On a Sunday evening in March 1973, Coretta Jean Wilkes left her farm outside Dellwood, Mississippi, to clean the county offices. She told her neighbor Hattie Beaumont, who was watching her two young children, that she expected to be home well before nine. She drove her green 1965 Ford pickup, the one with the bent antenna her five-year-old son Marcus had damaged the previous summer. She never came home.
Coretta was thirty-one years old. She had a daughter, Levette, age eight, and a son, Marcus, age five. Her husband Raymond had died of a heart attack two years earlier, leaving her with the farm, the children, and mounting debt. She had taken the cleaning contract with the county to keep things together, though she had once hoped for more.
She had completed two years of coursework at a teaching college before Raymond’s illness ended that. Her neighbors described her as disciplined, private, and deeply devoted to her children. She read to Levette and Marcus every night from a set of encyclopedias she had bought on installment from a traveling salesman. She wanted to finish her teaching certificate and teach third grade.
She had been saying so with complete seriousness since she was nineteen. By ten o’clock that Sunday night, Hattie Beaumont had put the children to bed and was watching the clock. By eleven, she had called Coretta’s brother, Everett, who lived in Greenville. By midnight, Everett was driving to Dellwood.
At one in the morning, the two of them drove to the county offices and found Coretta’s truck parked in its usual spot along the side of the building. The building was dark and locked. No one answered when they knocked. Everett called the sheriff’s office from a payphone.
The deputy who answered told him there was likely an innocent explanation, that Coretta had probably gotten a ride somewhere, and that they could file a report in the morning. The following morning, the truck was still there. The interior was undisturbed. Her cleaning supplies were still inside the county building.
The mop leaned against the supply closet wall. The cart sat halfway through the main corridor. A bottle of ammonia stood uncapped on the floor beside the hall bathroom. Whatever had interrupted Coretta Wilkes had interrupted her in the middle of her work.
Sheriff Harlan Price took the missing person’s report. He was forty-six years old, in his second term, broadly liked in the white community and regarded with wariness in the black community. He shook Everett Wilkes’ hand, listened carefully, and assured him that every resource of the county sheriff’s department would be applied to finding his sister. For nine days, investigators conducted what the local paper described as an extensive search.
They canvassed the roads between the county offices and the Wilks farm. They interviewed several people in Coretta’s life. They found no witnesses and no physical evidence suggesting what had happened to her. On the tenth day, Coretta Jean Wilkes was found.
She was in a drainage ditch off a farm road four miles east of Dellwood, partially concealed by a stand of cattails, in water that had hidden most of what an investigation would need. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. She had been there since approximately the night she disappeared. The sheriff’s office opened a homicide investigation.
Price stood at the scene and told a deputy that this was the worst thing he had seen in twenty years of law enforcement. He assigned two deputies full-time. Over the following six weeks, they interviewed forty-three people. They identified one person of interest, a white man named Deek Tolbert who had previously clashed with Coretta’s father over a property line and had been seen in his truck near the county road that evening.
Tolbert was questioned once, briefly. His wife provided an alibi. The matter was noted in the case file and not pursued further. By the end of the summer, the active investigation had concluded with no arrest, no named suspect, and no public accounting of where the case stood.
Everett Wilkes drove to the county offices and asked to speak with Sheriff Price directly. Price was not available. He was never available when Everett came. Over the following year, Everett submitted three written requests for an update.
He received two form letters and one phone call from a deputy who told him there were no new developments, but that the case remained open. It remained open in the way certain things remain open in certain counties in the deep South in 1973. Recorded as open. Treated as finished.
The case stayed that way for decades. Harlan Price served three more terms after 1973, retired in 1993, and died of a stroke in 2005 at the age of seventy-eight. He was buried with a ceremony attended by the county commission and a tribute from a sitting state legislator. His son Glenn had followed him into law enforcement, serving as a deputy sheriff in a neighboring county for thirty years.
In 2019, the Wilkes file crossed the desk of Detective Merilu Saucier of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation’s cold case division. It had been selected as part of a federally funded initiative to review unsolved homicides from the pre-DNA era in Mississippi counties with documented histories of racially biased law enforcement. Dellwood County met that criterion. Saucier read the original case file in one sitting.
She later described it as one of the most inadequate investigative records she had encountered in twenty years of cold case work. Not because the paperwork was disorganized, but because of what was not in it. Forty-three people interviewed. Not one of them appearing to have been asked where Harlan Price was on the evening of March 18th, 1973.
“You read enough of these files,” she said in a 2023 interview, “and you learn to look for the shape of what’s missing. The gaps in a file are sometimes more telling than what’s in it. ”
Nobody asked the sheriff. In a case involving a victim found on county property, with county keys, with county access, nobody asked the sheriff.
In the spring of 2021, the cold case unit submitted a biological sample from the original 1973 evidence to the state forensic laboratory for advanced DNA analysis. The sample had been collected at the scene and stored at the State Crime Laboratory in Jackson, one of several items logged as evidence in 1973 and never subsequently reprocessed. It produced a partial male DNA profile. It was submitted to the national database.
No direct match returned. Saucier did not stop there. Working with a forensic genealogist contracted through the state, investigators uploaded the profile to a public ancestry database and began tracing outward through distant genetic relatives. The process took fourteen months.
In the summer of 2022, the genealogical tree produced a name at its center that Saucier recognized. She pulled the file on Harlan Price. She ordered a court-approved sample from biological evidence connected to his son, Glenn Price. The comparison of that sample against the 1973 profile was run three times by two independent laboratories.
It matched. Saucier was in her office on a Thursday afternoon when the final confirmation report came through. She set it on her desk and sat with it for what she later described as a long time. Then she called the state attorney general’s office, the MBI director, and finally Everett Wilkes.
Everett was eighty-one years old. His hands shook when he answered the phone. Saucier told him they knew who had done it. He didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then he said, “I always knew it was somebody with power. ”
I told him he was right. And he cried. And so did I.
The investigation now shifted to building a prosecutable case around a perpetrator who had been dead for seventeen years. The attorney general’s office convened a special review to determine whether posthumous accountability measures, formal findings of guilt, public record, and civil remedies could be pursued against Price’s estate. Investigators also re-examined Price’s conduct throughout the original investigation, the pattern of obstruction embedded in the case file, and the extent to which other officials may have been aware. Glenn Price, when contacted in late 2022, denied all knowledge of his father’s involvement and cooperated fully with the review.
He was not accused of any wrongdoing. In a statement released through his attorney, he said he was devastated by the findings and that no words could address what the Wilks family had endured. He resigned from his position as deputy sheriff the following week. In March of 2023, fifty years to the month after Coretta Jean Wilkes had driven her green Ford pickup to the county offices and never come home, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office held a press conference in Jackson.
The formal findings were read into the public record. Harlan Price, former sheriff of Dellwood County, had been identified through forensic genealogical DNA analysis as the individual whose biological material was recovered from the scene of Coretta Jean Wilkes’ murder. The investigation further concluded that the original inquiry conducted under Price’s supervision had been structurally compromised by his control over the evidence, the witnesses, and the direction of the case. Everett Wilkes was in the front row.
Levette Wilks, Coretta’s daughter, was sixty years old. She had been eight the last time she saw her mother. She sat beside her uncle and held his hand through the reading of the entire statement. Afterward, on the steps of the building, she spoke to reporters.
“My mother wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “She wanted to teach third grade. She never got to do that. She never got to see me grow up.
She never got to meet my children. ”
She paused. “I want people to know who she was, not just that she was killed. Who she was.
”
Dellwood County’s Board of Supervisors voted that year to formally rename the county maintenance building, the building Coretta Wilks had cleaned on the night she was murdered, the building in which Harlan Price had kept his office. The Coretta Jean Wilks Public Service Center. The vote was unanimous. It was the first time in that county’s history that a public building had been named for a black woman.
The evidence and methodology used in the Wilks case have since been adopted as the protocol by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation for all pre-1990 homicide cold cases in which biological evidence was preserved. As of 2024, six additional cases in Mississippi counties have been submitted for forensic genealogical review using the same approach. Coretta Jean Wilks would have been eighty-three. She would have spent decades teaching third graders to read.
She would have watched Levette and Marcus grow up. She never got to do any of it. But the questions that were never asked in 1973, the interviews that were never conducted, the investigation that was never allowed to run its course, they were finally answered. Justice found Coretta Jean Wilkes fifty years late.
Her name is on a building now in the county where it happened, in the state where it was covered up. That is what remains.