He Cleaned the Room. The City Became the Grave. - Episode 96

The Trunk Nobody Thought to Open: The Double Murder of J.B. Hilton Beasley and Tracy Hollett

Two seventeen-year-old girls called home from a payphone just after eleven-thirty at night — perfectly fine, asking for directions. By the next morning, their car sat abandoned on a back road with purses, wallets, and cash still inside. Officers stood at that car for hours before anyone thought to pull the trunk lever. The question that still lands hard: what were those officers doing while the girls were already there?

In this episode, we explore a DNA profile that sat unmatched in a federal database for nearly twenty years, a paternity court order issued the day before the murders to a man who twice refused to comply, and a genetic genealogy match that finally put a name to the semen found on J.B.'s clothing. How does a double murder in a small Alabama town stay unsolved for twenty-three years when the biological evidence was recovered in the first week?

Case Details

Victim: J.B. Hilton Beasley, 17, recent high school student; Tracy Hollett, 17, JCPenney retail employee.

Date: Night of July 31 into August 1, 1999.

Location: Ozark, Dale County, Alabama, USA.

Case Status: Coley McCraney was convicted on four counts of capital murder on April 25, 2023, and sentenced to life without parole on June 15, 2023. No appeal has been publicly filed as of the latest available records.

Episode Key Points

- Officers stood at J.B.'s unlocked car for hours on the morning of August 1 without checking the trunk because the keys were missing — a family friend had to drive from Dothan to ask about the trunk lever.

- Both girls were still wet from the waist down when examined at autopsy the following day, more than fourteen hours after the car was found.

- The day before the murders, Coley McCraney was court-ordered to submit a DNA sample for a paternity test — he refused, and refused again when ordered a second time months later.

- McCraney was never in the CODIS national database, meaning the DNA match only became possible in 2019 through genetic genealogy run on samples from his biological relatives.

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