you at a gas station in Dothan, and every computer in the country would look right past him. Carol Roberts will  later say she hasn’t slept through a full night since July 31st, 1999.

The worst moments, she says, are never the anniversaries. They’re the ordinary ones. Holidays, dinners, a chair that stays empty at the table. Then, in April  of 2018, a case 3,000 m away cracks the method open. In California, a former police officer named Joseph James D’Angelo is arrested after more than four decades of walking free.

 He was responsible for at least 13 murders and dozens of assaults across the 70s and 80s. His DNA was never in Kodis  either. What finds him is a technique nobody in law enforcement had tried at scale before. Investigators upload the crime scene DNA to Get Match, a public genealogy  website where ordinary people have submitted their own DNA results to trace family history.

 The search doesn’t find D’Angelo directly. It finds his  distant cousins. People who share fragments of his DNA without having the slightest idea what that means. From there,  investigators build his family tree backward, branch by branch, until one name fits every piece. Ozark’s police chief, a man named Marlo Walker, watches that case from Alabama.

 And he isn’t  reading it as news. He’s reading it as a method, a semen sample. A girl who was 17, 20 years without a single match. He calls the same lab that worked D’Angelo, a firm called Parabon Nano Labs, and sends them  the 1999 sample. Find the family, he tells them. Narrow it down. Parabon comes back with a list.

Alabama families whose genetic markers overlap with the crime scene sample. Walker goes through it. One name stops him. He doesn’t recognize it from the case file. He doesn’t recognize it from any tip that’s come in over 20 years. He recognizes  it because he grew up in the same town.

 Before I tell you who it is, drop your best guess in the comments right now. Because when you hear the answer, I  want you to remember what you thought. His name is Kohley McCrainy. He is 45 years old. For 20 of those years, he has lived inside the same community as JB Beasley and  Tracy Howlet, the same roads, the same stores, the same Sunday mornings.

 He drives trucks for a company out of Troy. He is a military veteran, a Carol High graduate. by 2013, the founder of his own ministry, Spirit and Truth Lifeline Ministries. He has two children with his wife, Janette. He lives less than a mile from Herring Avenue. In 20 years, he has never been arrested, never been questioned, never given anyone in Dale County a single reason to pull his file.

 Walker doesn’t bring him in as a suspect.  He calls him in as a neighbor. two men who grew up in the same town having a conversation about an old case that still needs help. He tells Mccrainy he isn’t under suspicion, that police just need a sample  to help rule people out. Janette comes with him. She sits beside her husband and tells him he should cooperate.

 In 20 years of marriage, he has never given her a reason to think  twice. She says it the way a person says something they are certain of. She has earned it over 20 years and  it has never been wrong. Not once that she could see. Mccrainy agrees to give a sample. He doesn’t need to think about it. An officer takes it from the inside of his cheek. A few seconds, nothing more.

Mccrainy cooperates the way a man cooperates when he believes the room is on his side. Then he walks back out into the town he has moved through for two decades, past the gas stations and the churches. the streets he knows by heart, carrying whatever he has carried since July 31st, 1999.  What neither of them knows sitting in that room is that the meeting was a formality before it began.

 Parabon had already done the work. The family tree had been built backward, branch by branch, and it had ended with his name before Walker ever picked up the phone. The swab isn’t an investigation. It is a confirmation. The results come back unambiguous, not similar, not partial, identical to the DNA found on JB Beasley’s clothing 20 years earlier.

When they sit him down and tell him,  Mccrainy says he never met either girl. He was never in Ozark that night. On March 15th, 2019, Kohley McCrainy is arrested on four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. Coy, >> you do have a right to be a child. Anything you say genuinely has this law. >> The state  will seek the death penalty.

What moves through Dothan and Ozark is not relief. It is something heavier and harder to name. A pastor, a father, a man people greeted at church, passed on the road, made small talk with at gas stations, standing the whole time inside  the same small radius as the families still waiting for his name.

The trial should have started in 2020. CO pushes it back 3 years. It isn’t until April of 2023, almost  24 years to the night after the big little store, that the case finally reaches a jury in Dale  County. Mccrainy takes the stand himself, a real gamble in a  capital case. The story he tells looks nothing like his  denial 4 years earlier.

 He’d met JB before, he says, at a mall in Dothan. She gave him her number. They’d made plans to meet in Ozark  that night. His truck broke down at that same gas station. He saw the girls at the pay phone and got a ride with them. What happened between them was consensual. They dropped him home around 12:45 in the morning.

 There is no  call log, no witness, nothing placing him near JB before that night. Marilyn Merritt takes the stand again and says exactly what  she said in 1999. Two anxious, lost girls focused on nothing but getting home. Attorney General Marshall walks Mccrainy through his own  timeline in cross-examination. 45 minutes start to finish.

Happened pretty fast, didn’t it? He says. Then the state calls Janette, the same woman who sat beside her husband in 2019 and told him to cooperate because she believed in him completely. Now she is on the stand under oath. She tells the jury that on the night of July 31st, 1999, her husband left the house around 10:00.

 That his routine had him home by 11:30. That he didn’t walk back through the door until 12:45  in the morning. That the reason he gave her back then was car trouble at a gas station. The same station where two girls made their last phone call home. 20 years of marriage, two children, a ministry, and she is the one who puts him at the scene at the hour on the night it happened.

 On April 26th, 2023, the jury returns. Guilty. All four counts. The murder of JB Beasley  during a rape. The murder of Tracy Howlet in that same act. both girls in the same course of conduct and the use of JB’s Mazda in the crime  itself. The following day, Mccrainy is sentenced to life without parole. The state asked for death.

 The jury chose the other option, a cell with no way out  for the rest of his life. Carol Roberts sits completely still when the verdict is read. Cheryl Bagoon leans forward and sobs. And in the front row where he has sat  for every hearing, every briefing, every year with nothing new to report is Mike Roberts, the man who raised Tracy as his own from the  time she was small.

He hears the word guilty. Less than a year later, he dies.  He was 74. He held on just long enough. From a phone inside the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama. Mccrainy tells ABC News  he’s still innocent, that people can call him whatever they want, that he didn’t do this.

 The DNA said otherwise, it said so long before he ever spoke those words, stored in a lab while the man it would eventually identify was filling up at the gas station down the road. 24 years later, there’s still one thing nobody has ever found. A small keychain, white and black blocks, spelling out two words, hard to get.

 It was on that dashboard in that car the night these  girls went missing. And then it was gone. Somewhere in Dothan, Alabama, a woman still hears four words in her sleep. Four ordinary words her daughter said from a pay phone at a closed gas station in a town she’d never been to, never knowing they would be  the last words her mother would ever hear her say.

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