Just before midnight on July 31, 1999, two teenage best friends were trying to find their way home. They were not running from anyone. They were not involved in drugs. They were not meeting strangers.
They were simply lost. One wrong turn placed them in a town they did not know. One stop for directions should have been the last inconvenience of the night. Instead, it became the beginning of one of Alabama’s most haunting unsolved murders.
That day, J. B. Beasley had turned 17. A cheerleader at Northview High School in Dothan, Alabama, she had been the kind of person people described as always moving, always doing something.
Her best friend, Tracy Howlett, had come into her life back in middle school, and the two had been nearly inseparable since. Tracy’s story carried weight from early on. Her father, a police officer, had drowned in Lake Eufaula when she was just four years old. The officers in the area never forgot it, and they kept a quiet watch over her.
Tracy’s mother had eventually remarried a man named Mike, who raised Tracy as his own daughter without hesitation. On the evening of July 31st, J. B. ‘s birthday, the two girls left Dothan together in J.
B. ‘s black 1993 Mazda 929. The plan was simple: drive about ten miles north to Headland for a birthday party, see their friends, and head back home. They never found the party.
Somewhere along the way, a turn went wrong, then another, and before long they were in Ozark, more than twenty miles off course, in a town they did not know well, past 11:30 at night. They pulled into a closed convenience store and Chevron station called the Big Little Store on East Broad Street. A woman named Marilyn Merritt happened to be there with her daughter picking up drinks. J.
B. and Tracy got out and asked her for directions back to Highway 231. Merritt gave them clear, step-by-step instructions. She would later describe the girls as polite and neatly dressed, focused on exactly one thing: how late they were going to be when they got home.
Tracy walked to a payphone near the front of the building and called her mother. Carol picked up. Tracy’s voice was calm. She explained they had gotten turned around, but a woman had given them the route back, and they were heading out now.
Then she said four words that Carol Roberts would carry with her every single day for the next twenty-four years: “Mom, I love you. ”
Merritt was still in the lot when the Mazda pulled out, following her directions exactly. She watched the tail lights disappear down the road. No second call.
No arrival. Both families were awake by morning, waiting at doors that never opened. By 9:00 a. m.
on August 1st, both families had reported the girls missing to Dothan police. Around the same time, an Ozark patrol officer spotted a black Mazda 929 sitting along Herring Avenue, a quiet stretch of road less than a block from Dale County Hospital. The car was parked calmly, as if someone had simply left it there and gone inside somewhere. No damage, no signs of a collision, no skid marks.
Ozark police ran the plates and called Dothan PD. A Dothan investigator was sent out to have the vehicle towed. Through the windows, he could clearly see J. B.
‘s driver’s license resting on the dashboard. The girls’ wallets were still inside the car, along with their cash, credit cards, jewelry, and other personal belongings. Robbery did not appear to be the motive. With no obvious reason to force entry, the investigator waited for the tow truck to arrive, unaware that the most important discovery was still hidden from view.
Six hours passed. Six hours during which officers walked around that car, looked through its windows, waited, talked, waited some more. It was not until nearly 2:00 in the afternoon that the investigator found the trunk release lever inside the vehicle and pulled it. J.
B. Beasley and Tracy Howlett were in the trunk. Each had been shot once in the head with a 9 mm handgun. One brass casing was recovered from J.
B. ‘s abdomen. A second was never found. Based on how they were positioned, Tracy first, J.
B. placed on top of her, investigators concluded the girls had been placed there in sequence, not together. Both were fully clothed. Tracy’s arms were marked with scratches consistent with briars.
Her brand new sneakers, bought just the week before, were thick with mud. Both teenagers were soaked from the knees down, consistent with having walked through wet grass or muddy ground. Yet Herring Avenue was a paved, dry roadway. The girls had likely been somewhere else before the car was abandoned.
Herring Avenue was simply where the killer chose to leave them. Robbery was ruled out on the spot. The only item missing was J. B.
‘s keychain, small, with white and black letter blocks spelling out the phrase “hard to get. ” Investigators never found it. The initial autopsy found no signs of sexual assault and no alcohol or drugs in either girl’s system. That last point would change within two months, and when it did, it changed everything.
Two months into the investigation, the Alabama State Crime Lab returned findings that redirected the entire case. Biological evidence, semen, had been recovered from J. B. Beasley’s bra, her underwear, and on her skin.
The conclusion from Dale County District Attorney David Emery was unambiguous. What happened to J. B. was sexual in nature, and finding the man responsible for that evidence meant finding her killer.
Investigators ran the DNA profile through the Alabama state criminal database. No match. They submitted it to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA index. No match there either.
The man who left that sample had never been convicted of a crime, never arrested, never given any agency any reason to collect his DNA. Detectives were not missing the most important piece of evidence. They already had it. A high-quality DNA profile had been recovered from the crime scene, capable of identifying the person who left it.
The problem was that no one in the existing databases matched it. So year after year, the DNA remained unchanged in an evidence vault, silently holding the answer while waiting for technology and the investigation to finally catch up. Meanwhile, the investigation went into overdrive. More than 500 interviews were conducted.
Every block within a mile of Herring Avenue was canvassed on foot. DNA comparisons were run on over 70 potential suspects. Not one matched. A reward fund climbed above $15,000 in local donations, 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 voluntarily into the Ozark Police Station and said he had information. Over the next four hours, Berentime’s account changed six times. The first version placed him spotting a suspicious truck near Herring Avenue. By the sixth version, he was describing a tattooed stranger who climbed into the girls’ car, led them to Herring Avenue at gunpoint, and shot them while Berentime allegedly waited in a separate vehicle.
He was arrested that day. But across all six versions, not one mentioned anything sexual happening to J. B. The semen evidence was the most critical piece of the entire case, and the man confessing to being present had no account of it whatsoever.
The neighbor he named as the tattooed gunman had a confirmed alibi, and when DNA results came back, both men were excluded completely. When Berentime appeared before a grand jury, the story collapsed entirely. He admitted he had invented everything, motivated by the reward money. The grand jury declined to indict, and the investigation was left in a worse position than before.
Other leads followed. Investigators focused on a man who had reportedly been in the Herring Avenue area on the night of the murders. Soon afterward, he moved out of state, and when questioned, he was unable to fully account for several hours of his whereabouts that evening. Detectives traveled to Michigan three separate times to interview him.
In the end, his DNA did not match, and he was eliminated. A man from Mississippi who had been staying in Ozark and disappeared after the crime was tracked down and swabbed. Cleared. Investigators also reviewed surveillance footage from the Big Little Store.
Among the images was a small white pickup truck parked beside one of the fuel pumps while Tracy was using the payphone to call her mother. The truck never appeared to refuel, and no one was seen getting in or out. Detectives released the image to the public. If its driver saw anything important that night, that information has never been confirmed.
It simply vanished from the record. For the families, the case never went cold. Carol Roberts told reporters she had not slept through a single full night since the summer of 1999. She would wake in the dark believing she could hear Tracy’s voice.
The hardest days were never the anniversaries. It was the ordinary ones. Birthdays that came and went. Holidays with a chair that stayed empty.
Mike Roberts, the man who had raised Tracy since she was small, attended every briefing, every press conference, every hearing where new information might surface. Year after year, there was never anything new to report. He went anyway. Sheryl Bergoon carried the same weight for J.
B. , though she carried it more privately. The case was featured nationally on America’s Most Wanted in August 2000. Nothing produced a match.
Seven years later, it was profiled on a different show, Haunting Evidence, in an episode called “Wiregrass Murders. ” More attention, no name. The crosses on Herring Avenue weathered in the Alabama humidity year after year. Twenty years of summer heat and winter rain.
The DNA profile sat in the lab unchanged, perfect, a complete genetic signature attached to a man no database had ever seen. Then in April 2018, a case out of Sacramento cracked something open that nobody in law enforcement had fully anticipated. Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer who had committed at least 13 murders and dozens of sexual assaults across California during the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested at his home after decades of living quietly in a suburban neighborhood. He had no matching DNA profile in CODIS.
Traditional investigation had never produced his name. What produced it was something entirely new. Investigators uploaded the crime scene DNA from the California cases to GEDmatch, a public genealogy website where millions of ordinary people had voluntarily submitted their own genetic profiles to trace their family ancestry. The search did not return DeAngelo.
It returned his distant relatives, people who shared fragments of his DNA without knowing he existed as a suspect. From those partial overlaps, investigators built family trees, working backward through generations, narrowing branch by branch until DeAngelo’s name emerged as the only fit. He had been living in plain sight the entire time. Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker followed the DeAngelo arrest with an intensity that went beyond professional interest.
He was thinking about a specific evidence file in his own department. A semen sample from a 17-year-old’s clothing collected in 1999, matched to no one in twenty years of database checks. Walker contacted Parabon NanoLabs, a forensic genealogy firm based in Virginia that had worked on the DeAngelo case. He sent them the 1999 crime scene DNA and asked them to do the same thing.
Parabon ran the analysis. The results came back as a list of Alabama families whose genetic markers overlapped with the crime scene sample. Walker reviewed the list. One name stopped him.
He recognized it not from any tip that had come in over twenty years of investigation. He recognized it from growing up in the same town. The man on Parabon’s list was 45 years old, born and raised in the Ozark-Dothan area, a graduate of Carroll High School, class of 1992, a military veteran. After his service, he became a long-haul truck driver, a job that put him on the road for stretches at a time and brought him back to the Ozark area regularly.
He had started preaching at some point along the way. By 2013, he had founded his own non-profit ministry called Spirit and Truth Lifeline Ministries. He had married a woman named Janette. They had two children.
He had no criminal record, not an arrest, not a charge, not a citation that would have ever put his DNA into any database anywhere. And he lived approximately one mile from Herring Avenue. His name was Coley Lewis McCraney. Five hundred interviews, over 70 DNA comparisons, television appeals, reward money, two separate national broadcasts, twenty years of investigative work, and this man’s name had never surfaced once.
People who knew him in Ozark and Dothan would have described him as a decent man, a church man, a neighbor you waved to without thinking twice. The system only holds DNA from people who have been through the system. He never had been. Walker made a careful choice about how to approach the contact.
He did not call McCraney in as a suspect. He called him as a community member, someone who grew up in the same area, who might be able to help narrow the search toward a killer. Walker told him directly, “You’re not a suspect. I just need a DNA sample to help us get closer to whoever did this.
”
Janette McCraney came with her husband. She sat beside him during the whole conversation and encouraged him to cooperate. Twenty years of marriage, two children, a shared ministry. Nothing in any of it had given her a single reason to hesitate.
McCraney agreed. An officer swabbed the inside of his cheek. He sat still and patient through the whole thing with the ease of a man who genuinely believed he had nothing to worry about. What McCraney did not know, sitting in that chair with his wife beside him, was that Parabon’s genealogical analysis had already narrowed to him before that meeting was ever scheduled.
The swab was confirmation, not investigation. The lab results were unambiguous. The DNA taken from Coley McCraney’s cheek matched the DNA found on J. B.
Beasley’s clothing twenty years earlier. Not a partial match. Not a probable match. Identical.
When investigators confronted him with the results, McCraney’s response was complete denial. He had never met either girl. He had nothing to do with what happened to them. He was not in Ozark that night.
On March 15th, 2019, Coley Lewis McCraney was arrested and charged with four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. He was 45 years old. The reaction that moved through Dothan and Ozark after the arrest was not the uncomplicated relief that people tend to imagine when a cold case breaks. A preacher, a father, a man people had exchanged small talk with at gas stations and grocery stores, sat near at church functions, passed on roads they all shared.
For more than two decades, the person investigators were trying to identify had been living less than a mile from where the victim’s car was abandoned. Prosecutors expected the case to reach trial in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought court proceedings across the country to a standstill. The delay stretched on for nearly three years. Finally, in April 2023, almost 24 years after J.
B. Beasley and Tracy Howlett disappeared, the long-awaited trial began in Dale County with Judge William Fillmore presiding. McCraney chose to testify in his own defense. In any capital case, that is a significant gamble because it opens the defendant to cross-examination with no buffer.
The version of events McCraney offered on the stand bore no resemblance to what he had told investigators in 2019. The complete denial was gone. In its place was a new account. McCraney now claimed he had first met J.
B. at the Wiregrass Commons Mall in Dothan a couple of months before the murders. She had given her name as Jennifer. They exchanged numbers.
They made a plan to meet in Ozark on the night of July 31st. According to his testimony, his vehicle happened to break down near the gas station that night. Alternator trouble, he said. When he spotted J.
B. and Tracy at the payphone, they offered to give him a ride to where his truck was parked nearby. He and J. B.
, he claimed, had consensual sex in the cab of his truck. The girls then drove him home around 1:45 in the morning, and that was the last he saw of them. When prosecutors asked why he had categorically denied knowing either girl in 2019, McCraney said he did not want Janette to find out. The prosecution took the testimony apart piece by piece.
There was no evidence of any prior contact between J. B. and McCraney. No call record, no text, no witness, no mall security footage.
Marilyn Merritt testified about the girls at that gas station parking lot. She described two teenagers who were lost, running late, and focused on getting home to their parents. Nothing in their behavior that night suggested they were meeting anyone. Tracy’s call to Carol confirmed the same.
They were heading home. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall handled the cross-examination himself. He walked McCraney through his own timeline, roughly 45 minutes by McCraney’s account, during which he claimed to have gotten into a vehicle with a girl he had met once, driven to his truck, had sex, and been dropped back at his home. Marshall looked at him and said simply, “Happened pretty fast, didn’t it?
”
Then came Janette. The prosecution compelled her testimony. The same woman who had driven to the police station with her husband in 2019 and encouraged him to cooperate, who had built twenty years of marriage and a life and a family around this man without a single reason to question him, was now seated in the witness box under oath. Janette testified that on the night of July 31st, 1999, Coley McCraney had left the house around 10:00.
Their normal routine had him back by 11:30. He did not return until 12:45 in the morning. His explanation to her: 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 26th, 2023, the jury returned its verdict: guilty on all four counts of capital murder and guilty of rape. The sentencing recommendation was life without parole. The state had pursued the death penalty. The jury chose the alternative.
Judge Fillmore sentenced accordingly. The courtroom fell quiet as the guilty verdict was delivered. Carol Roberts remained still, almost as if the weight of 24 years had settled over her in that instant. Later, she described feeling stunned that the day had finally arrived when someone was being held accountable for her daughter’s death.
Sheryl Bergoon could no longer contain her emotions, leaning forward as she cried openly in court. Mike Roberts was in the front row that day. He had been in the front row for 24 years. Every briefing, every press conference, every time anyone said there might be something new.
He held on long enough to hear that jury say the word guilty. Less than a year after the verdict, Mike Roberts passed away at the age of 74. Even after the conviction, McCraney continued to deny any involvement. Speaking to ABC News from the William E.
Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, he insisted he was innocent and said others could judge him however they wished. Coley McCraney did not evade detection because he was sophisticated. He did not burn evidence or flee the country or systematically mislead investigators at every turn. He walked free because the entire architecture of DNA-based criminal identification in 1999, and for the next twenty years, was built on one assumption: that killers have prior records.
That if you commit a crime, you have likely committed something before, and that prior arrest or conviction would put your DNA in CODIS. If that assumption holds, the system works. If it does not, if the person responsible has no prior record, then you can have perfect DNA evidence confirmed and preserved pointing directly at a specific human being on Earth, and the system looks right past him for twenty years. Forensic genealogy changed that equation by running a crime scene profile through a public ancestry database and tracing outward through partial matches in family trees.
Investigators can now reach people who have never been through the system themselves, as long as a relative has voluntarily submitted their DNA somewhere online. It raises genuine questions about privacy and consent that are still being debated. But in cases like this one, it is the only reason an answer ever arrived at all. On the evening of July 31st, 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. Tracy said four words to her mother before she hung up. “Mom, I love you. ” With fresh directions in hand, the girls drove away from the convenience store and headed toward the highway.
Marilyn Merritt remained in the parking lot watching as the Mazda disappeared into the darkness. It was the last confirmed time anyone saw J. B. Beasley and Tracy Howlett alive.
J. B. ‘s keychain, the one with the small letter blocks that spelled out “hard to get,” was never found. Twenty-four years later, it is still missing.
Two crosses have stood on Herring Avenue since 1999. They are still there.