20 years or so, this part of Herring Avenue in the city of Ozark became a shrine. In fact, if you look right over there, you’ll see the crosses. They’ve been in place since 1999, the very site where the bodies of Tracy Hallett and J.B. Beasley were found in the trunk of Beasley’s vehicle.
The long wait on who the alleged killer is appears to be over. s3x A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. s3x On the morning of August 1st, 1999, a black Mazda 929 sat on Herring Avenue in Ozark, Alabama.
Parked along the road like someone had simply left it there. Ozark police were called to check it out. The car was undamaged. No collision, no forced entry. A driver’s license was sitting on the dashboard. Both wallets were inside, cash and jewelry untouched. The only thing missing was a keychain, small white and black blocks that spelled out hard to get.
Officers noted the Dothan plates and called Dothan PD. A Dothan investigator was sent to have the car towed. Six hours passed. Police walked around the vehicle, looked through the windows, ran the plates, waited for the tow truck. Nobody opened the trunk. It wasn’t until nearly 2:00 p.m. that the investigator found a trunk release lever inside the car. He pulled it. J.B.
Beasley and Tracy Hallett were inside, each with a single gunshot wound to the head. They had been there since sometime around midnight, less than a mile from the payphone where Tracy had called her mother to say they were on their way home. J.B. had turned 17 that same day. Tracy was her best friend since middle school.
They had left Dothan together that evening heading to a birthday party, gotten lost, and never made it back. The killer left behind the one piece of evidence that should have ended this case in weeks. It took 24 years. Before we go any further, if you’re new here, this channel covers cold cases that took decades to solve. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
And if you stay until the end of this one, you’ll find out how a DNA sample sat in a lab for 20 years, and why the man it belonged to was someone nobody in that community ever suspected. Now, back to the case. JB Beasley was born on July 31st, 1982 in Troy, Alabama. By 17, she was a cheerleader and a member of the Junior Honor Society at Northview High School in Dothan.
Full of energy, always moving, the kind of girl who filled a room without trying. Her mother, Cheryl Bergoon, never had to worry about her. Tracy Hallett was born 5 months earlier on March 3rd. Her father, Robert Hallett, had been a police officer. He drowned in Lake Eufaula when Tracy was four. The cops in the area knew her after that.
They watched over her the way people do when a colleague’s child loses a parent too soon. Her mother, Carol Roberts, remarried a man named Mike, who raised Tracy as his own and never called her anything but his daughter. The two girls had been inseparable since middle school. If one was somewhere, the other was usually within arm’s reach.
On the evening of July 31st, 1999, JB and Tracy left Dothan in JB’s black 1993 Mazda 929 heading for a birthday party about 10 miles north in Headland. They never found it. Somewhere along the way they made a wrong turn and ended up in Ozark, more than 20 miles in the wrong direction. After 11:30 p.m., the Mazda pulled into the Big Little Store, a convenience store and Chevron station at 763 East Broad Street.
The store had closed at 11:00, but a woman named Marilyn Merritt and her daughter had stopped to buy sodas. JB and Tracy got out and asked for directions back to Highway 231. Merritt gave them clear instructions. She later told investigators the girls were polite, neatly dressed, and worried about exactly one thing: how late they were going to be getting home.
Tracy found a payphone at the front of the building and dialed home. Carol picked up. Her daughter sounded fine. Tracy told her they had taken a wrong turn, but a woman had given them the route back. Then she said the five words Carol would hear in her sleep for the next 24 years. “Mom, I love you.
” Merritt was still in the lot when the Mazda turned out toward the highway, following her directions exactly. She watched the tail lights until they were gone. After that, nothing. No second call. No arrival home. Both families were awake by morning, waiting for a sound at the door that never came. The next morning, August 1st, Carol Roberts woke up and her daughter was not home. She called JB’s family.
JB was not home, either. Both families reported the girls missing to Dothan police before 9:00 a.m. Around the same time, an Ozark patrol officer spotted a black Mazda 929 parked on Herring Avenue, a quiet road less than a block from the Dale County Hospital. The car was sitting in the open, undamaged, no signs of a collision or being run off the road.
It looked like someone had parked it and walked away. Ozark police checked the plates. Dothan registration. They called Dothan PD, and a Dothan investigator was dispatched to have the vehicle towed. He arrived, walked the car, looked through the windows. JB’s driver’s license sat on the dashboard.
Both wallets sat on the seats. Money, jewelry, credit cards, all still there. The doors hadn’t been locked. One window on the driver’s side was cracked open. Whatever gas had been in the tank was almost gone, and every panel of the car was streaked with mud. The investigator waited for the tow truck. Hours passed.
Nobody opened the trunk. It was nearly 2:00 p.m., 6 hours after the car was first reported, when the investigator discovered a trunk release lever inside the vehicle. He pulled it. JB Beasley and Tracy Hallett were inside. Each had been shot once in the head with a 9-mm handgun. One brass 9-mm casing had landed on Tracy’s body.
Investigators never recovered a second. The positioning told its own sequence. Tracy went in first, then JB on top of her. Both girls were fully clothed. Tracy’s arm was scratched up, thorns caught in the fabric of her pants. She had bought a pair of New Balance shoes the week before. They were thick with mud now.
Both girls were wet from the knees down, the kind of soaking that comes from walking through tall grass or soft ground in the dark. Wherever they had been before the trunk, it was not here. Herring Avenue was paved and dry. This was where the killer left them. Robbery was ruled out immediately. Nothing of value had been taken from the car or from the girls.
The only item missing was the keychain that spelled hard to get. The initial autopsy found no signs of sexual assault and no drugs or alcohol in either girl’s system. Investigators were left with a double homicide, no apparent motive, and no suspect. Two girls who had been lost and asking for directions 90 minutes earlier were dead in the trunk of their own car, less than a mile from the last payphone call. Two months of silence followed.
Then the Alabama State Crime Lab sent back findings that turned the investigation on its axis. Biological evidence, semen, had been recovered from JB’s bra, her underwear, and her skin. A palm print that belonged to no one in the system was pulled from the underside of the trunk lid. Dale County District Attorney David Amory went on the record.
What happened to JB Beasley was sexual in nature. Finding the man who left that sample would mean finding the killer. They ran the DNA through the Alabama criminal database. Nothing came back. They ran it through CODIS, the FBI’s national index. Nothing there, either. The man who left that sample had never been arrested, never been convicted, never given any law enforcement agency in the country a reason to have his DNA on file.
The DNA was clean, complete, and damning. It pointed to exactly one man on Earth. The problem was that no law enforcement database in the country knew who he was. Two girls, both 17, dead in the trunk of a Mazda on a road nobody had any reason to drive down. That was the image Dothan could not shake. Something shifted in the way people moved around each other afterward.
Every face in a grocery store, every truck in a driveway, every man nobody knew quite well enough, all of it carried a question now. A reward fund climbed past $15,000 in local donations. Governor Don Siegelman put up another 10,000 from the state. The message from every direction was the same, find him. The investigation consumed everything the department had.
More than 500 interviews. Every block within a mile of Herring Avenue canvassed on foot. Forensic experts ran DNA comparisons on more than 70 potential suspects. Not one of them matched. On September 1st, about 4 weeks after the trunk was opened, a 28-year-old part-time mechanic named Johnny Barrentine showed up at the Ozark Police Station voluntarily.
He said he had information. They sat him down and recorded everything. Over the next 4 hours, Barrentine’s story changed six times. The first version had him spotting a black truck near Herring Avenue. By the sixth, he was claiming a tattooed stranger had gotten into the girls’ car, led them to Herring Avenue, and shot them both while Barrentine waited in his own vehicle nearby.
Barrentine was arrested that day. The news spread fast. Dothan thought it was over. But across all six versions of his story, Barrentine had never mentioned anything sexual happening to JB. The semen on her clothing was the most critical evidence in the entire case and the man confessing to involvement had no explanation for it.
The neighbor he pointed to as the tattooed stranger had a confirmed alibi and when the DNA results came back, they excluded both men completely. When Barrentine sat before a grand jury, the confession collapsed entirely. He admitted he had invented the whole thing for the reward money. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen anything.
The grand jury declined to indict and the investigation was left worse off than before. Months of resources spent running down a fabrication. Other threads were pulled and came apart just as fast. A man who had been at a gathering near Herring Avenue that same night left town within days of the murders. He couldn’t account for several hours of his evening.
Investigators made three separate trips to Michigan to question him. His DNA cleared him. Another suspect, a man from Mississippi who had been staying in Ozark and vanished right after the crime, was tracked down and swabbed. Cleared. And then there was the footage. The security camera inside the Big Little Store had captured a blurry image of a small white pickup truck sitting at the gas pump while Tracy was on the phone with her mother.
No gas was purchased. No one in Ozark recognized the truck. After police released the image to the media, not a single person came forward to identify it or its driver. That truck and whoever was behind the wheel simply disappeared from the record. The pattern held. A lead would surface, pull investigators in a direction, consume weeks or months, and then collapse.
Each dead end left the file thinner, not thicker. The DNA was the only piece of evidence that still carried weight and it pointed nowhere anyone could follow. For the investigators, the case went cold. For Carol Roberts, it never cooled down for a single day. She later told CBS News that she had not slept through a full night since July 31st, 1999.
Not one. She said she would wake up in the dark hearing Tracy screaming. She described the worst of it not as the anniversary of the murder, but as the ordinary days, holidays, dinners, mornings where a chair sat empty, and the absence filled the room louder than any sound. Her husband Mike had raised Tracy since she was small.
He never missed a hearing, a press conference, or a case briefing. There was never anything new to report. He went anyway, year after year. Cheryl Bergoon carried the same weight from the opposite side. She did not speak about it publicly the way Carol did, but JB’s absence pressed down on her just as constantly, just as heavily.
The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted in 2000. Tips came in from across the country. None produced a match. It was profiled again on Haunting Evidence in 2007. Attention arrived, a name did not. Dothan kept changing. New developments went up on the outskirts. The Big Little Store on East Broad Street changed hands and signage. Herring Avenue stayed quiet.
The memorial near the spot where the car had been found sat in the Alabama humidity and weathered. A generation of kids grew up in Dothan who had never heard of JB or Tracy, except as names attached to a story their parents told when summer came around. The DNA profile sat intact in the lab, as precise as the day it was extracted.
Every few years, the profile was checked again against the expanding database. Every time, the same result, nothing. CODIS only held DNA from people who had been arrested or convicted. The man behind that sample had never entered any system. He could have been pumping gas at a station in Dothan, and every database in the country would have looked right past him. Two decades passed.
The original detectives retired or moved on. New investigators inherited the file, understood what it carried, and had no new way forward. Carol aged. Mike aged. Cheryl aged. The DNA was perfect. There was simply no door it could open. Then in April 2018, a case out of California broke something loose.
The suspect was a former police officer named Joseph James DeAngelo. He had killed at least 13 people and assaulted dozens more during the 70s and 80s. He had been walking free for over four decades. His DNA was not in CODIS. He had no criminal record connecting him to the crimes. Traditional investigation had never produced his name.
What produced it was a technique no one in law enforcement had ever tried before. Investigators uploaded the crime scene DNA to GEDmatch, a public genealogy website where millions of people had voluntarily submitted their own genetic profiles to trace their ancestry. The search didn’t return the killer. It returned his distant relatives, second cousins, third cousins, people who shared fragments of his DNA without knowing it.
From those partial matches, investigators built family trees, working backward through generations, narrowing branch by branch, until one name fit everything. DeAngelo was arrested at his home in a Sacramento suburb. He had been living there quietly for decades. Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker followed the DeAngelo arrest with a focus that went beyond professional interest.
He was thinking about a specific evidence file in his own department, a semen sample pulled from a 17-year-old girl’s clothing in 1999 that had never matched a single profile in 20 years. Two families still waiting. A case still open with nowhere left to go, until now. Walker contacted Parabon Nano Labs, the private forensic genealogy firm that had helped build the case against DeAngelo.
He sent them the 1999 crime scene DNA and asked them to do the same thing. Run it through GEDmatch. Find partial matches in Alabama. Build the family trees. Narrow it down. Parabon ran the analysis. The results came back as a list of Alabama families whose genetic markers overlapped with the crime scene sample.
When Walker reviewed the results, one name on the list stopped him. He didn’t recognize it from the case file or from any tip that had come in over 20 years. He recognized it from growing up in the same town. That name had been living inside the same community as JB and Tracy’s families for the entire 20 years, working, raising children, going to church.
And no one, not an investigator, not a neighbor, not a single person in the Wiregrass region, had ever had a reason to look twice at him. The man on that list was 45 years old, born and raised in the Dothan-Ozark area. He had gone to Carroll High School, class of ’92, library club president, athlete, military veteran. After the service, he got behind the wheel of a long-haul truck for a company out of Troy, parking his rig at a gas station near Ozark every few weeks when he came home from the road.
Somewhere along the way, he had started preaching. By 2013, he had founded his own non-profit ministry, Spirit and Truth Lifeline Ministries. He had married a woman named Janette. They had two children together. He had never been arrested, never been questioned by police, never given anyone in his life a reason to use the word suspicious in the same sentence as his name.
He lived less than a mile from Herring Avenue. His name was Coley McCraney. Two decades of work, every interview, every DNA comparison, every flight to another state, every television appeal, had never produced this man’s name, not once, not in any form. The people who knew him in Ozark and Dothan would have told you he was a decent man, a church man, the kind of neighbor you wave to without thinking about it.
That was exactly why the database had never found him. There was nothing to find. Walker made a careful decision about how to handle the contact. He didn’t call McCraney in as a suspect. He called him in as a community member who might be able to help with an ongoing case. A casual conversation between two men who had grown up in the same area.
Walker told McCraney he was not under suspicion, but that police needed a DNA sample to help narrow their search toward the real suspect. Janette came with him. She sat next to her husband through the whole thing and told him he should help. Why wouldn’t she? There was nothing in 20 years of marriage that had given her a reason to hesitate.
McCraney agreed. An officer swabbed the inside of his mouth. He didn’t rush. He didn’t fidget. He sat there with the patience of a man who believed he had nothing to worry about. What McCraney did not understand, sitting in that chair with his wife beside him, was that Parabon’s family tree had already narrowed to him before the meeting was ever scheduled.
The lab results were unambiguous. The DNA taken from McCraney’s cheek was the same DNA found on JB Beasley’s clothing 20 years earlier. Not similar, not partial, identical. When investigators sat him down with the results, McCraney’s response was total denial. He had never met either girl. He had no connection to them.
He was not in Ozark that night. On March 15th, 2019, Coley McCraney was arrested on four counts of capital murder and one count of rape. The state announced it would pursue the death penalty. The reaction that moved through Dothan and Ozark was not the relief people expect when a cold case breaks open. It was something heavier.
A pastor, a father, a man people had greeted at church, passed on the road, made small talk with at gas stations for 20 years. He had occupied the same small geography as the families of the girls he killed, breathing the same air, shopping at the same stores, driving the same routes. Carol Roberts and Sheryl Bergoon had spent two decades growing old inside a question that had no answer.
And the answer had been standing in line behind them at the grocery store the whole time. Carol Roberts went quiet when she heard. For a long time, she didn’t say anything at all. Cheryl Bergoon broke down. The trial should have come in 2020. COVID shut the courts down and pushed it back 3 years. It wasn’t until April 2023, 24 years after the night at the Big Little Store, that the case finally went before a jury in Dale County, Judge William Filmore presiding, McCraney at the defense table.
Four capital murder counts and one count of rape. Eight days of testimony, dozens of witnesses. The families of both girls seated in the row behind the prosecution. McCraney chose to testify, a gamble in any capital case, because it opens the defendant to direct cross-examination with no shield. What he told the courtroom bore no resemblance to what he had told investigators 4 years earlier.
The total denial was gone. In its place was a new version of events. This time, he claimed he had run into JB at a Dothan shopping mall sometime before the murders. She told him her name was Jennifer. They exchanged numbers. They made plans to meet up in Ozark on the night of July 31st.
On the night of July 31st, his car gave out at the same gas station where the girls had stopped. Alternator trouble, he said. He saw JB and Tracy at the payphone. They gave him a ride to where his truck was parked. He and JB had consensual sex in the cab. The girls drove him home around 12:45 a.m. That was the last he saw of them. When the prosecution asked him why he had flatly denied knowing the girls in 2019, he said he was afraid Janette would find out.
The prosecution took his testimony apart systematically. There was no evidence, no call log, no witness, no record of any kind placing McCraney and JB in contact before July 31st. Merritt testified. She had been with those girls in the parking lot. They were lost, anxious, and focused on one thing, getting back to Dothan. Nothing about their behavior suggested they were meeting anyone.
Tracy’s phone call to Carol confirmed it. They were heading home, not to a rendezvous. Attorney General Marshall handled the cross-examination himself. He walked McCraney through his own timeline. In roughly 45 minutes, McCraney claimed to have gotten into a car with a girl he had met once, driven to his truck, had sex, and been dropped off at home.
Marshall looked at him. Happened pretty fast, didn’t it? Then came Janette. The prosecution had compelled her testimony. This was the same woman who had driven to the police station with her husband in 2019 and nudged him to cooperate because she believed in him completely. She told the jury that on the night of July 31st, 1999, McCraney left the house around 10:00.
Their usual routine had him home by 11:30. He did not come back until 12:45 a.m. His explanation, 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. 20 years of marriage, two children, a ministry, a life she had built around this man without a single reason to question him.
And now she was sitting in a witness box under oath, placing him at the scene, at the time, on the night two girls were murdered. Eight days of testimony. April 26th, 2023, the jury came back. Guilty all four counts. Murder of JB Beasley during the commission of rape. Murder of Tracy Hallett during the same criminal act. Murder of both girls in the same course of conduct.
Use of JB’s Mazda as part of the crime. The sentence came the following day. Life without parole. The state had asked for death, but the jury chose the alternative, a cell with no exit for the rest of his natural life. Cole McCraney, 49 years old, would never leave prison. When the foreman read the verdict, Carol Roberts sat completely still.
She didn’t speak, didn’t move. Afterward, she told reporters she was stunned. 24 years and finally someone was being held accountable. Cheryl Bergoon leaned forward in her seat and sobbed. Mike Roberts was in the front row that day. He had been in the front row for 24 years. Every briefing, every hearing, every time someone said there might be news.
He had raised Tracy as his own from the time she was small, had stood beside Carol through every year of silence, and had lived long enough to hear a jury say the word guilty. Less than a year later, Mike Roberts passed away. He was 74. He had held on just long enough. From a phone inside the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, McCraney told ABC News he maintained his innocence.
He said people could call him whatever they wanted, but he did not kill those girls. The DNA on J.B. Beasley’s clothing, the sample that had waited two decades in a lab for a name that was living less than a mile away the entire time, said otherwise. On the evening of July 31st, 1999, a girl who had just turned 17 left Dothan with her best friend to celebrate her birthday.
They missed a turn. They ended up at a gas station in a town they didn’t know. Tracy found a payphone and called her mother. She told her they were on their way. Then she said five words. “Mom, I love you.” The Mazda pulled out of the lot and turned toward the highway. Merritt watched the tail lights until they were gone.
24 years later, a keychain with small white and black blocks was still missing. It had spelled out hard to get. Nobody ever found it. If this case stayed with you, let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me where you’re watching from. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
