Two Teen Girls Vanished in Alabama. Police Found Their Car but Missed Something Horrifying

Two Teen Girls Vanished in Alabama. Police Found Their Car but Missed Something Horrifying

Two Teen Girls Vanished in Alabama. Police Found Their Car but Missed Something Horrifying

It was supposed to be a field party, the kind every teenager in southeast Alabama knew by heart. On July 31, 1999, 17-year-old best friends J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett got lost while driving to a birthday party in Dothan, Alabama. They were celebrating J.B.’s 17th birthday, about to start their senior year. They left Dothan in J.B.’s black Mazda, expecting to be home by midnight.

The girls never made it back. Hours later, their car was found less than a mile away, abandoned on a quiet road. When police finally opened the trunk, they discovered both girls inside, shot to death.

In between those two facts is a detail that has haunted investigators for more than two decades, and it is the reason this case is still taught to rookie officers in Dale County.

This was 1999. There was no phone in the cup holder giving turn-by-turn directions. A lost driver looked for a gas station or a pay phone. J.B. and Tracie ended up 20 miles off course in Ozark. Around 11:30 p.m., they pulled into a convenience store called the Big Little Store and asked for directions back to Dothan. Tracy used the pay phone to call her mother. She said they had been lost but were fine, that they had their directions now, and that they were skipping the party and coming home. It was an ordinary call, with no panic in it.

They never made it home. Early the next morning, police in Ozark spotted JB’s car on the shoulder of a quiet country road beside a wooded area, less than a mile from the store. The car was unlocked and the driver’s-side window was down. The girls’ purses were inside with their cash untouched, and the only thing apparently missing was the car keys.

That is where the first failure happened.

Here is a detail that is hard to believe in hindsight: the Ozark officers did not open the trunk. Later that morning, officers from Dothan arrived to help, and they noticed things that did not look right. The rearview mirror had been broken off and was lying on the floorboard. There was mud inside the front of the car, and the exterior was caked with dust and dirt. There was what looked like a smudged handprint on the rear driver’s-side door, and a dark substance on the rear bumper.

One of the Dothan officers asked an obvious question: had anyone checked the trunk? The Ozark officers said they had not, because they did not have the keys. The Dothan officer pointed out that the keys were not necessary, since there is a release lever inside the car. He pulled it, and the trunk popped open.

J.B. and Tracie were inside. Both girls had been shot in the head. They were still fully clothed, but their clothing suggested they had been somewhere else before they ended up in that trunk. Wild briars clung to Tracy’s pants, and her new shoes were caked with mud. JB’s jeans were filthy around the bottoms, with dirt staining the lower legs inside and out.

At first, there were no signs of foul play when investigators found the black Mazda sedan the teens had been driving by 9 a.m. the next day. But when they opened the trunk, they found Beasley and Hawlett inside with gunshot wounds to their heads. One of their purses was found in the front of the car with all of her cash and credit cards inside, leading police to believe that the motive was not a robbery.

The crime scene told two stories. The car on Herring Avenue, less than a mile from the store, was not where the crime happened. The place where their car was found told a different story. That contrast suggested an important possibility. The girls had likely been somewhere else before the car was abandoned, and Herring Avenue was not the location where the crime unfolded. The mud, the briars, the filth on their jeans meant they had been dragged through woods, through a field, somewhere overgrown and wet. Then they had been placed in their own trunk and driven back to a roadside as if they had simply broken down.

The most important evidence came from J.B. herself. Semen was found inside her body and on her bra and underwear. It gave investigators a DNA profile of the man who had been with her. What they lacked was a name.

The DNA was run through databases and returned no match. It was compared against every man police were looking at, and again there was no match. Years went by. Tips came in, hundreds of people were questioned, some people even confessed to knowing what happened that night. Every time investigators obtained a sample, the answer was the same: no match. Five years passed, then ten, then fifteen. By 2018, the case had been cold for nearly two decades.

Then investigative genetic genealogy, the same tool that caught the Golden State Killer, arrived in southeast Alabama. Ozark police sent the preserved profile to Parabon NanoLabs. The lab built a family tree from distant relatives on GEDmatch and narrowed it to one family name the chief recognized — a local preacher and truck driver named Collie LeRoy McCraney Jr., who lived less than a mile from both the Big Little Store and the spot where the Mazda was abandoned. He had never been on the suspect list. He had no criminal record.

When officers asked him for a voluntary swab in 2019, his DNA matched.

In 2023, McCraney took the stand and claimed he had met J.B. weeks earlier at a mall, had consensual sex with her in his semi-truck that night, and that the girls dropped him off alive around 12:30 a.m. He said he panicked and lied when first questioned. A jury did not believe him. The timeline, the mud, the briars, the broken mirror, and the two bullets from the same gun told a different story than a consensual encounter.

He was convicted of four counts of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole.

But for the families of J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, the horror will always circle back to that morning on Herring Avenue. Police found their car but missed something horrifying, because no one thought to pull a lever. For hours, two best friends lay in the trunk of their own car on the side of a road they had taken while trying to find their way home, less than a mile from where they had stopped to ask for help.

The case was solved by DNA, but it was almost lost by assumption.

This image captures that eerie morning — the abandoned sedan on a misty Alabama roadside, the flashlight that should have been aimed at the trunk sooner. Want to refine it further?