On the morning of August 1, 1999, a black Mazda sat abandoned on Herring Avenue in Ozark, Alabama. The driver’s window was cracked open a few inches. The doors were unlocked. Inside sat two wallets, cash, jewelry, and credit cards, all untouched.
On the dashboard lay the driver’s license of seventeen-year-old J. B. Beasley. The only thing missing was her keychain.
Officers ran the plates, found the car belonged to someone in Dothan, and called for a tow. The car sat in plain daylight on an ordinary residential street for six hours while neighbors walked past on their way to work. Nearly two in the afternoon came and went before an investigator, still waiting on the tow truck, found the interior lever that popped the trunk without a key. J.
B. Beasley and her best friend Tracy Howlett were both inside. Each had been shot once in the head at close range. Their clothes showed no torn fabric, no scraped hands, nothing that looked like a fight for their lives.
The night before, the two girls had set out from Dothan for a birthday party in Headland, a town about ten miles north. They missed a turn in the dark and ended up more than twenty miles in the opposite direction in Ozark. A little after 11:30 p. m.
, they pulled into a small convenience store and gas station on the town’s east side. The store was closed, but a woman named Marilyn Merritt and her daughter were still there. J. B.
and Tracy asked for directions back toward the highway. Merritt remembered them clearly afterward, not because anything seemed wrong, but because nothing did. The car was spotless. The girls were polite, a little embarrassed about being late, worried about missing curfew.
At the payphone on the corner of the store, Tracy called her mother, Carol Roberts, to say they were on their way. The last thing Tracy said before hanging up was that she loved her. Merritt watched the black Mazda pull out, turn right exactly as she’d directed, and disappear down the road toward the highway. It was the last time anyone saw either girl alive.
Inside the store, a security camera had captured the blurred shape of a small white pickup truck parked at one of the pumps at almost the exact minute Tracy was on the phone. No purchase was ever logged at that pump. No one ever identified the truck. Two months later, the Alabama State Crime Lab delivered a finding that reframed the case.
Semen recovered from J. B. ’s bra, underwear, and skin, along with an unidentified palm print lifted from inside the trunk lid, pointed to a sexual crime. District Attorney David Emery said publicly what the evidence already suggested.
Finding whoever left that sample would mean finding the killer. That theory turned out to be correct. Finding him would take another twenty years. Exactly one month after the bodies were found, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time mechanic named Johnny Barrentine walked into the Ozark Police Station and said he knew something about the case.
He lived less than a mile from where the Mazda had been abandoned. Over four recorded hours, Barrentine told six different versions of what happened that night. In the first, he’d simply seen a black truck speeding away. By the fourth, he’d given a ride to a stranger covered in tattoos.
By the sixth, that stranger had forced the girls to Herring Avenue and shot them both while Barrentine listened from his own vehicle. Police arrested him immediately. But in none of his six versions did he ever mention a sexual assault, despite physical evidence already confirming one had occurred. The neighbor he named as the killer had an airtight alibi.
When Barrentine’s own DNA was tested against the evidence, it wasn’t a match. Brought before a grand jury, he finally admitted he had invented the entire story, hoping to collect reward money. The grand jury declined to indict him. He walked free, but the case was worse than before.
Investigators had spent a month chasing a story that never existed. While the case sat frozen, the man responsible lived an ordinary life. Coley McCraney married a woman named Janette. They had children.
He built a career as a long-haul truck driver, logging hours on the same highways that ran past Herring Avenue, and founded a ministry, eventually preaching regularly at a local church. Every July 31st, Sheryl Burgoon and Carol Roberts relived the same night, the same payphone, the same last words. The DNA sample recovered from J. B.
’s body sat in a lab waiting on a criminal database that had nothing to compare it to, because the man who left it had never once given that system a reason to notice him. Investigators never stopped trying. A man from Michigan was flown in and questioned three times. His DNA didn’t match.
A man from Mississippi who vanished from Ozark after the killings was tracked down and tested. His didn’t match either. Every name the case produced led to the same dead end. In April 2018, police in California announced the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, responsible for at least thirteen murders and more than fifty sexual assaults.
He had evaded capture for over forty years. What finally caught him was a technique never before used in an American criminal case: forensic genetic genealogy. Traditional DNA databases only hold samples from people who’ve been arrested or convicted. Genetic genealogy didn’t need the killer’s DNA on file.
It only needed a distant cousin somewhere down his family tree curious enough about their own ancestry to upload theirs. Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker followed the DeAngelo case closely because he was thinking about a file sitting in his own department. He reached out to Parabon Nano Labs, the same company that had helped identify DeAngelo, and asked them to run the 1999 sample through public genealogy databases. Months later, they sent back a list.
Walker read through it slowly, then stopped on one name he recognized from his own high school years: Coley McCraney. Forty-five years old, a long-haul truck driver, a pastor at a local church, married with two children. No arrests, no criminal history. Nothing in twenty years of investigation had ever connected his name to the case.
Walker didn’t approach him as a suspect. A suspect could lawyer up or disappear. Instead, he reached out to an old classmate and asked him to come down to the station as a local resident helping with an investigation. Sitting across the table, Walker told him plainly he wasn’t a suspect, but needed a DNA sample to identify the person they were actually looking for.
Janette sat beside her husband and encouraged him to cooperate. McCraney agreed without hesitation. He sat still while an officer swabbed the inside of his cheek, calm, unhurried, chatting like two men catching up. The results came back within weeks.
Coley McCraney was a match. When investigators laid the results in front of him, he denied everything. He said he didn’t know either girl. He said he’d never been in Ozark on the night of July 31st, 1999.
On March 15th, 2019, twenty years almost to the week after two girls pulled out of a gas station parking lot and vanished, Coley McCraney was arrested and charged with capital murder and rape. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty. The shock wasn’t that the case had finally been solved, it was who had been living in plain sight. A pastor, a father, a truck driver half the town could name on sight.
Not once in twenty years had anyone, including the police, thought to ask where he’d been that night. Investigators questioned him for roughly twenty-seven hours after his arrest. According to his own attorney, he asked for a lawyer at least eight times and wasn’t granted access to one. It was a genuine failure of process.
The trial didn’t open in a Dale County courtroom until April 2023, twenty-four years after the murders. Over a trial that stretched nearly two weeks, prosecutors laid out the physical evidence and a reconstruction of that night built entirely from what the evidence could prove. Then McCraney took the stand himself. He told the jury he’d met J.
B. months earlier at a Dothan shopping mall, that they’d exchanged numbers and arranged to meet in Ozark that night. He claimed his truck had broken down, that the girls offered him a ride, and that he and J. B.
had consensual sex. He said he’d been afraid his wife would find out about the affair. It fell apart under the first real question. There were no texts, no calls, no witnesses, nothing to suggest J.
B. Beasley and Coley McCraney had ever exchanged a single word before that night. Marilyn Merritt testified plainly the girls were simply trying to find their way home. Tracy’s 11:35 p.
m. phone call to her mother, a girl saying she was on her way home, not on her way to keep a secret date, undercut the story even further. The most devastating witness wasn’t a police officer or a forensic expert. It was Janette McCraney, the woman who had sat beside her husband in 2019 and encouraged him to cooperate.
On the witness stand, she testified that her husband had gone out on the night of July 31st, 1999, and hadn’t come home for hours. He could never explain to her satisfaction, then or since. She had trusted him for twenty years. She had helped hand police the evidence that would convict him, believing she was simply helping identify some stranger.
Now she sat under oath and testified against the man she’d married. On April 25th, 2023, the jury retired to deliberate. The next day, they returned, guilty on all four counts: two counts of capital murder for shooting into an occupied vehicle, one for each girl, one count of capital murder during the course of a rape, and one count of capital murder of two or more people. The following day, they returned again to decide his sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole, not the death penalty prosecutors had sought.
When the verdict was read, Carol Roberts sat speechless. Sheryl Burgoon leaned forward in her seat and broke into tears the moment she heard the word guilty. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who personally prosecuted the case, said plainly that two young girls had lost every chance to grow up. No verdict could undo that or give either family the twenty years back.
Coley McCraney is now serving his sentence at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, still filing appeals, still insisting from prison that he wasn’t a killer. The Beasley-Howlett case became one of the first in the country to prove that forensic genetic genealogy could crack a cold case with no criminal record, no reliable witness, and no evidence beyond a single DNA sample stored for two decades.
In the years since, hundreds of other cold cases across America have been reopened using the same method.