On the night of July 31, 1999, seventeen-year-old J. B. Beasley and her best friend Tracy Hawlett climbed into a black Mazda 929 and left Dothan, Alabama, heading to an outdoor party about ten miles north in Headland. It was J.
B. ‘s birthday, a night that should have been memorable for all the right reasons. But somewhere along the way, they made a wrong turn. Instead of reaching the party, they ended up more than twenty miles in the opposite direction, in the small town of Ozark.
Just after 11:30 p. m. , the girls pulled into the Big Little convenience store on East Broad Street. The store had closed at 11:00, but a woman named Marilyn Merritt and her daughter were still in the parking lot after buying sodas.
J. B. and Tracy got out and asked for directions back to Highway 231. Merritt later remembered the girls as neat and clean, two kids simply worried about getting home late.
At the payphone on the corner, Tracy called her mother, Carol Roberts. She said they were lost but now had directions and were on their way home. Her last words were, “Mom, I love you. Be home soon.
” Merritt watched the black Mazda turn right onto the main road and disappear into the darkness. It was the last time anyone saw them alive. When the girls never came home, their families reported them missing the next morning. That same day, police found the black Mazda parked on Herring Avenue in Ozark, less than a mile from the payphone.
The car looked abandoned: doors unlocked, driver’s window cracked a few inches, mud covering the exterior, the gas tank nearly empty. Inside were both girls’ wallets, cash, jewelry, and credit cards, all untouched. J. B.
‘s driver’s license sat on the dashboard. The only thing missing was her keychain, a small chain with blocks spelling “hard to get. ” For six hours, no one opened the trunk. Finally, a Dothan investigator discovered the trunk could be opened from a lever inside.
When he popped it, he found J. B. and Tracy, each shot once in the head with a 9-millimeter handgun. They were fully clothed, with no signs of a struggle, but the details told a darker story.
Tracy had scratches on her arm, briars stuck to her pants, and mud caked on her new shoes. Both girls’ pant legs were wet up to the knees. They had walked through damp ground somewhere else before they were killed. The girls had not been murdered on Herring Avenue.
The car was simply the place where the killer had dumped them. Robbery was ruled out immediately. The killer had left cash, jewelry, and credit cards behind. Two months later, the Alabama State Crime Lab announced a discovery that changed the direction of the investigation: semen was found on J.
B. Beasley’s clothing and skin. An unidentified palm print was also lifted from the inside of the trunk lid. District Attorney David Emery stated outright that this was a sexual crime.
Finding the owner of that semen would mean finding the killer. That theory was correct, but finding him would take another twenty years. The investigation stalled almost immediately. A month after the bodies were found, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time mechanic named Johnny William Barentine walked into the police station claiming he knew something about the case.
Over four hours of interrogation, he gave six different versions of events. In his final story, he claimed a tattooed stranger had forced the girls into their car, driven to Herring Avenue, shot them, and driven away with Barentine. Police arrested him, and the community breathed a sigh of relief. But the DNA did not match.
Barentine later admitted before a grand jury that he had made the entire story up to claim a reward. He knew nothing. The grand jury declined to indict him, and the case returned to square one, now worse than before because months and significant resources had been wasted on a fabricated confession. Other leads went nowhere.
A man from Michigan who could not account for three to four hours that night was flown in for questioning and DNA testing; it did not match. A man from Mississippi who disappeared from Ozark right after the crime was also cleared. The blurry security camera footage from the Big Little Store captured a small white pickup truck parked at the gas pump at the exact time Tracy was on the phone, but no transaction was recorded, no one recognized the truck, and its driver was never identified. Every lead hit a dead end.
The semen DNA was the only piece of evidence that still held value, but it matched no one in any criminal database. The killer had no criminal record, no reason for his DNA to be in any system. The years passed. The 2000s came, then the 2010s.
The case became one of the most famous cold cases in Alabama history, mentioned in anniversary articles every five years and discussed in true crime forums, but there were no answers. For Carol Roberts and Cheryl Bergoon, J. B. ‘s mother, time did not move forward.
It only accumulated, year after year, like sediment pressing down on a wound that would never heal. Every July 31, they relived the phone call, the last words, and the car turning right into the darkness. In April 2018, a breakthrough in an unrelated case changed everything. Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was arrested after forty years on the run thanks to a new investigative technique: genetic genealogy.
Instead of searching for a suspect’s DNA directly in criminal databases, investigators ran crime scene DNA through public genealogy databases like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people had voluntarily uploaded their DNA to research their ancestry. From partial matches, they built family trees, working backward from distant relatives to narrower and narrower circles, until they identified a single individual who fit the criteria. Ozark Police Chief Mosley Walker followed the case closely because he had a specific file in mind: the DNA sample that had sat quietly in a lab for nearly twenty years. He contacted Parabon NanoLabs, the company that had played a key role in identifying DeAngelo, and requested they run the 1999 crime scene DNA through GEDmatch.
The results returned a list of Alabama families with DNA similar to the crime scene sample. When Walker read through the list, he stopped at a name he recognized from his school days: Coley McCraney, forty-five years old, a long-haul truck driver and a pastor at a local church, with a wife named Janette and two children. He had no criminal record and no police history. In the community, he was a familiar and respected face, someone neighbors chatted with comfortably, someone his congregation looked up to.
That was exactly why his DNA had never been in a criminal database. Walker did not approach McCraney as a suspect. Instead, he invited him to the station as a local resident helping the police, a friendly conversation between people who had known each other since high school. Walker told him directly that he was not a suspect but needed his DNA to identify the person they were really looking for.
Janette sat beside her husband and encouraged him to agree. McCraney calmly provided a cheek swab, unaware that the family tree built from the DNA had already pointed directly to him before he walked in. The test results left no room for doubt: his DNA matched exactly with the semen sample collected from J. B.
Beasley in 1999. When confronted, McCraney denied everything, claiming he did not know the girls and was not in Ozark that night. On March 15, 2019, nearly twenty years after the girls disappeared from the Big Little Store parking lot, he was arrested on multiple counts of capital murder and rape. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.
The shock in Dothan and Ozark was not that the case had been solved, but the name. Coley McCraney was a pastor, a father, a truck driver, someone people might have nodded to on the road or sat near in church. For twenty years, the killer had been living normally in the middle of the community, going to work, attending church, and raising children, while the two mothers sat at home waiting for answers. The trial was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and did not open until April 2023, twenty-four years after the murders.
McCraney, now forty-nine, faced four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. His testimony was completely different from his 2019 denial. He claimed he had met J. B.
at a shopping mall a few months before the crime, that they had exchanged phone numbers, and that on the night of July 31 they met in Ozark by chance. He admitted to having sex with her in the cab of his truck but insisted it was consensual. He denied knowing anything about the murders, saying he had lied in 2019 because he was afraid his wife would find out about the affair. The prosecution dismantled his testimony point by point.
There was no evidence, no texts, no calls, no witnesses to confirm the two had ever known each other. Marilyn Merritt testified that the girls were simply lost and trying to find their way home. Tracy’s phone call to her mother at 11:35 p. m.
, saying they were on their way home, contradicted any planned meeting. The prosecution’s reconstruction, based on physical and forensic evidence, was that after the girls left the parking lot, McCraney approached them at gunpoint, forced them to another location with damp ground, which explained the mud on their shoes and pant legs, raped J. B. , shot both girls with a 9-millimeter handgun, placed their bodies in the trunk, drove the car to Herring Avenue, and left it there.
The most important witness of the trial was Janette McCraney, the wife who had unknowingly encouraged her husband to give his DNA to police. She testified that her husband had gone out on the night of July 31, 1999, and had not come home for a period of time he could never satisfactorily explain. Her testimony was one of the most heartbreaking moments of the case. On April 26, 2023, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all four counts of capital murder.
The following day, they decided the sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was not the death penalty prosecutors had sought, but McCraney would never walk free again. Carol Roberts said she was stunned, that they had waited twenty-four years and finally someone was being held accountable. Cheryl Bergoon broke down in uncontrollable tears when she heard the word guilty.
McCraney is currently serving his sentence at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama. In an interview from prison, he continued to proclaim his innocence, saying people could call him a cheater or an adulterer, but he did not kill anyone. The case of J.
B. Beasley and Tracy Hawlett was one of the first in the United States to prove that genetic genealogy could solve cold cases where every traditional method had failed. After this case, hundreds of cold cases across America were reopened using the same technology. Families who had long given up hope suddenly received the phone call they no longer dared to wait for.
Every solved case meant one more family freed from decades without answers.