In April 2023, a jury in Dale County, Alabama, found Coley McCraney guilty on four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. The verdict ended a 24-year wait for the families of J. B. Beasley and Tracy Howlett, two teenage girls found shot to death in the trunk of a car in Ozark, Alabama, in 1999.
The case had gone cold for two decades, not because the evidence was missing, but because the DNA that pointed directly at McCraney had no match in any criminal database. On the night of July 31, 1999, Beasley turned seventeen. She and her best friend, Tracy Howlett, left Dothan, Alabama, to drive roughly ten miles north to a birthday party in Headland. They never found the party.
A wrong turn sent them more than twenty miles off course, into Ozark, a town they did not know well. Just before midnight, they pulled into a closed convenience store called the Big Little Store on East Broad Street. A woman named Marilyn Merritt was there with her daughter. The girls asked for directions back to Highway 231.
Merritt gave them clear instructions and later described them as polite and neatly dressed. Tracy walked to a payphone and called her mother. She explained they had gotten turned around but had been given the route home. Before hanging up, she said four words her mother would carry for the next 24 years: “Mom, I love you.
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Merritt watched the black Mazda 929 pull out of the lot and disappear down the road. It was the last confirmed sighting of either girl alive. By 9:00 a. m.
on August 1, both families had reported the girls missing. Around the same time, an Ozark patrol officer spotted a black Mazda 929 parked along Herring Avenue, a quiet road less than a block from Dale County Hospital. The car was undamaged, unlocked, and sitting still in the morning light. Through the windows, an investigator could see J.
B. ‘s driver’s license on the dashboard. Wallets, cash, credit cards, and jewelry were still inside. Robbery did not appear to be the motive.
For six hours, officers walked around the car and looked through its windows while waiting for a tow truck. It was not until nearly 2:00 in the afternoon that the investigator found the trunk release lever and pulled it. J. B.
Beasley and Tracy Howlett were inside. Each had been shot once in the head with a 9mm handgun. One brass casing was recovered from J. B.
‘s abdomen. A second was never found. The girls were positioned in sequence, one placed on top of the other, suggesting they had been put there separately. The car sat on a paved, dry road, but both girls were soaked from the knees down and Tracy’s new sneakers were thick with mud.
The crime had not happened on Herring Avenue. That was only where the killer chose to leave them. Two months into the investigation, the Alabama State Crime Lab returned findings that changed everything. Biological evidence, semen, had been recovered from J.
B. Beasley’s bra, underwear, and skin. The initial autopsy had missed it. Dale County District Attorney David Emery stated plainly that what happened to J.
B. was sexual in nature. The DNA profile was run through Alabama’s state criminal database, then through CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA index. There was no match.
The man who left that sample had never been arrested and never convicted of any crime. His profile was sitting in a lab, complete and identifiable, but no database on Earth knew who he was. The investigation went into overdrive. Investigators conducted more than 500 interviews, canvassed every block within a mile of Herring Avenue, and ran DNA comparisons on more than 70 potential suspects.
A reward fund climbed above $15,000, and Governor Don Siegelman added another $10,000 from state funds. About a month after the bodies were found, a 28-year-old part-time mechanic named Johnny Berentime walked into the Ozark Police Station and said he had information. Over four hours, his account changed six times. By the final version, he was describing a tattooed stranger who had forced the girls to Herring Avenue and shot them while Berentime allegedly waited in a separate vehicle.
He named a neighbor as the gunman. He was arrested. But none of his versions mentioned anything sexual happening to J. B.
The semen evidence was the most critical piece of the case, and the man confessing to being present had no account of it whatsoever. The neighbor had a confirmed alibi. DNA excluded both men. Before a grand jury, Berentime admitted he had invented everything for the reward money.
The grand jury declined to indict. Other leads went nowhere. A man who had been in the Herring Avenue area that night and later moved to Michigan was interviewed three times before DNA cleared him. A man from Mississippi who disappeared after the crime was tracked down and swabbed, cleared.
Surveillance footage from the Big Little Store showed a small white pickup truck parked beside a fuel pump while Tracy was on the phone. The truck never refueled and no one was seen getting in or out. The image was released to the public. If the driver saw anything that night, it has never been confirmed.
For Carol Roberts, the case never went cold. She hadn’t slept through a single full night since the summer of 1999. Mike Roberts, the man who had raised Tracy as his own daughter since she was small, attended every briefing and every press conference, year after year, even when there was never anything new to report. The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted in August 2000.
Seven years later, it was profiled on a show called Haunting Evidence. More attention, but no name. The DNA profile sat in a lab, preserved but silent. Then, in April 2018, a case out of Sacramento cracked something open.
Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer who had committed at least 13 murders and dozens of sexual assaults across California in the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested after decades living quietly in a suburban neighborhood. He had no matching DNA profile in CODIS. Investigators had instead uploaded his crime scene DNA to GEDmatch, a public genealogy website where millions of people had voluntarily submitted their own genetic profiles to trace family ancestry. The search returned DeAngelo’s distant relatives, and from those partial overlaps, investigators built family trees that narrowed to his name.
He had been living in plain sight the entire time. Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker followed the DeAngelo arrest closely. He contacted Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic genealogy firm that had worked on the DeAngelo case, and sent them the 1999 crime scene DNA. Parabon ran the analysis through GEDmatch and returned a list of Alabama families whose genetic markers overlapped with the crime scene sample.
One name stopped Walker. He recognized it not from any tip, but from growing up in the same town. The man on the list was Coley Lewis McCraney, 45 years old, born and raised in the Ozark-Dothan area, a graduate of Carroll High School, class of 1992, a military veteran and long-haul truck driver. He had founded a non-profit ministry called Spirit and Truth Lifeline Ministries, married a woman named Janette, and had two children.
He had no criminal record of any kind. And he lived approximately one mile from Herring Avenue. Walker approached McCraney as a community member, not a suspect, asking for a DNA sample to help narrow the search for a killer. McCraney agreed.
His wife sat beside him and encouraged him to cooperate. An officer swabbed the inside of his cheek. What McCraney did not know was that Parabon’s genealogical analysis had already narrowed to him before that meeting was ever scheduled. The swab was confirmation, not investigation.
The DNA taken from McCraney’s cheek matched the DNA found on J. B. Beasley’s clothing 20 years earlier. Not a partial match.
Identical. When confronted, McCraney denied everything. He had never met either girl. He was not in Ozark that night.
On March 15, 2019, Coley Lewis McCraney was arrested and charged with four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. The reaction in Dothan and Ozark was not uncomplicated relief. A preacher, a father, a man people had exchanged small talk with at gas stations and grocery stores had lived less than a mile from where the victims’ car was abandoned. The trial was delayed for nearly three years by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It finally began in April 2023, presided over by Judge William Fillmore. McCraney chose to testify in his own defense and offered an account that bore no resemblance to his 2019 denial. He claimed he had first met J. B.
at a mall in Dothan months before the murders. She had given her name as Jennifer. They exchanged numbers and planned to meet in Ozark on the night of July 31. His truck broke down near the gas station, he said.
He and J. B. had consensual sex in the cab of his truck. The girls drove him home around 1:45 a.
m. He denied knowing either girl in 2019, he said, because he didn’t want his wife to find out. The prosecution found no evidence of any prior contact between J. B.
and McCraney. No call records, no witnesses, no mall security footage. Marilyn Merritt testified about two teenagers who were lost, running late, and focused on getting home. Tracy’s call to her mother confirmed the same.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall cross-examined McCraney himself, walking him through a timeline in which he claimed to have gotten into a vehicle with a girl he’d met once, driven to his truck, had sex, and been dropped home. Marshall looked at him and said simply, “Happened pretty fast, didn’t it? ”
Then Janette McCraney was compelled to testify. The same woman who had encouraged her husband to cooperate in 2019 was now seated under oath before a jury deciding whether he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
She testified that on the night of July 31, 1999, Coley had left the house around 10:00. He normally returned by 11:30. He did not return until 12:45 a. m.
His explanation was a broken-down car at a gas station. The same gas station where two girls had stood at a payphone and called home for the last time. After eight days of testimony, on April 26, 2023, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all four counts of capital murder and guilty of rape. The state had pursued the death penalty.
The jury recommended life without parole, and Judge Fillmore sentenced accordingly. Carol Roberts described feeling stunned that the day had finally arrived when someone was held accountable for her daughter’s death. Sheryl Bergoon, J. B.
‘s mother, cried openly in court. Mike Roberts was in the front row, as he had been for 24 years. He had kept showing up year after year when there was nothing new to show up for, and he held on long enough to hear that jury say the word guilty. Less than a year later, he passed away at the age of 74.
McCraney continued to deny any involvement, insisting from prison that he was innocent. The case is now widely recognized for the role forensic genealogy played in finally identifying a suspect. McCraney did not evade detection because he was sophisticated. He walked free because the entire architecture of DNA-based criminal identification in 1999 was built on one assumption: that killers have prior records.
If the person responsible has no prior record, even perfect DNA evidence can point directly at a specific human being and the system can look right past him for 20 years. Forensic genealogy changed that equation by running crime scene profiles through public ancestry databases, tracing outward through partial matches in family trees until investigators can reach people who have never been through the system themselves. It raises genuine questions about privacy and consent that are still being debated. But in this case, it was the only reason an answer ever arrived.
On the evening of July 31, 1999, J. B. Beasley turned 17. She and her best friend got in a car to go celebrate.
They missed a turn. They ended up at a closed gas station in an unfamiliar town, asked a stranger for directions, and called home to say they were on their way. With fresh directions in hand, the girls drove away. Marilyn Merritt watched the Mazda disappear into the darkness.
J. B. ‘s keychain, the one with letter blocks that spelled out “hard to get,” was never found. Two crosses have stood on Herring Avenue since 1999.
They are still there.