In 1999, two 17-year-old girls in south Alabama made calls from a payphone, telling their parents they were lost on the way home from a birthday party. The next day, they were found shot dead in the trunk of their car parked near a small hospital in Ozark.

The crime went unsolved and as the years passed, the case turned cold.

And no one might have ever been arrested for the slayings, had a distant cousin not shared their DNA results, eventually leading police to a truck-driving preacher who had lived a crime-free life.

In 2019, 20 years after the shootings, police arrested Coley McCraney in the murders of Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley. McCraney, who maintains his innocence, was arrested after Ozark police worked with DNA sequencing company Parabon NanoLabs.

At the time, Ozark police said they decided to try using genetic genealogy after the arrest of California’s “Golden State Killer” relied on the same technology.

The field of forensic genetic genealogy—using an unknown person’s DNA to work backwards to identify the person through a web of relatives —is becoming more common, gaining attention in cases like the Golden State Killer and more recently in the case of the four murdered Idaho college students.

But, it’s being used to crack cold cases in Alabama, too.

“Genetic genealogy has changed the world of DNA and these cases,” said Capt. Scott Bonner, a cold case detective and 25-year veteran of Heflin police in Alabama. “I never dreamed that we would come this far with these cases.”

The 1999 Ozark murders

Beasely and Hawlett were high school seniors on their way home from Beasley’s birthday party when they stopped in Ozark, a small town just north of Dothan, on July 31, 1999.

According to Hawlett’s mother, the girls were lost, so they stopped at a convenience store and made several calls at a payphone.

There was conflicting testimony at trial over where and when Beasely’s car was seen after leaving the store.

The girls’ bodies were found the next day inside the trunk of Beasley’s black Mazda, parked on the side of Herring Avenue about one block away from the Dale County hospital. Both teens had been shot in the head. Their jewelry, purses and money were still in the car, and officials said there were no physical signs either girl had been raped.

Decades later, in 2018, police sent Parabon a DNA sample from the crime scene. After working with the company, police identified McCraney as a person who could be related to the sample.

McCraney agreed to provide police his DNA. Police took a swab from him, which matched the 1999 sample. He was arrested in March 2019.

A little luck

The way McCraney’s case unfolded wasn’t typical, said Parabon Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore. Normally, they are able to narrow lists down to a few persons of interest. But that’s not what happened in the McCraney case.

When Parabon received the 1999 sample and began to work on reverse engineering family trees, they found limited information. Moore said the similar match they found in open-source websites was likely a third cousin or someone even more distantly related.

So the genealogy team was only able to create a list of surnames they thought could be somewhere in the suspect’s family tree. They wrote a report and briefed Ozark officials, sharing the list of possibly relevant names. When they got to the name McCraney, someone on the Ozark team remembered going to high school with Coley McCraney. The cop thought aloud that he could visit McCraney and get a fresh DNA sample so Parabon could have more information to build out the family trees, get better matches and narrow the search.

At the time, no one expected a match.

“This case was luck,” said Moore.

On trial

During testimony at his capital murder trial this spring, McCraney said he met Beasely at the local mall several months before the murders.

McCraney, who was 24 the time, said the two planned to meet in Ozark on July 31, the day the girls disappeared. But she didn’t show, he said, so he left and went to his mother’s house. He said Beasley had the phone number for his mother’s house, so he waited for a call.

That call didn’t come. McCraney left around 11:30 p.m. to head to his own home, but his car broke down and he stopped at a gas station. That’s where, he said, he happened to spot Beasley and Hawlett.

He talked with Beasely before getting in her car and giving the teens directions. They passed another gas station where his semi-truck was parked, where McCraney said he and Beasley had consensual sex.

After that, McCraney testified, the girls dropped him off close to his home.

The next day, Beasely’s car was found still in Ozark on the side of the road, the girls shot dead in the trunk.

Until the DNA search decades later, McCraney’s name would never come up in connection with the case.

Fingerprints found on the steering wheel and gear shift of Beasely’s car did not match McCraney, and there was no evidence preserved from the backseat. The gun was never found.

One of McCraney’s attorneys, Andrew Scarborough, said he did a considerable amount of research on genetic genealogy when he took on the case. His lawyers didn’t challenge the validity of the DNA results—after all, McCraney admitted to having sex with Beasley.

“Just because DNA is somewhere doesn’t mean that person is automatically a killer,” Scarborough said. “That in itself is not the determining factor of guilt or innocence.”

He said because of the interest in crime shows like CSI, people often think DNA is the answer to every case. But, he stressed, genetic genealogy shouldn’t close an investigation.

“It’s a piece of evidence, it can be a powerful piece,” he said. “But it’s just evidence. You don’t blindly follow it.”

‘Genealogical brick wall’

Often cases that involve a Black person’s DNA are harder to work than white or European samples, said Moore at Parabon. That’s because there are fewer Black participants who have uploaded their genome sequences on GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA.

And, there’s even fewer Black participants who allow law enforcement to search their information. In fact, said Moore, many who did have their information logged in open databases took it down following the racial reckoning in recent years.

Adding to the lack of trust and participation, Moore said it’s extremely challenging to build family trees that were affected by slavery. Family units were separated, some took different surnames, and some people never knew their family’s ancestors or were reunited. In such cases, often the first time a name is listed in public records is the census of 1870. Genealogists refer to this as the “genealogical brick wall of 1870.” The wall can be scaled, Moore said, but it’s time and resource intensive.

How it works

In Alabama, as across the nation, there are two primary ways law enforcement is using forensic genetic genealogy to solve crimes: Using samples from a crime scene to identify a possible suspect, like in the McCraney case, and identifying remains of previously unidentified Jane or John Does.

The process is similar in both types of investigations. Police provide a lab the DNA, either from a set of unidentified remains or from a crime scene, and the lab works to create whole genome sequences of that sample. The sequences are different from what’s stored in a database like CODIS– the Combined DNA Index system maintained by the FBI—because it uses more markers from the DNA, increasing the chances of matches from similar samples. Then, that sequence is uploaded to two websites called GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA.

While many people have used popular sites like Ancestry and 23andMe to send off swabs and research their family history, users have to take an extra step to allow law enforcement to search those results. They have to upload their sequences to open sites like GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA and opt in, in some circumstances, to let police compare results.

“Then, we go to work building family trees… and try to find where the person fits,” said Olivia McCarter, a University of South Alabama graduate who works as a genealogy analyst with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department. She recently opened her own business along with two other female scientists called Moxxy Forensic Investigations.

Genealogists like McCarter and Moore have to build those family trees backwards, using things like census data, obituaries, birth announcements, and other public records.

Occasionally, the matches come quick. But often, the process takes much longer. When and if matches are made, McCarter said cops treat the match as a tip and begin building a case.

Det. Bonner said that follow-up usually involves getting a fresh “one-to-one” DNA sample before standard police work like checking alibis and going back through evidence.

“It doesn’t take the place of police work,” Bonner said, “but it’s an incredible tool.”

Another limitation is the debate over privacy and which websites law enforcement can use. GEDMatch currently has 1.4 million uploaders, but McCarter said that’s not enough.

McCarter urged people who have used sites like Ancestry or 23andMe to download their genome sequence and upload it to open sites like GEDMatch. “That’s key… One person can solve (a case)… Five minutes can provide closure to someone.”

Alabama cold cases

McCraney hadn’t been on the radar of Alabama police, but he’s not the first surprise due to genetic genealogy. This year, police in Tuscaloosa got a break in the 1991 and 2001 sexual assault cases of a University of Alabama student and a real estate agent when DNA pointed toward a prominent musician several states away.

In February, Tuscaloosa authorities announced that a former conductor of the Albuquerque Philharmonic was identified as the suspect in the assaults.

Elliott L. Higgins died years before police said it was his DNA at the two crime scenes, information they gathered after working with Parabon. After identifying a match, police found that Higgins was a judge at the annual International Horn Competition hosted by the university in the same year and week as the two assaults.

Alabama police are not only finding suspects in cold cases, but in recent years have also been able to put names to some long unidentified victims.

That was the case for the Bibb County “unknown boy,” who was found dead in the Cahaba River more than six decades ago. The boy was finally identified in 2021 as Florida teen Daniel “Danny” Armantrout, who hitched a ride in March 1961. The driver who picked him up crashed, and the car went flying into the river. A team of genealogists identified the teen after a 2016 exhumation of the body.

There was also the Opelika Jane Doe, known as Baby Jane, whose remains were found in 2012. She went without a name until this year, when she was finally identified in January as Amore Joveh Wiggins.

Alabama versus Coley McCraney

In Dale County, McCraney was found guilty in April for the slayings, and a jury recommended he spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. While the case represents justice for some, it’s presented others with concerns about law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy.

Scarborough, McCraney’s attorney, described examples where a genealogy match could lead to a person who brushed past a victim in a store: They could have left DNA on a victim and be tracked down decades later, pinned as the killer. He also said retrieving a new DNA sample could be damaging and disrupt lives at times, like if a frail person in a nursing home is approached by police to give a sample for a bank robbery that she couldn’t have committed. What it boils down to, he said, is following the evidence.

Bonner, the detective from Heflin, agreed. “We’ve got to be open-minded. If the old way ain’t working, we’ve got to try the new way.”

Despite the DNA, McCraney maintains his innocence. Numerous community members testified to his good character, but a jury found the evidence persuasive and voted him guilty.

Today, a Dale County judge will formally sentence McCraney for the shootings 24 years ago, a case that was locked away for decades until one person’s DNA turned the key.