Double Murder: Tracie Hawlett & J.B. Beasley

0:04 Hey, y'all, it's kJ here, back for another episode of Unspeakable. How's your week going? I bet it's going good if you're a Patreon member, because I released a bonus episode on Monday. I hope you got to listen to it. If you didn't, you better go check it out because it's a pretty damn good one, if I do say so myself. But I've got some shout outs here, so let me start in none other than Citrus Heights, California, where I have a new member named Dragon Onion. What is going on? Dragon Onion? Now, you're only the second Dragon that I've ever known, because the first Dragon was the son of Baron Lee. If you listen to that episode. But I hope things are going really well for you Dragon out there in California. And then right here in Swally, Louisiana, Miss Melinda Leech. What's up, Melinda? How are things going over there? I hope they're going well for you. It's getting hot. We had Springfest just this past weekend, and I almost sweat to death.

0:53 If I got to see you there. I was really excited. I took lots of pictures with people, and I facetimed a lot of people, and I looked like a drowned rat. I was having a good time, but god darn, it's hot. I hope you're doing good over there, Melinda in your neck of the woods. And then last, but certainly not least, this week from Kimboleton Iowa, is Miss Melody Wilin' men. What's going on, Melody? How are things over there? I hope again, I hope you're having a great time. Maybe your weather's better than ours, I hope so. But I'm really excited about the episode I have today. I was gonna jump right in, but you know what, I've got to stop for a second because a little girl came up to me at Springfest and said, Miss Jennings, I loved when you came and spoke to us at my middle school, and you told me you were going to say hey to me on the air. And I have waited and waited and waited, and you haven't done that yet.

1:40 And I said, well, my god, I cannot believe I'll let you down. What is your name? And she said, I'm Faith And I said, well, Faith, you can count on me. So Faith, you better be listening, because here is your shout out. All the way down the road about fifteen miles is Faith right there in Watson. I hope you're doing good, baby girl. I'm a woman of my word. I told you I was gonna tell you. Hey could tell all your friends that you got your shout out that have promised you. All right, So now let's get started, and we're going to go to Alabama. Y'all. Ozark Alabama, And this is a place that you imagine every hometown. In a movie, I guess to be. It was voted, by the way, the most patriotic city in Alabama, and they believe in the American dream. So they honor local heroes at their police Memorial Park that was built. They have a Veterans Memorial Bridge that they also used to promote our veterans and to thank them for everything that they've done. So basically, excellence is celebrated and hoped for by the locals and I just really admired that.

2:40 I think a lot of it. The youth of the community are also raised to excel and to reach for the stars, while also shaking the hand and thanking those that have gone before them and have paved the way for them to live in such a free world. And to be able to experience all the things that they get to experience as teenagers. And this was the case for seventeen year old Tracy Hallett and her best friend jab Beasley. So Tracy grew up in Alabama, and y'all, she's a pretty little girl. She's got brown hair, it's cut into this sassy little bob it's right above her shoulders. She's got these big brown eyes, she's got this big toothy, smiley grin, and she's just a precious girl that you would expect in any.

3:20 Hallmark movie that you would watch. Her father was killed when she was little, she was only about four years old. Whenever her daddy was killed, but with the support of her mother, her mama's name was Carol, her life remained on course. And she was a happy girl. Just a few years after her father passed away, her mama would meet a new man that she would eventually marry and would become Tracy's stepdad, and he would raise her as his own daughter, alongside two younger brothers that would soon thereafter come along to be born and come along into the family. Now, Tracy was super active in her high school. She was a junior at Northview High School, where she was a majorrette. So she liked to do her day anson and in her spare time she would babysit for people in the area just to get some extra cash. But she also had a real job, so to speak, where she worked at the J. C. Pennies in the men's department. So between school and practice and work, she was a really busy girl. But she always made time for something that was very important to her, and that was her church. And so she participated actively in the events at Heritage Baptist where she felt really blessed to be part.

4:28 Of the youth group there. She even was so enthralled in what they did that she volunteered and she would teach vacation Bible school in the summertime. Now, if that is not enough to give you just an ounce of what character this child had. She also maintained a four point zero GPA in school. As well as being funny. What's a good combo? I like funny. I'm funny even whenever I don't try to be. People tell me that all the time, and I'm apparently funny inappropriate times, and I'm so sorry that I do that. I guess maybe it's a trauma response or something. Who knows. So I guess though that you can tell she was a good kid and that she would keep similar company in her best friend JB. Hallett, So Jennifer Beasley, which was she was affectionately called JB by all of her friends.

5:16 She went to Northview and she was two raised in Alabama. Cute little thing too. If you look at her pictures again, she's got that little sassy bob just like Tracy. These really thin, almond shaped brown eyes, and she has kind of a sweetness about her overall. Look when you're looking at the two of them, you can just tell that these girls were alike and that they really thought a lot of each other. And JB was really active as well. In school, she had started really getting excited about cheerleading. She was I found to even be an All American cheerleader in the eighth grade. She went to Carver Middle. School, but once she made it into high school, she really shifted and focused her love of dance as her main priority.

5:58 At school. She had dedicated a great deal of the last ten years to really honing her skills, which were evidenced in the numerous dance trophies and awards that she had. Collected and were all over the shelves in her room. She was an absolute star when she was on the stage and very clearly talented in dance, which caught the eye of her dance instructor, who And I know people always talk up their own kids, and we're always proud of our kids, and they try really hard. But her dance instructor really did think that the light shined differently on JB and that she one hundred percent could I don't know, go to New York and try out and be on Broadway and be on the stages. She just had that presence about her on the stage. She was destined for stardom in the eyes of her instructor that had taught her for so long. And matter of fact, JB had had a fallen out with her mom at one point, which it got really kind of bad that fallen out, and I don't know everything about it, but I do know that it got kind of dicey there for a little bit, and so her dance instructor ended up taking her in and they loved one another. This was in nineteen ninety eight, and her dance instructor would even become her guardian. Now, her mama loved her, and I don't want it to seem like her mama just kicked her out of the house or something. That's not what it was. Her mama loved her, but there was just this strain in the teenage mother relationship and it just kind of got out of whack. So she moved in, like I said, with her dance instructor, and they really had a great relationship and things were going pretty well.

7:30 JB was also a member of the first United Methodist Church and she was very active in that as well as a million other activities. One of the things though, that she really really liked was she liked dressing people up. That was sort of thing. She liked to doll them up and do their hair and put makeup on people. And this included her bestie Tracy. While Tracy was more reserved than JB was as far as makeup and probably a little bit in personality from what I gather too, that dancer part of JB. She really wanted to doll up her dancer friend, but her bestie you'd be like, no, it's too much, You're doing too much. And so they kind of had that Yin and Yang, I guess relationship. So both girls worked really hard in school, and they both were those kinds of students that you just knew were going to graduate and go on and be successful in whatever.

8:16 Past they chose. So they were really excited as this story really takes place, because they were now transitioning right into their senior year of high school. Y'all. It was finally their time. They were going to be the top dogs, and they looked forward to everything that being a senior had to offer, those privileges and that excitement of knowing this is your last year and you're on the top of the food chain. It was still summertime, though they would start in August, but this was about mid July. Summer was winding down, the school year was fast approaching, and so the girls were still enjoying their summer, those little bit of freedoms that they had and just having some fun before the last school year of high school came into play. So the majority of the time that they spent together, we're going to be at the mall.

9:02 JB loved shopping, they liked talking on the phone, they liked finding things to do with their friends and finding something to do was really the most pressing issue of their lives. And I want to remind you that this is nineteen ninety nine when this is going on, and these girls were into everything we were all into. If you were a teenager back then, Napster. Do you remember Napster? That was really short lived, but you could get your free CDs and get those burned. I know my little high school boyfriend burned me a CD in high school from Napster, allegedly. Allegedly, graphic teas were all the rage when that was going on. TRL was on TV, Britney Spears was topping the charts with her hit Me Baby One More Time. That's really the era that this all is going to take place in. And the two girls were super excited on the evening of July thirty first because they got word that there was going to be a party going down in the nearby Headland area. This was going to be, no doubt a blast, and considering it was JB's birthday, this was gonna be a night for the bucks. They were gonna get to celebrate and make it about her, even though it seemed to be just kind of a random party that they were going to, but they were gonna make it about her that night.

10:14 Tracy did work at the J. C. Penny. She had a shift that night until about nine o'clock, so JB had to wait for her to get off before they could head out and go to the party. And there was just one other small issue that they had to hurdle. Tracy's mama was very firm in the curfew that Tracy had to follow, and eleven o'clock. That was it. Eleven o'clock, you better be in this house. So JB did what. We all did as teen girls, and she said, well, let me call your mama, let me see what we can do. So JB called missus Carroll, and she really tried to persuade a possible extension, but she was met with typical miss Carroll, who said, no, her curfew is eleven o'clock. No problem, Miss Carroll, no problem, We'll be back at eleven, no worries.

11:02 So JB. The plan was that JB was gonna spend the night with Tracy anyway that night back at the house, and then after the party, and then they were gonna go to church together the following morning. And this was going to be the best birthday ever. So Tracy ended her shift. JB picked her up and they ran back to JB's to get dressed for the party. So they double checked their hair one last time in the mirror, made sure everything was looking good, and then they jumped in the car to hit the road. They were riding together in JB's car. She had a four door black Mazda and that's what they were taken to the party. JB's dad had given her the car. It was a gift, and this was a gift that she was stoked to have. It was her first real big thing that she owned, and so she kept it spotless. She was proud of her wheels and she wasn't gonna disrespect this gift that she was proud to have received. Now they were pretty sure where they were headed, but this was the timeframe.

11:55 If I want you to, I want you to kind of go back and think about nineteen ninety nine. This was before I fol, this is before Google Maps. But I mean, how hard could it possibly be to find this party that they were going to. It wasn't at a house or anything like that. It was in a place that kids around where I'm from, where they liked to party. It was in a field. They would find a field. Build a bonfire, and everybody would kind of hang out, and that's what this party was going to be. So the girls didn't know exactly where they were going, but they knew the general direction, and they figured they could just drive up and go and go find it. Where everybody was, they'd be able to find it. So there'd be this mix of flirting and fun, maybe a little drama. That was what was on the menu for the night.

12:36 But finding the dang field proved harder than they thought. The field was off a country road, like these country back roads, and considering it was already dark whenever they set out to find the party, these roads weren't well lit, and so it was really just adding to the difficulty of them finding where to turn to end. Up where the party was. So after they drove around for a while, the girls decided it just wasn't worth it to keep searching. They didn't know where they were. They were gonna head back home because this was just getting It was getting too late. They'd been driving around too long and they couldn't find the friggin party, And they knew for a fact that that curfew was in effect, and they were not gonna be late. But the issue became that after all the turns and the twists that they had taken on these back roads, they were now somewhat turned around and they were unsure of how to get back home. So they made the decision to stop, and they were going to ask for help rather than chance being late, because Miss Carroll did not play and these girls followed the rules.

13:36 So thank god. They saw this gas station that they decided to pull into to try to get directions, and there was a woman and her daughter in that same parking lot who had stopped to get a drink. It was a convenience store, and so they saw this woman and they saw her daughter, and maybe it was because the teen girl was there, the teen daughter that was in the car with her mother, maybe the girls felt safe in that or it saw that lights. Oh, look another teenager, and so they felt comfortable getting out of the car and going up to these people to ask for directions. But the teenager in the car didn't really know, so she looked at her mom and had her mom give these directions. Now that mom's name was Marilyn Merritt, and she was happy to help these young girls out.

14:17 She gave them directions to get back on the main highway, and the directions were super simple. You'd take a right out of the store parking lot and then you'd take a left. When you see the entrance to the highway, it's marked by a sign. You can't miss it. It's literally two turns from where we are. And the girls thank you so much. They were just so thankful because they had to get back home, and realizing it was now after eleven, uh oh, they were late, Tracy said, we can't go until I call mama. I have to call her because we're already late and we're going to be in trouble. So the girls pull up to a payphone that was right there on the corner of the of the building and got out a quarter, put it in, and made the phone call home. Now, her mom had actually just walked in the door when she heard the phone ringing, so she was able to just grab it and answer it right there. And Tracy was honest, Mama, look, we got lost. We're in the Ozark area. We're headed back home. We never even found the party, but we're kind of lost, but we just got directions and now we're going to jump back on the road. We are gonna be there in just a minute. And her mama said, okay, baby, y'all come home. Y'all be careful. I love you, and Tracy said, I love you too, Mama, and then they hung up the phone. So Marilyn and her daughter then drove away from the parking lot and the girls made their way back to their car to follow those instructions that they had received from Miss Merit well, since it wouldn't take long now for the girls to make it back home. Since they had the directions, Tracy's mama went on and went to bed. She was happy to know

15:49 the girls had checked in, they were safe, they should be home in the next fifteen to twenty minutes, so she could lay down and she could rest. But before mama knew it, she had dozed off and she kind of third back awake between four point thirty and five o'clock in the morning, so she shuffled into the kitchen to go get a drink or whatever she was doing, and that's whenever she noticed that the light above the stove in the kitchen was still on. So when the girls would come in, it was commonplace that they would turn it off before they had to bed, So this really alarmed Mama Carol. And in my house, we actually did the same thing. I saw a meme one time that said, if you leave your stove light on at night, you are country as hell. Well, baby, here I am, because that's exactly what we did. We left that light on the night light in the kitchen, but you turn it off whenever everybody's gone to bed. So not one to overreact, Miss Carroll went into the living room and she looked at the couch, but the girls weren't there.

16:44 She ran back to Tracy's room. No girls. She goes and looks outside. The cars weren't there, and the phone had not rang since they last spoke, so clearly something was terribly wrong. So she starts her mind starts just racing. Maybe the car broke down. Yeah, that's it. I bet the car broke down and they're just waiting for us to go get them. That's got to be what it is. It can't be anything worse than that. So missus Carrol ran and she woke up Tracy' stepdad. His name was Mike, and Mike never hesitated. That was his baby girl. He jumped straight out of the bed, threw his clothes on, jumped in his truck, and he tore out of the driveway, not necessarily knowing specifically where he was going, but he knew that the last call came from Ozark, so his aim was to travel that same route where they most likely would have taken to come home and look for them. So while he's driving, he not only was looking at the roadway and looking at the cars going past him, but he was checking the shoulder. He even scanned the ditches and the tree line to look if maybe they had gotten in a wreck, or if they had pulled off the beaten path, because maybe they ran out of gas, you just don't know.

17:49 But they didn't see him anywhere. Both parents felt sicker by the minute because not only did they not find the girls, y know, they didn't see the whole car like they were nowhere to be found. So Mamma Carroll, not wanting to waste time, she jumped on the phone. She started calling the local hospitals to see did y'all have any wreck victims or do you have any injured teenage girls? Any any teenagers that have come in maybe they were unconscious or something. But no medical personnel had seen the girls. Nothing, nobody that was unnamed, and nobody by the names that were they were given. So these girls would not have just gone somewhere without permission.

18:33 I need to be so very clear about that. So missus Carroll then jumped on the phone with Patty. Patty was that dance instructor that became JB's guardian. She called Patty to see if maybe they had gone over there instead. But again this was almost laughable because the girls always did what they were told to do, and they were expected to spend the night at Tracy's. They would not have just changed their minds and they would have never changed a plan without permission. So when Patty got the word that they were not at the house, she too immediately panicked because she knew that these girls were not those kids that would just go disappear. So she even called the State Troopers main office to see if they had any reports. Maybe something did happen. The worst case scenario, maybe they got arrested. We don't know, they're just gone, But that resulted in nothing. The police had no clue about these girls. So once that was dreadfully clear that something had to have happened to them, the police did get involved and a BOLO was put out be on the lookout for the missing car and the teen girls.

19:35 So while those that didn't know the girls may have assumed that this was a teen's gone wild. Maybe these girls were just acting out, that was if you didn't know these girls. But Mama Carol and Miss Patty knew this was the absolute furthest thing from the truth that could have been the case. So maybe other people thought, why are you panicking so much? You know, teens will be teens, But these ladies knew that this was not that case. These were good girls and this was beyond out of character. A mother's intuition it never lies, and Miss Carrol knew down in her soul that there had to have been something serious happen for her Tracy to fail to get in touch with her, her baby girl and JB.

20:18 They had to be in trouble. She knew it in her soul. So within just a few hours of that bolo going out for the missing car, an alert patrol officer came upon a vehicle that he believed matched that description of JB's vehicle, so he pulled in behind and he ran the license plate and wouldn't you know, it came back as a positive hit for that missing car. Now it was parked off to the side of the road. There was a tree line there. It was like there was a shoulder and a tree line. And this was called Herring Avenue, which, as a crow flies, it's only about a mile from the gas station where Tracy had last called from and spoken to her mom. It wasn't that far and this road it was also rather short, and there were no houses or buildings or anything like that on either side of this road. There was only a shoulder, then some grass, and then it met into that treeline and the car was parked in that grass.

21:15 It was not wrecked. It also wasn't a place that you would have ever expected the girls to walk away from because there was nowhere to go. Really, there was nothing around there that they would have been walking to. And while I don't have direct knowledge of this, I kind of got the gist that maybe it was in an area too that these two girls didn't need to be walking around in the middle of the night by themselves either. So the condition of the car was peculiar though, because when the officer got up to it, it was unlocked. Some of the windows were rolled down, the ones on the driver's side were rolled down, and then further inspection looking into the car, it really just made what was found seem worse because the girl, those purses were still in the car, their wallets were still there with cash still inside the wallet, their belongings, they were all still in the car.

22:10 There just were no keys. Now you look again, you're like, uh oh, they look really close. There was no blood, there was no sign of a struggle. There was no sign of violence of any kind. The girls were simply gone and the car was left unattended. But where did they go and why would they leave the car there? There really were just no leads to answer this question at all. So, making an executive decision on the best course of action that should be taken, the police decided to enact what they referred to as a close patrol. And this is basically where you identify the coverage of a very defined, usually really a smaller area, kind of like a directed patrol, and the police officers are going to remain in that area to address an issue of some sort. And this could be just to reduce crime in a high crime area, or it could be something really specific, like what was going on here? That these girls are somewhere, we need to figure out where they are. So the goal was that, hey, let's just keep an eye on the car and let's see if the girls or anyone else for that matter, returns to the car, and that might help us with a lead of what's going on here. But no one would ever show or come up to the car. But there was an old friend of Tracy's father. This friend's name was Alton Miller, and he had been an investigator for a number of years, and he decided when he found out that Tracy was missing, he was not going to wait any longer to find his friend's daughter. He was not going to sit by the wayside because I

23:40 believe he was a different town away or a different county, whatever it is over there. He had already lost his friend in Tracy's father, who had passed away, and he wasn't going to lose his friend's daughter who was now missing. So he jumped in his vehicle and he drove down to Ozark himself to assist in any way that he could. And sure enough, when he got there, he saw the very same things that the police officers reported that they saw. It just didn't make sense. So he decided to just go a step further because his own wife drove a similar Mazda as to the one that Jab drove, and he knew that there was a trunk release on the inside of the car where he could pop the trunk even without the keys if it was locked in some fashion, So he wanted to look in the trunk to see if there was anything that could be of any evidentiary value before they towed the car away. The police were like, whatever, yeah, check it out. We didn't pop it yet, so let's do that.

24:35 So he figured out how to pop it. He popped the trunk, he pressed the button, and then he walked to the back and he raised the trunk door, where he was stunned out of his mind to find both teenage girls laying there in the trunk, right in the vehicle that had been sitting there now for hours while they looked for the girls. They had been in that trunk the entire time. Why the police hadn't popped the trunk before then, I can't tell you other than they didn't have keys. But my god, y'all, the girls. Were there the entire time, right underneath their nose literally, and he's like, girls, Oh my god, the girls. But neither one of them moved when that trunk opened. They just lay there, dead, silent, and completely still, next to one another. And it wasn't because they were scared, and it certainly wasn't because they were overheated either. It was because they were both dead and they couldn't. Both of these young girls were shot execution style in the head with a nine millimeter. Now I know what someone's gonna ask me right now, I know they are. They're gonna say, why couldn't the police smell the bodies?

25:51 I don't get it. If their bodies had been in the trunk for a while, they didn't smell them. And ye, all the answers know, smell of a body doesn't really start typically on average, okay, until about the two day mark, and that's going to be weather conditions dependent, amongst other factors. So the girls were known to have been alive for sure around eleven the night before, and it was just now roughly two o'clock in the afternoon. They hadn't been dead long enough for any type of smell to have been alerting the police. Their bodies were laying parallel to one another, right next to each other, but they were laying feet to each other's heads, if that makes sense, so kind of opposite, but right next to one another. And it looked as if they had possibly gotten into the trunk alive and then laid opposite of each other, resting their heads on the slight incline of the trunk sides whenever they got in, and both of their hands were drawn up by their faces as if they had tried to shield themselves from this gun that would inevitably shoot them both in the head.

26:59 And then their hands colapsed right where they were trying to make it go away, a last ditch effort basically to make the reality of what was happening stop. But we all know your hands are never going to be enough to stop someone that's going to inevitably shoot you in the head. And the scene was so horrific that even the seasoned investigators that showed up and were trying to assess the scene, they even said that they had to turn their heads and walk away and try to compose themselves before they continued the investigation, because no man on the planet could have looked at these two young girls in that position and in that condition and not feel something. They're little girls. No one deserves to be murdered, and I know that. But to see two young, good girls who displayed such which genuine goodness and promise laying there in a final position of fear, that's a lot for anybody to look at and for anybody to see.

28:11 We're all human, even our investigators are human, and it's a lot. So after they gathered themselves got back into the business side of it, now came the job of evidence collection, and it was obvious that they both had been shot, and one bullet casing was actually found on top of one of the girls. But looking at their clothing before they moved them, they noticed that both of the girls their jeans were wet from the thigh or the lower thigh to the knee area down, and they had mud on their jeans, but there was also mud on the back of the bumper. The mud was like a swipe of dried blood, so it looked like maybe it had transferred to the trunk as they climbed inside, or their body moved over the trunk and they were put inside and then it dried, so it kind of just looked like a swipe of blood, So it appeared to the investigators that the girls must have been kneeling outside of the car at some point in a muddy area where that's how it had soaked them and gotten up to the place that it did on their blue jeans.

29:16 But the area around the car was dry. It was super dry, so it seemed like they must have not gotten muddy near the car. It had to have been a different location that they were in this kneeling position. And only finding one shell casing was a curious thing as well, right off the top because both girls had been shot. So officers scoured the area because they're now looking for a second casing or more casings to be able to figure out what was going on. So they dropped down on their knees. One investigator gets down real low and he's looking underneath the car. His goal was to find hopefully maybe some spent bullet casings or something of that nature. But when he got down really low and he started looking, that's whenever he noticed that there was a dripping puddle of blood right underneath the car where it was parked. And then looking further, they also found that there was some blood spatter on the vehicle, and that blood looked like it had been blown, like it spattered, and then the car had driven and it blew the blood backwards in a backwards direction with the wind rushing underneath the vehicle. So this led them to believe that the girls had been shot elsewhere and then loaded into the trunk and then driven. The vehicle was then driven to this location where they found where they found the girls, the blood had dripped out and puddled after parking. That's how long that car had been there.

30:45 So clearly there had to have been a secondary crime scene somewhere, but that could. Have been anywhere. So once the truth in essence here had been revealed, now came the sickening task of not only finding a murderer, but someone had to go tell not one, but two mamas that their daughters would never be returning home. And I'm gonna tell you that reality is so much easier said than done. I mean, the closest thing. I never had to do a death investigation or anything in an official capacity, but I will tell you this, I did have to do the death notification when my mother in law passed away, and I had to tell that to my child and my child and my mother in law were besties for the resties. They were the tightest. They were probably tighter than me and my child. That's how much my mother in law was with my daughter at the time. And I had a lot of trouble getting those words out because I didn't want to break her heart and to tell her this would be life altering.

31:55 It would change the course of what she knew her day to day to be. And so. It made me, you know, ask the question I guess of you that can you remember something traumatic in your life happening and the way that you found out about that traumatic event, Because most people can tell you that the way you find out a traumatic situation, the way that you find out the literal words that are said to you often will remain with you for the rest of your life. So tact and empathy have to be number one in this instance. And so that's why, just so you know, death notifications are usually done in pairs.

32:40 Is the is the strategy usually taken. And the goal here is that you have to think before you break this type of information, especially to a mama about her little girl. You got to deliver with. Compassion and respect, and it needs to be so dignified it can't be jarring. So in this case, the police, taking all of that into account, they decided that they would let Miss Carroll's friend, Alton, break the news to her. And he was the one, the family friend that went and broke the news to Miss Carroll. And when he broke that news to her, she fell silent because she just couldn't believe it. She wouldn't believe it. She got quiet and she just stared at him. It wasn't until her husband, Mike walked in the house and it was reiterated again that reality really set in for the both of them and they both collapsed. They fell apart, not knowing what to do, and I my heart for them in that moment. It just touches something, because what do you do. You want to do something. Your child, you just found your child is dead. I need to go do something. But the reality is there's nothing to do.

33:51 There's nothing you can do. You can't undo it. You can scream, you can run, you can punch a wall, you can go by flowers, you can go jump off a bridge, you can do whatever you want to do, but it's not going to change what was just told to you and so missus Carrol and her husband Mike just sat there in that grief, trying to really wrap their brains around what they had just been told. JB's family was also notified, and they had to begin that same crushing response of grief and despair that this worst absolute case scenario just played out in such a short period of time. So investigators back at the scene now started to venture out and they started to search nearby places to see if they could locate possibly a muddy area where the girls.

34:45 Could have been killed. But again, y'all, this is huge. I mean, they found nothing that was of great value. They didn't really find any muddy areas either that lent itself to where these girls must have been. They also, when they found out about the call from the gas station, went back to the gas station that the girls were last known to be at. And this the store was called the Big Little Store, and it's located on a corner street and there's a railroad track that runs along one side of it. And I don't know why, but when I looked at the visual of this, it reminded me of the bovie Fried Green Tomatoes, you know that set up where there's the store and then the railroad tracks are right there. It's very small and it has only two gas pumps for reference, so it's not.

35:28 A big store. It's a big little store. And the good news about the store is that there were security cameras there and they had been filming the night before, and it wasn't a regular recording camera. They would come to find out, but it wouldn't necessarily be to these investigators benefit. So this type of camera took still shots every three seconds instead of a constant film, so it was kind of like doot doot doote and you would see someone move every three seconds, but they go through and they're looking at the tape. And around eleven thirty, there were a few shots of film that catched the girl's car pulling in and they park right in front of the window.

36:09 And this video is bad, y'all. It's grainy, it's black and white, but you can still kind of see what's going on. And about the same time that the girls were at the gas station, another vehicle pulled up as well, but it stopped by the gas pumps. And this was not the vehicle of the Miss Merrit and her daughter. It was a different vehicle. This was a white truck, and it was believed to be a Ford based on the what could partially. Be seen in the film. Interestingly, though, the entire time that the truck was there, no one ever got out to pump gas. They never got out to walk in the store either the store was closed, they couldn't have, but they never got out to pump the gas. So police were really interested on just this front little cab shot of that vehicle and what possibly could have been going on there. I'm not going to go through the whole mundane situation here, but they were able to track down the owner of that vehicle, I'll tell you that, and they questioned this person to the nth degree. When they finally realized that this actually wasn't a big break at all, it was nowhere near suspicious as they thought it would be. Basically, a man had pulled into the gas station, the gas station was closed, he changed his mind, and then he just went about his business and pulled back onto the roadway. So I previously mentioned to you that the girls got their directions from Miss Merrit and her daughter, But how did I know this whenever I was telling you the story. Well, this is where good people just did their thing. And that's the only way I know how to explain this.

37:34 Good people doing what good people do. Miss Merritt had called the police whenever she saw the news the next morning or the next afternoon that two young girls had been murdered. She immediately grabbed the phone and dialed in because the photos that were released sent a chill up her spine, because she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, those were those two sweet girls that I gave directions to, and oh my god, they're dead. I just talked to those two girls. So when she called in to give this information, she was able to establish the firm timeline of the last time the girls were seen alive. They knew about the phone call, but they were able to really set in stone when those girls were last seen alive. And she couldn't help but feel this tinge of what if and the I wish I would have, which was evidenced by her interview with this local news station. But it was only after the girls were dead that she came to the realization that you know that something was ever gonna happen to them, So I want you to listen. In her words, it didn't matter that these girls were strangers.

38:43 It didn't matter that they were different races, it didn't matter that they lived in different towns from one another. It mattered to mis merit that these were someone's daughters. And the sting that she felt, you're gonna it's just a mama's heart on full display. Go ahead, take a listen to this. If I were able to do it over again, I would have stayed there until they finished their phone call and followed them out to two thirty one at least and make sure that they were on the right track. So we can all agree just by listening to that and imagining just how devastating this was for so many people, but directly, most directly for their families. It's just so unnatural for a parent to have to bury a child.

39:29 It's not the way that nature intended it to be. It's definitely not natural when such violence is the cause of it. So it's almost just too much to consider as truth. So how could anyone think that it's okay to snuff out the life of two young girls and then just walk away like nothing happened. What kind of human being can do that? I hope that. Through listening to crime stories, if you're a fan of true crime, It's always my goal to put myself in these victims shoes and their family shoes, and to not let it become so I don't want to ever become so desensitized to what is going on here that I'm just telling a story without saying this is just animal.

40:14 This is pure animal that could inflict such violence on two young girls and then just leave them there. So, back at the Medical Examiner's office, autopsies were now being performed. Their bodies had been sent to the Central Alabama Forensic Medicine Facility, which was in Montgomery. And if you're like me, when I heard that the wallets and the purses were still in the car, that ruled out robbery for me. And if robbery was not the ultimate ultimate motive, then I maybe I'm wrong, but I always go this had had to be sex and motive. This had to be sexually motivated. What other purpose would there be for these girls to be murdered? In my mind, I thought they had to have been accosted for sex. Maybe they refused, and because of that rerif fusal, they were murdered. And I came to that because they were still dressed, they weren't naked, but I just my mind went there and the autopsies that were done would find that both girls were shot at what's going to be considered intermediate range.

41:15 This means that the gun wasn't pressed directly against their skin. It was most likely just from like a couple of inches to upwards of probably around two feet away whenever the trigger was pulled. So basically, the gun was close enough to their skin that the gunpowder from the bullet it burned right so close enough to their skin that it left small dots on their faces. A high point nine millimeter pistol was believed to be the weapon that. Was used to execute both of the girls. Tracy was shot in her right temple and the bullet went into her temple, but it was at a downward angle and it exited right out of the front of her left ear. Because of the situation, she was also given a rape test kit, and the results showed that she was not raped and she had no external or internal injuries to her genitalia. JB was also shot in the head, but her bullet entered into her right cheek and the trajectory of the bullets travel it originated from a higher angle whenever she was shot, it was a higher angle than Tracy's at least, and so that resulted in the bullet severing her spinal cord and exiting through her upper neck area.

42:35 And I guess if you. Need some sort of goodness out of this, if that makes sense, maybe mercy is the word. The doctor said that the spinal cord injury in and of itself would have been fatal no matter what. So I hope it was just quick. And she too, was still given a rape test kit, although she had no external or internal damage to her genitalia. But what was noted was that when the medical examiner pulled off her pants, there was mud on the inside of JB's jeans, not just on the outside. So that makes you kind of wonder why would one girl have mud on the inside and the other one not. Rape test kit was given and there would be DNA recovered from JB's kit. The sperm fragments were recovered from her panties from her brawl, and there was also a stain on her sweater. So while DNA was obtained, this is a great thing as far as the investigation goes. Sickeningly, I'm just gonna tell you it led nowhere. They got nothing from this DNA except a profile. So JB was buried first and then Tracy was buried afterwards, but no arrests were made. They had time to be fa have their autopsies done, their families plan their funerals, hold their funerals.

44:06 The start of their senior year rolled around. The students were still in shock. It had only been a couple of weeks, but still nobody was arrested for this. The start of the school year for the seniors at their high school involved answering a questionnaire that was provided by the police on their whereabouts the night of the girl's murders. To tell you how serious this was. Nobody walked away from this unscathed. Everyone was scared. Were the girls targeted by a serial killer who wanted to target young girls? Was it just wrong place, wrong time? Why? All of these questions were just now unanswered. But police know this. I don't care what happens. People are going to talk. It may take time, but that rumor mill always starts.

44:58 A turning some people, and you know this, we all know this. But some people like to make drama where there isn't any there's also some people who like to make assumptions and then based on those assumptions, whether they're true or not, they are going to pose them to other people as if they're fact. But then there's also snippets of truth in there that can come to light. And considering the social fact of how the world works, police decided to establish a tip line to try and gain leads. And as you can imagine, the tips start rolling in hand over fists and the police are tasked with tracking down every single lead. They can't leave any of it unlooked at, So these never really were painting out to anything. But eventually a really large reward was offered. They got donations and from all over y'all. I mean, I think the maybe it was the governor's office that even they gave money towards this. Just nice townfolk gave up their money to to this reward because people wanted this solved, and if people won't talk for free, maybe money will do some convincing. But nothing again really came to be until about a month after the girls were murdered and that reward was made known. A man by the name of Johnny bearnine would call in and give some information on what he said he had seen. Now, Johnny was a tall and skinny, white guy. He's in his twenties. He was working as a part time mechanic in the area,

46:31 and he was also the father to a two and a half year old child. He had lived there his entire life. He knew the area, and he believed that he had seen the girls the night that they died. So he went into the police station and he was willing to answer any questions that the police had and that questioning turned into nearly four hours of questioning. Now why four hours? I want to address this because the questioning seemed to bring up more questions than answers, and his story would have just a slight shift in it, and then that would open up even more questions. And so what started out is what would be kind of a little interview about what he had seen. It just snowballed into this four hour interrogation. The basic story that Johnny gave was that he had been hit by a black truck at some point while he was out. He was going to get some milk, and the stranger then asked him for a ride to the store. Johnny agreed, sure, I'll give you a ride to the store, and that's when they got to the store and the stranger got out and laid eyes on the girls, and so the stranger looked to Johnny and said, I'm gonna go talk to them.

47:35 So Johnny watched as he walked over there, and then the conversation went that the man basically said, look, I can show y'all a quick way to the interstate if you don't know how to get there. So the man got in the car with the girls. Johnny stayed in his truck, and then he followed behind them towards the interstate. Once they got to a stop sign. At some point, the man and the girls got in to an argument, and Johnny watched as the stranger shoved the girls into their trunk and shot them, and then he jumped back into Johnny's truck and they drove away. Obviously, anybody with a brain right now would find this story a super convenient and be completely disjointed and fraught with tons more questions now than what you feel like should have been said, you know, or that you could have derived from this area of questioning. And the police felt the same way because everything within the story that he was giving was disjointed, and at times, the more questions they asked, it didn't even match the evidence. It didn't even make sense. So when police finally had had enough of the lies and of the inconsistencies, and Johnny was really now looking a lot like a guy who may have killed two girls, they went ahead and they placed him under arrest for the of JB and Tracy. The thing was, people from the area weren't so sure that was true. They just

49:08 did not believe a lot of them said they just did not believe he was capable of such violence against these girls. And look, while that's nice and all, I've learned in my life that anyone is capable of anything on any day. Anyone your best friends can turn on you in a heartbeat. The kindest people in town can be murderers, and those you trust can be absolute, pure evil. I have learned that in my time on this earth, and so lots of questions to me have been answered by not answering them, if that makes sense. But people in town just weren't buying it. Well, if the police spent weeks looking for this so called stranger that Johnny said that he had given a ride to YadA, yadayada.

50:00 Of course that led nowhere. There was no stranger that they could find, so it just basically looked like old Johnny was lying. And the thing about lying is that he placed himself at the scene. He placed himself there when the girls were murdered. But he also then gave this fake story about the so called man he gave a ride to, so it was all over the place. But he was adamant at what he had seen. So, like I said, he was arrested and he was charged with it, and he would be headed for trial for the murders of the two girls. But that's when the seamen stain found on JB's clothing came back into play. This would be the best evidence ever against somebody. So the District Attorney's office went ahead and they got Johnny's DNA. It was collected and it was sent off to the lab. Because all we gotta do is compared the two and hook line and sinker, We've got our killer. A few weeks later, heads would freaking turn when the report came back because it was not a match for the semen found on JB.

51:09 Johnny Bearentine did not match that DNA. That's a big issue, okay, especially if you think that he was the one that did this. So where did the seamen come from If it wasn't Johnny's It's just not driving. So the grand jury that he went before also had some serious reservations about his involvement, considering the key facts were inconsistent or really just dead ass wrong. In a lot of instances, the DNA didn't match in the rape kit. So ultimately there was a failure to indict. I mean, all the charges were dropped and Johnny was released because when it was all said and done, it wasn't that some pooral guy in town was targeted. It wasn't that the mean old police were after this guy.

51:55 It was none of that. The answer is pure greed, is what happened. Johnny had inserted himself into this investigation because he saw a huge payout if he gave some information on the case. Remember that fifty thousand dollars reward that I mentioned, Well, that had Johnny chomping at the bit. Not only that, wasting law enforcement's time, wasting their resources, as well as pulling on the emotions of the girl's families, all in the name of the almighty dollar. So while a lot of people feel sorry for Johnny. If you ever do any research on this case, I don't A killer was on the loose, two girls were dead, the police were now back at square one with all of their time wasted, and all of this because you wanted to lie to make some money.

52:44 Shame on you. That's horrible. But at least the DNA was still there, and clearly they had to identify this DNA. We got to figure out who it belongs to. So this is where Codis comes into play. So Codis is a software that forensic labs use to upload unknown DNA samples and then they can hopefully more rapidly get back any type of match that there might be from all known samples that are in the database. It's an awesome tool. I'm a huge proponent of it. I think it's great and it can turn back results obviously much faster than a person ever could do it by hand or by eye, having to go through all of the comparisons. So if you're not familiar with this, I just I want to give a little titbit of jeopardy.

53:31 I guess. But Codis was invented by the FBI, but it's not that old. It just started in nineteen ninety as a pilot project. But in nineteen ninety four that's when Congress passed what's called the DNA Identification Act, and that authorized the FBI to establish CODIS, and it became fully operational in nineteen ninety eight. Think about the timeframe that all of this case is going down. Now, not all states have the same laws on DNA collection, but we're certainly moving towards a standardization of this. But this database and CODIS can search local, state, national, It can look at all of these profiles and not only can it match DNA, but it can also link crimes.

54:16 I think that's the coolest thing. You could commit a crime in Arizona, your DNA is put into the database, and then you come to Louisiana commit a crime. We don't know who you are, and then when we I don't know, we arrest you or whatever. We can get your DNA and we can run it and not only can we see that you were convicted in that other state for the crime, but your DNA is now matched in Louisiana and we can see that you're maybe went on. A crime spree everywhere. It's kind of neat, so. The issue, though, like I said, is that it's the database is going to compare against known offenders to the police. That means people who have already been arrested or convicted of crimes. And also it depends on what crime you're arrested for whether we take DNA or not. So this means if you've never been arrested or convicted of these certain crimes, it doesn't have your DNA in it. How could it, think about it, No blood is taken from you at birth or anything like that, and uploaded it into a system. So the killer's DNA in this case was uploaded into COTIS and it was searched against one million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, nine hundred and twenty nine known profiles, and sickeningly, there were no matches to this DNA.

55:25 That's insane. I would have fully expected someone who's willing to murder two girls to be committing other crimes and be caught. It's also scary, if you think about it, that they hadn't already been caught for anything else. So all of this work and all this effort that's been put in to trying to solve this case, it hadn't gotten anywhere, and as is common, the community wanted it solved, and they now though, started to question the police, why can't you solve such a horrendous crime. They must not be taking this case seriously. They must not be using their time wisely. And while I don't speak for any specific agency, I don't represent any specific agency, I will say this, it hurts to think that a lot of these officers are working twelve hours a day, sometimes seven days a week to try to solve these murders, and in this case, specifically of these two girls, and these same girls who these officers said that they lost their composure at the scene because it just hurt their hearts. They're haunted by their faces at night. Yet the evidence is so lacking that you're not getting anywhere, and then you arrested someone who ultimately wasted all of your time. And now we've got these websites places where people go online, and we have them locally, you have them everywhere, you know what I'm talking about, where every numb nut in society gets to give their uneducated and often incorrect opinion on what's happening.

56:50 And for some reason, people take what these people that have nothing to do with the investigation have to say as fact as if that's really what's going on is it is ignorance at its finest. So then you have a community now who needs someone to be angry at. And since the murderer is unnamed, the police start taking the brunt of the anger. And I'm gonna tell you it's not fair. It's not fair if you see how hard these people work on these cases. An example being when people jumped online, why the hell didn't they open the trunk of the car? Well, guess what they didn't. I don't know the reason why. I don't have it for you, but guess what else. That's how policy, procedure, and protocol are created in business and in government. We learn hindsight is twenty twenty, and I've found out that now procedure has changed in that agency that if there are ever similar circumstances where they come upon a vehicle with the similar type of situation, opening the trunk is not only mandatory, it is expected. Those girls made that change. Okay, it is what it is, but it's not because there's a bunch of idiots that are running this investigation. You live and you learn, and I'm gonna tell you this too.

58:09 If those girls had been fine and had been located just later that day, society also would have been screaming that the police then violated expected privacy when they opened the vehicle without permission. I guarantee you that would have happened. It's damned if you do, and it's damned if you don't. So now, with the DNA and no name connected to it, combined with a fake confession and having to release that guy, the police didn't have much else to go on, so they would think up really more creative ways of trying to spark information. This included sharing the case with America's Most Wanted, which was super popular at the time. Miss Merritt.

58:49 She also was brought in and she underwent hypnotizing to see what they could. Pull from that, if anything. And look, I know that method sounds kind of cuckoo, I really do, but it has been proven to work, not in all cases, but the possibility is there that it could have turned into something, And so it becomes one of those don't knock it till you try its situations, especially when you're limited on leads. So a little info about this if you're just not familiar with it. Hypnosis in and of itself is basically when a person enters a complete physical and mental relaxation, and so there's three levels that people enter. Ninety percent of people who are attempted to be hypnotized and are just a very light depth, they remember everything and it's not really that much of a difference. The medium depth is where recollection of what just happened gets really hazy. But only about ten percent of people actually experience that deep trance that we think.

59:46 Of when we think being hypnotized. This can't be done in formal suspect interrogations either it's not going to be used in court, it's not admissible or anything like that, but it can aid witnesses in recalling important events. And it works because the mental fatigue of the really really strong concentration over long periods of time that doesn't develop if you're actually hypnotized. And so the studies of all of this show that a witness is more accurate and can really be more vivid in what they saw when they're in a hypnotized state rather than in a regular awake state. And it also last thing, I'm not going to go on and on it, but it also and this is kind of neat. It limits overlying emotional factors that can inhibit a person's understanding.

1:00:35 Of what they saw or what they experience. It takes the emotion out of it and makes it more of I saw this, and it takes away that feeling that people might feel where I don't know if I should say this, it doesn't quite feel right or whatever it might be. So like if something happened to someone when they were a child, it can take away a lot of that stress where they're able to just voice it without all of the constraints of being judged and things of that nature. So I know that's probably more than you wanted to know, but I wanted you to understand the concept of why hypnotization is used. Nothing though after they did, all of those things came up. But the police didn't give up.

1:01:17 But time kept passing, and Jabie's mom was just devastated in the lack of progress in this case, so she even decided to go off on her own, and she went on the very popular at the time Maury Povits show, where she discussed her experience and what had happened to her daughter and blessed her heart y'all in those videos, because I watched if you go look it up, But she shook as she cried at her baby's violent death and that nobody was being held accountable for it, and just time was passing, So everyone's involvement, everyone who had involvement in this case was hurting and they were trying their best to try to find an answer. Not only this, but Tracy's little brothers remember how how her mom remarried and had two younger brothers. Her little brothers started struggling.

1:02:05 They couldn't understand why. When they watched TV of crime shows, it was solved in an hour, but their sister has been dead and murdered for a long time and nothing in real life was happening like that. Their sister was gone, she was stolen from them. No one's ever been arrested, and that's not the way it's supposed to go. Kids only have TV to. Go off of. It wasn't going that way, And unfortunately, as time passes, people start to forget pain, eases, urgency, and fear. Sometimes they just start subsiding. But not for those families. They continued to have memorials and anniversaries to showcase that this is still open that we have no closure to what happened here. Crosses were erected at the site where the car was found. The mam has continued to go visit after year, just trying and hoping and praying for an answer.

1:03:05 A year would pass, then three, then five, then ten, Still no answers. Y'all. Ten years went by. Tracy's once younger brothers were now legally recognized as men. They were older than their sister was at the age she was murdered. Still no answers. By year fifteen, I'd be lying if I said that. Everyone was like, Oh, we're going to solve it. We're going to solve it. No, it was really starting to seem like someone was going to get away with this double murder. As year sixteen rolled around, it had now been over one hundred and forty thousand, one hundred hours with no arrest. And we all know that if you don't solve a case or have a suspect within the first forty eight that's a bad thing. Now it's been sixteen years, but a woman would come forward and her name was Renee Crumb, and she said that she knew something about the case because the thing is. As time passes, people get older and people who maybe shut their mouth before their conscience sometimes catches up with them, and.

1:04:11 This was one of those situations. It was her conscience mixed with fear that kind of made her want to speak to police. What happened was a blogger got wind of Renee's supposed story and wrote a post about it online, and now, with the Internet being the way that it is, it got passed and passed and passed and passed and passed, and so. It blew up. Basically, the story was that years ago, Renee was at a party where she was having a good time. Everybody was drinking and everybody's running their mouth. And at this party, she said, there was a police officer who got drunkard and Cooter Brown and began running his mouth, and he told her how he killed JB. He never should have done it, and that other people at the party were supposedly saying, oh, we got your back, man, we would never say any thing. And then this police officer added that if you if you say anything, I'll kill you. Well, when the question of why did you kill the girls came up at the party, supposedly the man said, oh, I was dating her and she pissed me off, so I killed her. Renee took this to mean that a police officer or a police cover up had happened, and because this was a small town, she didn't want all the police after her. So on top of that, that officer had supposedly threatened her, so she had just decided to keep her mouth shut so that she didn't draw on one of the attention to herself. And when all of this got spread online, obviously the police department was

1:05:41 shook by the claim that it might be one of their own, so they enacted this exhaustive investigation. They looked into everybody that was on the force at that time lee a person after person, file after file, questions, background, where were you, who were you dating this, that and the other, and no matter what happened. After they went through everybody, police found zero links between any officers and JB. Beasley nor Tracy. None of them had any type of links, no phone conversations, no phone calls, no texting, no friends that stopped by at the house, no family connections, nothing. No one on the force had been seeing JB. There was also no evidence to support the claim about any of this, so the police department ended up filing a lawsuit against not only the blogger but also Renee Crumb for defamation of character. But the blogger then filed bankruptcy and so the whole lawsuit was dropped. So, now even more time had passed, the police were still nowhere closer to solving the case. Cotis was still periodically running the DNA to see if any new matches in the DNA could be made, but nothing was ever flagged. But as luck would have it, California was about to have a huge break in a massive cold case, and that case would be the Golden State Killer. So as the news broke on the use of genetic genealogy as the tool

1:07:12 that would break the case wide open, it just so happened that a detective that was newly brought on to the case of JB and Tracy was watching that newscast and he was really intrigued by this new science that was being used to solve old cases, and so his wheels really got turning. Look, this case is over twenty years old. We can't crack it. So when he got back to work the next week, he jumped on the phone and he started calling California. Hey, man, tell me how this works, what's the process, how did y'all do it? What's going on with this? And that phone call would end up being the break investigators needed. It would take an additional five months, but they followed suit with California and they submitted the DNA from JB's rape kit genealogy processing. When they set off this DNA and they got the results back, believe it or not, the chief of police at the time was kind of surprised by what came back and was put on his desk.

1:08:14 This guy's name was Marlos Walker. Okay, he was the serving police chief in twenty nineteen when all of this went down, and he was actually the one to submit the DNA and receive the list of possible relatives to the DNA donor of the sperm on JB. And when that list came back, he was blown out of the seat at one of the names on the list, and it was a guy that he actually went to school with and knew personally. They went to high school together. He was a popular guy. They played football and basketball and all that kind of stuff. But now as an adult, this guy was a truck driver, but he was also an ordained minister. And this guy's name was Coley McCraney, now Coley. Just a little background him. He's married with two kids of his own. These are good people. They are regarded as living the life, live in the dream.

1:09:00 They were happily married, their kids were successful, good teenagers. His own daughter, by the way, was the same age of the girls that were murdered back in the day. So the Chief's thoughts were, you know, he'll really understand how important this is, and maybe that'll be a pull on his heart that his own daughter is the same age of these girls. So Minister Coley was in the process of now starting his own church, a dream that he had been having and was going to make come true. So when Chief Walker called him to come in look at the family tree and ask him, will you give your DNA sample so that we can get even closer to whoever this suspect might be, Coley told his wife.

1:09:44 They jumped in the car and drove down to the police department as requested. And this was an awesome chain of events. What are the chances of the chief actually knowing someone personally on the list, and then a minister to boot like, thank god, this is a great break that he's gotten. So Coley shows up. He looks through the list of names, gave a little bit of information if he knew anyone or anything, and then he submitted an oral swab of his DNA to the police. They shook hands, thanked Coley. We appreciate this so much. We'll let you know and maybe we can solve this case together. No problem. The DNA was promptly sent off and maybe, just maybe they would get results back that could possibly lead them to a violent rapist and double murderer. So a little time goes by, the phone rings and it's the crime lab with the data for Chief Walker. And the crime lab confirmed not only was the DNA related to the killer, whoever gave that DNA sample was the killer. Chief Walker is like, wait what no, no, no, no, no, that was the sample we gave to find a killer.

1:10:59 And the crime. Lab repeated, whoever you got that DNA from is who left the sperm on JB's body. Unbelievably, the minister himself was a direct match to the seamen collected off of the body of JV JB. Chief Walker was in so much shock he had to like get it together before he made the phone call to let everybody know, Look, McCraney that. Was in here. He's the one. He's going to be wanted for these girls murders and he needs to be apprehended right now. So officers set out to capture Coli and they find him on the road.

1:11:42 He was driving his big rig. They enacted a traffic stop, pulled him over, took him into custody, no problem. So he's taken down to the station and he's brought into an interrogation room, still handcuffed, and he's set into a chair in the corner of the room, and you know, an interrogation room is really small. The investigators come in and they ask him point blank, have you ever met Tracy or JB. You know, the two girls that were murdered and the case that you came and you gave your DNA for. Have you ever met them? No? Have you ever spoken to them? No? Have you ever do you even know who they are? No?

1:12:22 He never saw them in his life. And that's when they told him, well, your DNA shirt has matched the sperm found on one of the victims. So you can either explain what happened or you can just let the evidence speak for itself. So Coley's eyes are wide open, his breathing is very rapid. You can see it clearly in the video. His shirt is moving with his heartbeat. And he immediately asked for a lawyer. So the investigator reminds him, look, you can have a lawyer, but that's not going to change the evidence. And so while he's saying this, he lays out photos of the dead girls in front of him on the table, and Coley looks at the photos and then says, so, I don't get a lawyer. So the officer then looked up, he looked Coley directly in his eyes, and he said, no, you're gonna get a lawyer. And he then picked up the photos from the table and he like shoved them into his folder with obvious disgust, adding, whoever did this, whoever brutally murdered these young girls and savagely raped them, that's a savage Coley then just cocked his head to the side, crossed his arms in front of his chest, kind of in defiance, and said, I want a lawyer.

1:13:41 I don't know about you. That does not seem very minister like. I don't know what you would expect, but that's not what I expected. So meanwhile, Coley's wife, her name is Jeanette. She and her family were advised of what was taking place, and they flat out didn't believe it, no freaking way. And I can imagine that the dad and the husband that they knew was nowhere near the twenty five year old man who was believed to have murdered and raped these girls. But then again, y'all, DNA don't lie. There are facts and then there's feelings. And as for me, I believe the facts, but a lot of people in town didn't want to believe it, and they started this rumor that it was a setup because he was black and the police wanted to pin it on someone it had been too long. Okay, well, I understand if people want to get all up in their emotions, but why would the police? You have to ask yourself this, Why would the police set up someone twenty years later that no one would believe could do it? A minister, of all people? Why would they pick a minister? That would be the dumbest move I've ever heard of. Wouldn't you want to pick some vagrant who has no ties.

1:14:52 To the community. If you were that evil, you wouldn't pick somebody that was beloved. And also, I'll tell you it turned out that back then Coley lived less than a mile from one of the girls car was found. So race then became a big issue in the media. A black man is now being set up for killing white girls, and to me, this really cheapens the death of the girls. And it also makes me angry because the media didn't mention that the chief of police was also black. You know, the very man who broke this case open and called for the arrest of Coley, he. Was black too. Also, all of that aside the DNA guys, the damn DNA.

1:15:33 The police didn't have spit, they didn't have sweat, they didn't have a thumbprint. They had seamen. That doesn't just appear on a young girl's body, you know what I'm saying, And definitely not in her panties and not on her brawl. It doesn't just happen to get there. So Coley is charged with capital murder as well as rape, and his defense then started pointing out that witness Renee Crum said, oh no, it was a cop. Remember it was a cop. But when they went back and they questioned her, again, Renee then admitted, all right, I was lying. I made it up. She said I was also threatened. So if I'm ever called to court, I'm just gonna say I lied. And that's exactly what she did. So when she went to court, she said I lied.

1:16:16 None of that is true. So regardless of whether she lied or she didn't lie, to me, that was all smoke and mirrors. Because you can't change the DNA. That can't be explained, there's no explanation for it. So during during the trial, when Coley's wife, Jeanette was brought to testify, she gave lots of insight to the night that the girls were murdered, which is odd to me. You can remember twenty years back, and I'm not judging this woman. I'm just saying that's kind of odd. You can remember a specific day twenty years back, and she said that the two of them were together, and then she got a call because Coley said his car battery had died that night, and she went to the little Big store to jump him off. And I'm gonna tell you, Janet, that comes across to me as an honest woman and a good woman. But she also i think believes in a man blindly too. Her own statements place him at the very place that the girls were the last time that they were ever seen. But Coley also decided to take the stand, and wouldn't you know, once he's on the stand, the minister, who never met the girls in his life, did not know their names, never saw them, never had an interaction with them, and his entire life, now says that not only did he know them, but he knew JB really, really well. Because it turns out he now says that he met JB

1:17:46 at the mall and he gave JB his number, and she called him the very night of the murders and they met up at his truck where they had consensual sex. So I'm guessing Trey just sat out in the car in the middle of a bad part of town while her friend was hooking up with a stranger in his truck, and then when they were done, they took him and drove him back to his wife. Is this Michael one to his wife? The minister, They took him back to his wife, who then brought him back to his truck at the gas station. Then, just hours later, when the very same girl that was found murdered, the one that you thought enough to cheat on your wife with, the one that you thought enough to have sex with, the one that you thought enough to give your number to that girl. But you just didn't think enough to give a call to the police and say, oh my god, I was with her.

1:18:46 She was fine. I saw her at this time. This is what we did. You didn't think to make that call. You just let that ride. That was just just another day, not your problem. And that's when he says, oh, well, I was dating a lot of a lot of women. I hooked up with a lot of women, and I'm thinking, why you had a wife. Okay, well that's a character flaw in and of itself. Don't you think that you're gonna be up here spouting that you're a minister but you're just like, oh yeah, but I cheat on my wife all the time. Y'all. If you believe what this man was saying, then I have got some ocean front property for sale in Kansas and I will sell it to you today. It's absolutely fricking ridiculous. And some other information that I would like to add to this, I uh didn't plan on telling you, but I'm ad it in here because Coley also on the stand.

1:19:31 Minister Coley, he maintained the fact that he had no criminal record and he was never violent, and that was all over the news. You know, this guy couldn't have done it. I don't know how a seaman ended up on a young girl, but he couldn't have done it because he's a minister and he's never been violent. Well, an ounce of research, just an ounce of it, would help you call total bullshit on what you're being fed because it's not quite true. Because Coley McCraney was married to someone else before he was married to Jeannette, and that woman in two thousand and four, arrived at Keisler Air Force Base at three point thirty seven in the morn in the morning saying that her husband had assaulted her and when they were investigating this, there was a big bruise on her left cheek and she also had a bald spot on the back of her head where her hair had been forcibly ripped out from her scalp.

1:20:26 She said that she was hitting the head with a nine millimeter magazine and then he locked her in a room with her baby, and the only way that she was able to get out is that whenever Coley opened the door, she managed to push past him and run out. She just ran for her life. So the military police went and they detained Coley. He also had a friend with him at the time. And guess what they found on him ammunition along with a broken magazine. You know what. The wife just claimed she was smoked in the face with. And Coley was charged with aggravated assault, assault consummated by battery on a child under sixteen, unlawful detention, and possession of a concealed weapon. They did charge his friend, but his friend was only charged with trespassing because his friend was a civilian while Coley was military. And do you remember this little little tidbit of information. Both girls had been murdered by a high point nine millimeter pistol. You remember that that's what was believed to be the murder weapon.

1:21:25 Well part of this investigation I'm telling you about. Now, guess what they recovered a weapon from Coley. Guess what it was? A nine millimeter pistol high point. I rest my case. What are the chances y'all be so for real? Right now? Be so for real? And the jury agreed with me too. Nine white and three black jurors all agreed that Coley McCraney kidnapped, raped, and murdered the two girls, JB and Tracy, and he now faced the death penalty in a state with the highest death penalty rate in capital cases, and that phase, once he was convicted, would happen. At a later date. But I want y'all to know too. It only took thirteen minutes for them to sentence him to life in prison. So consider considering all of the grace that Colely got. You know, minister Colely, it was a lot more than he ever extended to those two young girls that were headed home to their mamas. You had a daughter the exact same age as the girls you raped and killed, and you just went through life as if it never happened.

1:22:33 But that was the old you, wasn't it. That was the old you. You didn't want to bring that up because you've changed. And that's the thing about people, y'all. They do change. But even when change is for the better, it does not erase what happened in the past. It's still there. Your reputation, that's how people see you, but your character, that's who you really are. And from where I'm sitting. A fresh coat of holiness doesn't cover semen and bloodstain. It's incredible to me to know that a man can spend his youth lying, cheating, and murdering, But as soon as you add a Bible in a robe, people are willing to just overlook facts, cold hard facts. Well, I don't work that way. I don't care how good of a friend you've been to me. When the evidence proves that you raped and murdered teenage girls, our friendship is done.

1:23:25 And it's not because I'm fake. It's because I'm human and you are a snake. And snakes don't repent. They just shed their skin to grow bigger, slicker, and harder to catch.