On the night of July 31st, 1999, two 17-year-old girls, JB Beasley and her best friend Tracy Holllet, got into a car and left Dothan, Alabama, heading to a party celebrating JB’s 17th birthday. They got lost, and at 11:35 p.m., Tracy called her mother, Carol Roberts, from a pay phone outside a convenience store to say they were on their way home.
Tracy simply said they had gotten lost, but now had directions and were on their way home. The last thing Tracy said before hanging up was, “Mom, I love you. Be home soon.”
Then the two of them vanished completely, leaving two devastated families and a shocked community. The next morning, police opened the trunk of the black Mazda and found JB and Tracy with gunshot wounds to the head. Authorities had the killer’s DNA from the very beginning, but they couldn’t find a match.
He had no name in CODIS, no criminal record, and the investigation eventually stalled for two full decades. However, throughout all those years, the two families never gave up. When the arrest of the Golden State Killer in 2018 proved that genetic genealogy could catch killers whom CODIS could not, Ozark police sent that DNA to Parabon Nano Labs.
The results pointed straight to a name that shocked everyone involved in a way no one could have imagined after 20 years of waiting. This is the story of 20 years of silence, of a DNA sample sitting untouched in a file, and of a killer who lived among the community for two decades. But let’s start from that night. In the summer of 1999, America was living through the most prosperous period of the decade.
The economy was booming with the dot-com wave. Bill Clinton was still in the White House after surviving the impeachment scandal and songs by the Backstreet Boys and TLC played non-stop on the radio. The summer of 1999 came to Dothan, Alabama with the characteristic humid heat of the Wiregrass region in southeastern Alabama, a city of 60,000 people located near the Florida and Georgia borders.
It was a typical southern town where people grew up knowing their neighbors’ names and where young people’s summers consisted of backyard parties and late night drives along the straight roads of Houston County without anyone thinking they had anything to worry about. Beasley was about to turn 17. Born on July 31st, 1982, she was an excellent student, a member of the Junior Honor Society, a cheerleader, the kind of daughter parents never had to worry about.
She was smart, well-behaved, and knew what she wanted. Her mother, Cheryl Burgon, called her daughter a beautiful gift. The friend with her that night was Tracy Holllet, JB’s closest friend since middle school. The two girls were so close that if JB was there, Tracy was almost always with her and vice versa. The night of July 31 was JB’s birthday.
A night that should have been the most memorable of the year. Around 10:05 p.m., JB and Tracy left Dothan in JB’s black Mazda 929, heading toward Headland for an outdoor party about 10 mi north. But they never arrived. At some intersection, they made a wrong turn. Before they realized it, they were in Ozark, a town more than 20 mi northwest of Dothan, completely in the opposite direction from where they needed to go.
After 11:30 p.m., the Mazda pulled into the Big Little convenience store and Chevron Gas station at 763 East Broad Street in Ozark. The store had closed at 11 p.m., but JB and Tracy were lucky. A woman named Marilyn Merritt and her daughter had stopped by to buy sodas. The two girls got out of the car and asked for directions back to Highway 231 so they could find their way to Dothan.
Merritt gave them clear directions. She later recalled that JB’s car was spotless. The girls were neat and clean and there was nothing unusual in their eyes or voices. Just two kids worried about being late getting home. At the public pay phone on the right corner of the store’s front, Tracy picked up the phone and called her mother.
Carol Roberts heard her daughter’s voice. It sounded normal. Merritt stood in the parking lot and watched the black Mazda 929 pull out of the store, turned right toward the main road exactly as instructed, and disappear into the darkness.
It was the last time anyone saw JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet alive. The security camera inside the Big Little store that night captured a blurry image. A small white pickup truck parked at the gas pump at the exact time Tracy was on the phone with her mother. No transaction was recorded at that pump.
No one knew who the truck belonged to. No one saw the driver. And for many years afterward, that small white truck in the blurry footage would remain one of the unsolved mysteries of the case. On the morning of August 1st, 1999, Carol Roberts and JB Beasley’s family reported the girls missing after they had not come home all night.
That same morning, a black Mazda 929 was found parked on Herring Avenue in Ozark, less than a mile from the pay phone Tracy had used the night before. Ozark police were called to check it out. The car was undamaged, showed no signs of collision, and no signs of being forced off the road.
On the surface, it just looked like an abandoned vehicle on the side of the road. But upon closer inspection, small details began to speak. The car was covered in mud. The gas tank was nearly empty. The driver’s side window was rolled down a few inches. The doors were unlocked. JB’s driver’s license was on the dashboard.
And both girls’ wallets were still inside along with cash, jewelry, and credit cards. The only thing missing was JB’s keychain, a small chain with white and black blocks spelling out “hard to get.” Ozark police determined the car had Dothan plates and contacted Dothan police. A Dothan investigator was sent with the intention of having the car towed.
The vehicle had been there since 8:00 a.m. 6 hours passed without anyone opening the trunk. It wasn’t until nearly 2:00 p.m. while waiting for the tow truck that the Dothan investigator discovered the trunk could be opened from a lever inside without the key. He popped the trunk. JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet were inside, each with a single 9mm gunshot wound to the head.
The girls were still fully clothed with no obvious signs of a struggle, but their bodies told a different story. Tracy had been shot in the temple, had scratches on her arm, briars stuck to her pants, and her brand new New Balance shoes bought the week before were caked in mud. Both girls’ pant legs were wet up to the knees. They had walked through wet ground or damp grass somewhere else before they were killed.
From the position of the bodies in the trunk, it was clear Tracy had been placed in first, JB after her. A 9mm shell casing was resting on Tracy’s leg. Robbery was ruled out immediately. Cash, jewelry, and credit cards were all untouched. The girls had not been killed on Herring Avenue. This was simply where the killer had dumped them.
The initial autopsy concluded there were no signs of rape and no alcohol or drugs. But more than 2 months later, the Alabama State Crime Lab announced a discovery that changed the entire direction of the investigation. Semen was found on JB Beasley’s bra, panties, and skin. Additionally, an unidentified palm print was collected from the inside of the trunk lid.
District Attorney David Emory, lead prosecutor for Dale and Geneva counties, stated outright that this was a sexual crime, or at least stemmed from a sexual act. Finding the owner of that semen sample would mean finding the killer. That theory was correct, but finding him would take another 20 years. Dothan was in shock. Not the kind of shock people talk about and then forget, but the kind that clings to a community and refuses to leave.
The kind where people looked at each other on the street and wondered who among the people they knew could have done it. Two 17-year-old girls on a birthday night in the trunk of a car. That image haunted the Wiregrass region of Alabama in a way no words could describe. A reward was raised. People wanted this monster found and punished. Police faced enormous pressure from all sides.
Then, exactly 1 month after the bodies were discovered, a man walked into the police station on his own. On September 1st, 1999, Johnny William Barentine, 28 years old, a part-time mechanic who lived less than a mile from Herring Avenue, came forward and said he knew something about the case. The interrogation lasted 4 hours and was fully recorded.
During those 4 hours, Barentine told six different versions of events. The first version, he saw a black truck speeding away from the Herring Avenue area. The next version, he gave a ride to a stranger with tattoos all over his arms who passed by the Big Little store that night. In the final and most detailed version, Barentine claimed the tattooed man got into JB and Tracy’s car in the parking lot and told Barentine to follow them.
They drove to Herring Avenue. The man pulled the girls out of the car. Barentine heard two gunshots. The man returned to the car and Barentine drove him away from the scene and back home. Police arrested Barentine immediately. The press covered it heavily. The whole community breathed a sigh of relief. They thought the case was solved and the killer had been caught.
But problems appeared from the start. In all six versions of his story, Barentine never once mentioned any sexual activity. Even though the semen on JB was physical proof that it had occurred, the neighbor Barentine identified as the tattooed man had a solid alibi for the entire night. And when the DNA results came back, they did not match Barentine or the neighbor.
Barentine later appeared before a grand jury and admitted he had made up the entire story to claim the reward. He hadn’t seen anything that night. He knew nothing. The grand jury declined to indict him. Barentine was released. And the case didn’t just return to square one. It was worse than before. Because police had spent months and significant resources investigating a man who had fabricated a story for money.
Investigators pursued other leads. A man from Michigan, who had been at a party near Herring Avenue on the night of July 31, could not account for 3 to 4 hours that night and left town a few days after the bodies were found. Investigators flew to Michigan three times to question him. The DNA did not match.
A man from Mississippi who had been staying in Ozark and disappeared right after the crime was brought in for questioning and DNA testing. It did not match. The small white truck on the Big Little store security camera—blurry footage, unreadable license plate, unrecognized by anyone in the community—was never identified and its driver was never found.
Every lead led to a dead end. Every suspect who was cleared left another gap. The semen DNA was the only piece of evidence that still held value in the entire case file, but it matched no one in the Alabama criminal database. And the person who left it was still out there somewhere, free, invisible, and unknown. The 2000s arrived.
Then the 2010s. Dothan kept living, kept changing. New neighborhoods sprang up. Children born after 1999 grew up knowing nothing about JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet except the names they heard from adults. Life in the small Wiregrass town continued. But for Carol Roberts and Cheryl Burgon, time did not work that way.
For these two mothers, time did not pass. It only accumulated year after year like layers of sediment pressing down on a wound that would never heal. Every year on July 31, they relived that night: the pay phone, the last words, the car turning right into the darkness and never coming back. The case file remained officially open at the Ozark Police Department, but there was no meaningful progress.
The semen DNA sample was carefully stored in the lab. The only biological evidence connecting the present to the killer, but year after year, no match was found. The DNA technology of 1999 wasn’t enough. 2005 wasn’t enough. 2010 wasn’t enough. The CODIS criminal database slowly expanded each year, but it only contained DNA from people who had been arrested and convicted, and the killer had no criminal record, no criminal history, no reason for his DNA to be in any system.
The case became one of the most famous cold cases in Alabama history, mentioned in anniversary articles every 5 years, in true crime forums on the internet, and in conversations among Dothan residents every time summer came and the humid Alabama air brought back memories of the night of July 31. But remembering did not mean solving it.
20 years passed. There were no answers. There was no justice. Only two mothers growing older with each passing year and one question that never left them. “Who killed my daughter?” In April 2018, nearly 20 years after the night JB and Tracy disappeared, the entire country focused on a stunning arrest in California.
Joseph James DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, who had killed at least 13 people and sexually assaulted more than 50 victims during the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested after more than 40 years on the run, thanks to an entirely new investigative technique never before used in American criminal justice history: genetic genealogy.
The idea behind the technique was that instead of searching for a suspect’s DNA directly in criminal databases, which only contain DNA from people with criminal records, investigators ran the crime scene DNA through public genealogy databases like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people had voluntarily uploaded their DNA to research their ancestry and find relatives.
From those partial matches, they built family trees, working backward from distant relatives to closer ones, narrowing it down to a single individual who fit all the criteria. The technique didn’t search for the killer. It searched for the killer’s family, then narrowed down to the individual. Ozark Police Chief Mosley Walker followed the Golden State Killer case with an attention that not everyone in law enforcement had because he was thinking about a specific case file in his own office.
A semen DNA sample that had sat quietly in the lab for nearly 20 years without a match. Two 17-year-old girls who still had no justice and two mothers he knew were still waiting. He contacted Parabon NanoLabs, the private DNA testing company that had played a key role in identifying DeAngelo, and requested that they run the 1999 crime scene DNA sample through GEDmatch, find matching families in Alabama, build family trees, and narrow it down.
Parabon NanoLabs accepted the request. They ran the analysis. The results returned a list of Alabama families with DNA similar to the crime scene sample. And when Walker read through that list, he stopped at one name. A name he recognized from his school days. That name was Coley McCrainy, 45 years old, born and raised in the Dothan-Ozark area, a long-haul truck driver, a pastor at a local church with a wife named Janette, and two children.
He had no criminal record, no police, and no indication in the past 20 years that would lead anyone to associate his name with the JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet case. In the community, Coley McCrainy was a familiar face, a respected man, someone neighbors chatted with comfortably in their yards, a man his church congregation looked up to.
If you ask anyone in Dothan about him, they would have nothing bad to say. That was exactly why his DNA had never been in the criminal database for those 20 years. Walker did not approach McCrainy as a suspect. That would have been a mistake. A suspect might refuse, call a lawyer, or disappear. Instead, Walker invited McCrainy 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 McCrainy directly, “You are not a suspect, but I need your DNA so we can identify the person we’re really looking for.” McCrainy’s wife, Janette, sat beside her husband during the meeting and encouraged him to agree.
She had no reason to suspect anything, no reason to refuse. McCrainy agreed to provide the sample. He sat there calmly while an officer took a buccal swab from his mouth, unaware that the family tree Parabon NanoLabs had built from the DNA had already pointed directly to him before he even walked into the station.
The test results came back clear, leaving no room for doubt. Coley McCrainy’s DNA matched exactly with the semen sample collected from JB Beasley on August 1st, 1999—the semen sample that had sat in the lab for nearly 20 years. When investigators confronted McCrainy with the results, he denied everything.
He claimed, “I did not know JB Beasley or Tracy Holllet, had no connection to the two girls and was not in Ozark on the night of July 31st, 1999.” On March 15th, 2019, nearly 20 years after the night JB and Tracy pulled out of the parking lot at the Big Little Store and disappeared into the darkness, Coley McCrainy was arrested on multiple counts of capital murder and rape.
Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty. Dothan and Ozark were completely shocked, but not because the case had been solved after 20 years, and not because DNA technology had accomplished what two decades of traditional investigation could not. The shock came from the name Coley McCrainy, a pastor, a father, a truck driver whom many people in the community recognized by face and name.
Someone they might have nodded to on the road, sat near in church, or exchanged casual conversation with about the weather or football. No one, not even the police during 20 years of investigation had ever thought of Coley McCrainy. It wasn’t just simple surprise. It was the slow, painful realization that the killer had been living normally right in the middle of this community for two decades, going to work, attending church, raising children, and aging year by year.
While Carol Roberts and Cheryl Burgon sat at home waiting for answers. Carol Roberts, Tracy’s mother, heard the news of the arrest and couldn’t speak for several minutes. Cheryl Burgon, JB’s mother, cried. Both women had waited 20 years for this moment. And now that it had arrived, there was no relief, no sense of completeness, only the old pain resurfacing alongside a new hope that the upcoming trial would finally give them the answers they had waited so long for.
The trial was supposed to begin in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic hit and delayed everything. It wasn’t until April 2023, 24 years after the night JB and Tracy were killed on Herring Avenue, that the trial officially opened in Dale County with Judge William Filillmore presiding. Coley McCrainy, now 49 years old, sat at the defense table facing four counts of capital murder and one count of rape.
The trial lasted 8 days with dozens of witnesses, physical evidence, and intense opposing arguments throughout. In the courtroom, Carol Roberts and Cheryl Burgon sat in the row reserved for the victim’s families. McCrainy chose to take the stand himself, a major risk in any criminal trial because once on the stand, the defendant must face direct cross-examination from the prosecution with no protection.
On the stand, he was completely different from his absolute denial in 2019. Now, he told an entirely different story. He said he had met JB at a shopping mall in Dothan a few months before the night of the crime. JB introduced herself as Jennifer. They exchanged phone numbers, stayed in contact, and planned to meet in Ozark on the night of July 31.
According to McCrainy, “My truck broke down due to a bad alternator at a gas station that night. I saw JB and Tracy at the pay phone by chance, as I described it, approached them, and the two girls offered to drive me to where my truck was parked. In the cab of my truck, I and JB had consensual sex. Afterward, the two girls drove me home around 12:45 a.m. and I knew nothing more about what happened to them.”
As for why he had completely denied knowing the girls when he was arrested in 2019, even claiming he had never met them, he said, “I was afraid my wife would find out about the affair.”
The prosecution systematically dismantled every point of his testimony. There was no evidence, no texts, no calls, no witnesses to confirm that JB Beasley and Coley McCrainy had ever known each other before the night of July 31. Marilyn Merritt, the woman who had met the two girls at the Big Little store that night, took the stand and stated clearly, “JB and Tracy were simply lost and trying to find their way home. There was no sign of any planned meeting or date.”
Tracy’s phone call to her mother at 11:35 p.m. further confirmed this. They were on their way home, not heading to a rendezvous. The prosecution reconstructed the sequence of events based on physical and forensic evidence. After JB and Tracy left the parking lot at the Big Little store, McCrainy approached their car, held them at gunpoint, forced the two girls to follow him to another location with bushes and damp ground, which explained the mud on their shoes and wet pant legs, raped JB, then shot both girls with a 9mm handgun, placed their bodies in the trunk, drove the car to Herring Avenue, and left it there.
But the most important witness of the entire trial was Janette McCrainy, the defendant’s wife, the woman who had sat beside her husband in 2019 and encouraged him to give his DNA to the police because she had no reason to suspect anything. On the witness stand, Janette McCrainy testified that her husband had gone out on the night of July 31st, 1999, and had not come home for a period of time that he could never satisfactorily explain.
Her testimony from the wife who had unknowingly helped police obtain her husband’s DNA, who had trusted him for 20 years and who was now testifying against him, was one of the most heartbreaking and dramatic moments of the entire case. On April 25, 2023, after 8 days of trial, the jury retired to deliberate. On April 26, 2023, the jury returned with their verdict. Coley McCrainy was guilty on all four counts.
The murder of JB Beasley during the commission of rape, the murder of Tracy Holllet during the same criminal event with JB, the murder of both victims during the same course of conduct, and the use of JB’s Mazda 929 as part of the criminal act. Under Alabama criminal law, controlling and using a victim’s vehicle during the commission of a crime qualifies as capital murder, a legal provision designed to carry the highest penalty.
The following day, the jury met again to decide on the sentence and returned with their decision: “Life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
It was not the death penalty the prosecution had originally sought, but it was life without parole, meaning Coley McCrainy, 49 years old, would never walk out of prison gates for the rest of his life. In the courtroom, when the verdict was read, Carol Roberts was speechless for several minutes. She later said, “I’m stunned. We waited 24 years and finally someone is being held accountable.”
Cheryl Burgon, JB’s mother, recalled the moment the jury said guilty. She leaned forward and broke down in uncontrollable tears. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who personally prosecuted the case, stood before the press after the verdict and said, “We lost two precious girls, girls who never had the chance to grow up and experience life.”
He openly acknowledged that the sentence did not bring complete closure. No verdict could do that, but it answered the question that the two families had carried like a nameless burden for 24 years. Coley McCrainy is currently serving his sentence at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama. In a phone interview from prison with ABC News, he continued to proclaim his innocence, saying, “People could call me a cheater or an adulterer, but I did not kill anyone.”
The case of JB and Tracy was one of the first in the United States to prove that genetic genealogy could solve cold cases under conditions where every traditional investigative method had failed. No criminal record, no reliable witnesses, and no physical evidence except a single DNA sample stored in a lab for 20 years.
After the McCrainy case, hundreds of cold cases across America were reopened using similar 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. The case of JB Beasley and Tracy Holllet left behind practical lessons that every American, especially parents and young people can apply in their daily lives.
First, always share a specific itinerary before going out. Not just “I’m going to a party,” but the exact location, the name of the host, contact phone numbers, and expected time home. If plans change, call immediately to update, just as Tracy did when she called her mother from Ozark. But if the two girls had had one more person who knew exactly where they were and what they were doing, everything might have been different.
Second, in the age of smartphones, there is no reason to get lost without anyone knowing. Turn on real-time location sharing with at least one trusted family member when going far away or to unfamiliar places, especially at night.
Third, if you or your child gets lost and has to stop the car in a deserted place at night, stay in the car, lock the doors, and make a call. Do not get out to ask strangers for directions if it can be avoided.
Fourth, trust your instincts. If something feels off, even if you can’t explain why, drive away, call 911, or go to a crowded place.
And finally, this case reminds us that dangerous people never look like dangerous people. They can be your neighbor, someone familiar in the community, someone you’ve seen hundreds of times without any suspicion. Vigilance is not paranoia. It is something that can save your life.
