On the morning of September 3rd, 1964, Darlene Pruett left her house on Hickory Road in Calvert County, Arkansas, and did not come home. She was 22 years old, weighed 115 pounds, and carried her lunch to work in a brown paper bag every morning: a ham sandwich and a thermos of sweet tea, because she said the lunch counter near the cotton gin charged too much for what you got. She stepped off the Route 9 bus at 6:18 that morning at the intersection of Mill Road and Hickory Street, the same stop she used every working day. The driver confirmed she turned left toward the gin, the same direction she always went.
She should have arrived at the employee entrance by 6:35. She never appeared. Calvert County in 1964 was a place of about 4,000 people, nestled in the Ozark foothills, where the cotton fields ran white to the horizon in early September. Darlene had grown up seven miles north of town, the second of five children, and had lived her entire life within 20 miles of the house where she was born.
She had a small and earnest plan: save enough from her job at the gin to contribute to a down payment on a lot on Elm Street, marry her boyfriend of three years, James Ray Holloway, and have a house with a garden before she turned 25. James Ray had proposed in April, driving to Little Rock to buy a quarter-carat diamond set in white gold. She wore the ring to work every day. She was a licensed practical nurse by training but had taken the mill job when the county hospital cut hours.
Her supervisor called her the most dependable employee he had, never late, never absent. When she did not arrive at the gin that morning, her supervisor sent a young worker to check the road. He found her lunch bag in a ditch forty feet from the bus stop, the thermos open, the sweet tea still warm. Her purse lay in the grass on the opposite side of the road.
A small spiral notebook from her purse had fallen open; in it she had written things she was looking forward to: James Ray’s birthday, plant tulip bulbs before frost, get mama’s winter coat from the cedar chest. Her shoes were found thirty yards further along the road. She was not there. The search began within the hour.
Sixty volunteers combed Mill Road and the surrounding fields through the morning and into the afternoon. Arkansas State Police were called, and dogs were brought in. By nightfall they had found nothing except a partial boot print in the soft shoulder of the road and a single strand of dark hair caught on a fence post. Darlene was found on September 7th, four days after she disappeared, by a farmhand checking fence line in a wooded hollow two miles east of where her shoes had been found.
She had been murdered. The cause of death was determined by the county medical examiner, and evidence at the scene suggested a violent struggle. James Ray Holloway identified her body. The investigation was led by Sheriff’s Deputy Arnold Mackie, a 29-year veteran who would later describe the Pruett case as the one that never let him go.
Within the first two weeks, Mackie interviewed 47 people and built a list of seven men who had made comments about Darlene in public, had no verifiable alibi for the morning of September 3rd, or had a prior history of violent conduct. At the top of the list was Gerald Fitch, a 34-year-old part-time mechanic and laborer who had worked briefly at the cotton gin six months before the murder. Co-workers recalled that supervisors had spoken to him twice about the way he looked at female employees. He lived in a house trailer on Route 9, three-quarters of a mile from the bus stop where Darlene was last seen.
He drove a 1957 Ford pickup. Mackie interviewed Fitch four times in the first month. Fitch had no alibi he could prove and no alibi he would abandon. Mackie applied for a search warrant, but the judge denied it for insufficient probable cause.
The biological evidence collected from Darlene’s clothing was submitted to the Arkansas State Crime Lab. The technology of 1964 could narrow a blood type, but it could not individualize. The lab reported the perpetrator was type O positive, which matched roughly 42 percent of the American male population. It also matched Gerald Fitch.
And so did a quarter million other men in Arkansas. The case did not close, but it did not move either. James Ray Holloway never married. The Calvert County Gazette ran Darlene’s name once a year on the anniversary of her disappearance until 1979, when the notices stopped.
By 1985, Arnold Mackie had retired. He took the case file home with him in a cardboard box, telling his daughter he could not leave it at the department because he did not trust that anyone would keep it safe when they eventually cleared out the old records room. He was right to worry. A flood in 1987 destroyed two filing cabinets worth of open cases from that era.
The evidence collected from Darlene’s clothing survived because it was on a high shelf in the county storage facility on Magnolia Avenue, whether by intention or pure accident, no one could say for certain. Darlene’s mother kept the engagement ring in a small velvet box on her nightstand for the rest of her life. She died in 1991 without an answer. Gerald Fitch moved away from Calvert County in the mid-1970s and died in 1998 in Texarkana of congestive heart failure.
He was 68 years old. He had never been charged with a crime. By 2003, no one in the Calvert County Sheriff’s Department had worked the original investigation. The case existed as a paper file in a banker’s box in a storage room alongside cases going back to 1931.
The first person to return to the Pruett case with modern tools was not a detective. She was a retired school teacher named Bett Ann Holloway, James Ray’s niece. She had heard the story her entire life. When genealogical DNA databases began to open to law enforcement submissions in the early 2010s, she started writing letters.
She wrote to the Calvert County Sheriff’s Department, the Arkansas State Police Cold Case Unit, and the Attorney General’s office. She kept copies of every letter and a log of every response, which was mostly silence and occasionally a form letter explaining that resources were limited. In 2019, she found a cold case advocacy nonprofit that worked with volunteer genetic genealogists. They agreed to take the case.
In January 2020, a genealogist named Rosario Escobar, working remotely from her kitchen table in Tucson, Arizona, uploaded the DNA profile extracted from the preserved biological evidence to a public ancestry database. The process compares crime scene DNA against the genetic profiles of people who voluntarily uploaded their own ancestry results, then uses shared genetic segments to identify distant relatives and trace family trees back toward a common ancestor. It is detective work done in spreadsheets and family trees. Rosario found a match to a second cousin whose family tree she began to build outward.
She worked for six weeks, went back five generations, and identified three men born in Arkansas in the right decade who could theoretically be the contributor to the crime scene evidence. Gerald Fitch was one of them. In September 2020, Rosario called the Calvert County cold case coordinator and asked whether they had any archived DNA from the original persons of interest. They did not.
But they had a name. The Calvert County cold case unit, now led by Detective Loretta Grimes, opened an active investigation for the first time in decades. Grimes drove to Texarkana, where Gerald Fitch had died in 1998. She obtained a court order for cemetery records, located his grave, and in October 2020, technicians from the Arkansas State Crime Lab exhumed a DNA sample from his remains.
On a Tuesday morning in early December 2020, Detective Grimes received the call from the crime lab’s forensic analyst. The DNA from Gerald Fitch’s remains matched the biological evidence collected from Darlene Pruett’s clothing on September 7th, 1964. Not a near match. Not a probable match.
A match. In the weeks after the confirmation, Grimes built the complete picture that Arnold Mackie had never been able to. Gerald Fitch had worked at the cotton gin for approximately four months in early 1964 and had been dismissed not long before the murder after a final warning about his conduct. Records from the Calvert County Justice of the Peace office showed a complaint filed against Fitch in 1962, two years before the murder, for following a woman home from a church social.
The complaint had been settled informally and was never in the 1964 investigative file. It had never been shared with Mackie. Former co-workers, now in their 70s and 80s, were re-interviewed. One 81-year-old woman told Detective Grimes that Fitch had once said something to her about Darlene that she had never repeated to anyone because she thought it would sound like she was making trouble.
She had remembered it for 56 years. There would be no arrest. Gerald Fitch was dead. There would be no trial, no sentencing.
But the Arkansas Attorney General’s office made a formal public statement in February 2021. Based on DNA evidence and corroborating investigation, Gerald Fitch of Calvert County, Arkansas, was identified as the perpetrator in the September 1964 murder of Darlene Louise Pruett. James Ray Holloway had died in 2014, six years before the DNA result came back. He never had his answer.
Bett Ann Holloway, who fought for 18 years to get someone to listen, drove to his grave after the Attorney General’s announcement. Detective Grimes, when asked what the confirmation meant after 62 years, said: “The case is closed, but I don’t think any of us think it’s over. ”
The DNA evidence that solved the case was collected in 1964 using methods considered advanced for their time. It was preserved by accident as much as by intention, surviving a flood and two reorganizations of a county evidence room, sealed in a cardboard box on a high shelf.
The genealogist who built the family tree that pointed to Gerald Fitch worked on a volunteer basis at a kitchen table in another state. The detective who exhumed a man dead for 22 years led a cold case unit created only a decade before. None of that was supposed to work. All of it did.
A name was finally returned to Darlene Pruett, the truth recorded in the correct place with the correct name, long after the man who took her life believed the world had simply forgotten.