On the night of her seventeenth birthday, July 31, 1999, J.B. Hilton Green Beasley and her best friend, Tracie Hawlett, both 17-year-old high school seniors from Dothan, Alabama, vanished after getting lost while driving to a party. The last confirmed sighting of the pair was at a convenience store in Ozark where they stopped to ask for directions. The next day their bodies were found in the trunk of Beasley’s black Mazda on a roadside in Ozark; both had been shot in the head and DNA evidence indicated Beasley had been sexually assaulted.

The case went cold for many years despite extensive interviews and a substantial reward. In 2018 investigators used genetic genealogy on crime-scene DNA to build a family tree that eventually identified a suspect. In March 2019 police arrested 45-year-old Coley Lewis McCraney, who lived about a mile from where the bodies were found; authorities said a DNA sample he provided matched the evidence from the 1999 crime scene, and he was charged with capital murder, including the sexual assault and murder of Beasley.

The case raises questions about how the two teens became separated from their plans that night and who else, if anyone, knew about what happened to them. If anyone knew Beasley or Hawlett, or remembers their car or that convenience store in July 1999, please share what might help the investigation.