1,315 posts is a lot to read.
In an effort to re-focus our discussion on the facts, I've revised and updated my original post on this case. I provide it here as a starting point. It has been cobbled together from a great many sources, among them MSM articles, television shows, transcripts and interviews.
Rex Tipton, the original lead investigator on the case, now retired, wrote last year of my blog and Facebook page dedicated to the case that "Although lots of stuff posted is correct something [sic] get lost in translation." Mr. Tipton was very helpful in clearing a few things up for me, as was Officer Tony Smith of the Headland Police Department. It is still my highest priority to verify as fact or eliminate each and every point in the following document, because I believe such a document, one comprised of nothing but factual information, is what our ongoing efforts and discussion would most benefit from.
Mr. Tipton expressed interest in helping with this effort, but I lost contact with him when it was decided to unpublish the Facebook page. If anyone can offer correction of and clarity to the following information, or if anyone has a connection with a source close to the investigation who would be willing to remove erroneous information for us even if the source is unable to replace it with factual information in order to protect the integrity of the case please let me know.
The (Still) Unsolved Murders of J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett
At approximately 10:05 p.m. on the night of Saturday, July 31, 1999, Northview High School incoming seniors J.B. Hilton Green Beasley, 17, and Tracie Jean Hawlett, 17, left their hometown of Dothan, Alabama, together in Beasleys 1993 black Mazda 929. It was Beasleys 17th birthday, and the friends were headed to a field party for her at the rural home of Beasleys friend, fellow dancer Jana Hare, in Headland, about 10 miles north of Dothan.
Earlier that evening, Tracie Hawlett finished her shift in the menswear department at J.C. Penney, left work shortly after 9:00 p.m. and went home to change clothes before Beasley, of Woodleigh Road in Dothan, arrived to pick her up sometime between 9:45 and just past 10:00 at her house in the Hickory Hill Drive/Rock Spring Road neighborhood in Dothan.
The plan was to attend the birthday party, then J.B. would spend the night at Tracies house and the girls would go to church with Tracies family in the morning.
But the girls never arrived at the party. Carol Roberts, Tracie Hawletts mother, later said, They never found the party. They just couldnt understand the directions.
Beasley and Hawlett were spotted in Headland at about 10:30 p.m. by Officer Tony Smith of the Headland Police Department. Officer Smith saw Beasley's car twice in Headland that night. In 2014, he contacted me because he wanted to clear up an important discrepancy in information released by the media, and he was also willing to tell me about the two Headland sightings:
The witness [Marilyn Merritt] that stated the car was spotless in Ozark, that was not true. The car was dirty, that's one thing that stuck out with me. I thought to myself, that's a nice car to be dirty. I turned beside them at a red light on the square in Headland. Just wanted to clear that part, the car was dirty just like police photo shows, was not spotless.
I saw them twice, once at BP talking with someone in a tan truck, side by side, and when I turned beside them at red light.
When I saw them it was just them two [in the car], they appeared to be headed out of Headland. The car looked exactly the same as it did from police photo. No one was following them because I turned into the parking lot right behind their car to speak with kids on the square.
I remember all this because it hit me hard knowing I had just saw them."
Police records show that the girls stopped at a BP gas station near the intersection of Routes 173 and 431 in Headland, where they used one of two side-by-side pay phones to call friends, perhaps to get clearer directions to the party or possibly to tell friends they wouldnt be able to make it: Hawletts curfew that night was 11:30 p.m., giving the girls a relatively short night out given their departure time, made all the shorter by their becoming lost.
In 2014, Jacqui Burgoon, J.B.s sister, offered this information about the phone calls and the curfew:
"A friend of mine was at the field party J.B. and Tracie were supposed to attend. At some point during the night, J.B. called from a pay phone to get ahold of her friend Jana. My friend answered the phone and J.B. told her to tell Jana not to be drunk when she got there, that she had something to tell her. With a curfew of 11:30, I don't see how they planned on making it to the party or how they ended up in Ozark of all places."
One hour later, just after 11:30 p.m., Beasley and Hawlett turned up in Ozark more than 20 miles northwest of Dothan at the Big/Little convenience store-Chevron station located at 763 East Broad Street. The store had closed for the evening.
There Beasley and Hawlett encountered a woman, Marilyn Merritt, and her daughter, who had stopped to buy a soda; Beasley asked for and was provided directions to U.S. Highway 231, which would take them the 20 miles southeast to Dothan. According to media reports, Merritt and her daughter later told police that Beasleys car was spotless, conflicting with the information given by Officer Smith of Headland PD. Merritt and her daughter also stated that the girls were clean and that nothing seemed awry.
While Beasley asked the witnesses for directions, Hawlett called home. In 2014, then-lead investigator Rex Tipton confirmed that phone records were checked, confirming the Headland and Ozark calls. Using the pay phone at the far right end of the storefront, Hawlett told her mother they had gotten lost and wound up in Ozark, but had gotten directions and were on their way home. Carol Roberts later recalled, Nothing was wrong in Tracies voice. It was Mom, I love you. Be home soon.
Merritt and her daughter then saw Beasley and Hawlett pull out of the parking lot and turn right toward the highway, as directed.
Exhausted from a double shift as a nurse's aide at Wesley Manor nursing home, Carol Roberts fell asleep after the call from her daughter. When she awoke at 5:00 a.m., Tracie had not returned. Of Tracies failure to return that night, Roberts stated, Tracies never late. I knew that something beyond her control was keeping her from getting home.
At 8:00 that morning, August 1, 1999, Roberts called Dothan police. Officers started to search for a car accident.
Ozark police officers found Beasley's black Mazda 929 between 8 and 9 a.m., parked along Herring Avenue, about 30 yards from the James Street intersection and less than a mile from the pay phone Hawlett had used the night before. Though a residential street, the stretch of Herring Avenue where the car was found is houseless and flanked by dense woods on both sides.
According to police, when the car was initially found, there were no outright signs of foul play. Police said why the girls stopped remains a mystery. They said it didn't look like someone had forced the girls off the road, since there was no damage to the car.
Though undamaged, the car was muddy and almost out of gas despite a fill-up the day before. When police found the car, the driver's side window was rolled down and the door was unlocked. Beasleys driver's license was on the dashboard. The girls' purses were inside the car. The car keys were among items missing from the car.
Now-retired Lieutenant Rex Tipton, then-chief of detectives with the Ozark Police Department, was contacted by a sergeant at the Herring Avenue scene and told about the discovery.
I don't know why I'm bothering you," the sergeant said, "but something about this feels funny.
Tipton told the sergeant to keep an eye on the car, figuring that teenagers may have left it there after a night of partying, which would not have been unusual. The sergeant ran the car's license plates and discovered that it was registered in Dothan, the region's largest city with just under 60,000 people. He contacted police there.
The Dothan police told Tipton they were just then taking a missing person's report from Tracie's parents.
Tipton reiterated his order to keep an eye on the car.
At that point," Tipton said, "I didn't think about popping the trunk. There was nothing to indicate anything was wrong.
Hours passed with no sign of the girls. By lunchtime, Tipton had become worried. Dothan police sent an investigator, who planned to have the car towed back to Dothan. As officers waited for a tow truck, the Dothan investigator noticed that he could open J.B.'s trunk with an inside lever; the missing keys weren't needed.
Six hours had passed since the discovery of the car. It was nearing 2 p.m. when he popped the trunk:
J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett were inside, each dead from a single 9mm gunshot wound to the head.
They were clothed and showed few signs of struggle. Hawlett's arm was scratched, her pants had briars, and the $95 New Balance tennis shoes she had bought the week before were covered in mud. First into the trunk, she had been shot once in the temple.
Beasley had been shot once in the cheek. She was noticeably dirty; her shoes were muddy.
Both girls pants were wet below the knee.
A single 9mm shell casing rested precariously on Hawletts leg.
Robbery was quickly ruled out as a motive when it was confirmed that not only the girls purses but also their jewelry, money, and credit cards were all found inside the car.
The only item confirmed by police as missing from the car was Beasleys key chain, which held the cars keys. It was described as having white blocks with black letters that had a heart on one and spelled out HARD2GET.
An autopsy revealed that the girls had not been raped and had no alcohol or drugs in their bodies.
Authorities were able to determine that the girls had not been murdered where the car was parked on Herring Avenue.
A palm print was recovered from the trunk lid.
At 11:30 p.m. on the night of July 31, 1999, at the same time Tracie Hawlett called her mother from the Big/Little Store pay phone, 28-year-old part-time mechanic Johnny William Barrentine told his young wife that he was headed out to buy milk for the couples 2-year-old son.
Barrentine didnt return home until shortly before 1:00 a.m., and, according to his wife, when he came in he was visibly upset. When asked, he told her his car had been hit by a black truck with a Dothan tag near Herring Avenue.
In the days that followed, Barrentine would confide in others that he knew something about the murders of the two teens found on Herring Avenue. He just said he thought he might know who did it, said Avalyn Murphy, whose boyfriend, Leon Jordan, encouraged Barrentine to go to authorities and collect the reward.
Barrentine finally took the advice.
On September 1, exactly one month after the bodies of Beasley and Hawlett were found, Johnny Barrentine met with police for a four-hour, videotaped interview, ultimately offering six different stories and sometimes placing himself at the scene of the crime.
According to then-Ozark Police Chief Tony R. Spivey (Spivey retired January 16, 2015), Barrentine first said that on the night of the killings he'd seen a black truck speeding away from the area where the girls were found.
As the interview wore on, Barrentine changed his story several times, finally telling investigators that he'd picked up a tattooed man he didn't know, and the two drove by the Big/Little Store. Barrentine said the man he'd given a ride got into a car with two girls who Barrentine identified as the dead girls and told him to follow. He said they ended up on Herring Avenue. The man got the girls out of the car. Barrentine said he soon heard two gunshots and the man returned. Barrentine gave the man a ride away from the scene, then went home.
In another version, Barrentine confessed to investigators that the man hed picked up and given a ride home wasnt unknown to him at all it was his neighbor. Barrentine lived just eight-tenths of a mile from where police found the bodies.
Police arrested Barrentine then and there, naming him the prime suspect and charging him with two counts of capital murder.
But there were problems with his account. For one, the neighbor he implicated had an alibi for the evening.
Barrentine, whose police mug shot made him look like he might have just been startled from a slumber, immediately said he'd fabricated the whole story in hopes of scoring some quick cash.
I didn't see anything, he later told a grand jury. I made up everything to get the reward money.
He says he was there, Chief Spivey said, explaining what made Barrentine a suspect. He relayed to us about getting the girls out of the car. One of the girls ran. The girls were combative. The individual placed the girls in the trunk. Two shots were fired. The gunman comes back to the car. Something is in his hand. He drove the gunman outside the city. He returned home.
In a September 21 preliminary hearing, Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent Charles Huggins testified that Barrentine was able to describe the girls clothing and other items consistent with the girls and the crime.
Police Chief Spivey said the district attorney, who was present during the September 1 interview, instructed police to arrest Barrentine. When Barrentines arrest was announced at a September press conference, Spivey said police were confident they had arrested the right man.
"What do you do?" Spivey would say later. If you don't charge him, maybe you just let a killer walk out the door. You're between a rock and a hard place.
Barrentine was held without bond in the Dale County jail from his September 1 arrest on. In an October 18 bond hearing before Circuit Judge P.B. McLauchlin, Barrentine denied he was involved in the killings, though he had made the earlier statements to police that he watched the two 17-year-olds shot to death by an acquaintance of his who had tattoos all over his arms.
Barrentine told McLauchlin that he never picked up a tattooed man and that he didn't see anything the night of the murders. He said he simply went to the BP at about 11:00 p.m. to get milk for his little boy.
Barrentine was denied bond by McLauchlin, who then appointed 36-year veteran lawyer Bill Kominos to represent Barrentine.
Barrentine's friends and family stood by him, professing his innocence to anyone who would listen. He did not do it, his mother, Faye Barrentine, adamantly told reporters the day after her son's arrest. "He's not capable of doing it. He has a two-year-old son, and he is not capable of doing anything to hurt a child.
Kominos would go on to say his client had obviously stumbled into a situation with investigators he wasn't capable of handling. As a lawyer, you need to take what your client says with a grain of salt sometimes, he said, speaking in slow, measured tones, his hands held together almost as if he were praying. But I had a feeling from the very beginning, in viewing the car, in viewing the evidence, I said to myself, No. Johnny Barrentine could not have done this.
The police were under intense pressure to make an arrest, Kominos contended. And that pile of reward money kept growing. It grew enough to lure Barrentine in, Kominos said.
Well, they started. They questioned. And questioned. And questioned. Four hours, the lawyer said, punctuating each sentence with a moment of silence. It's all on video and the questions turn from questions to accusations. From accusations to suggestions.
Barrentine, who had lived in Ozark for several years and was residing on Young Avenue with his wife and son, said he first went to Spivey several days after the murders to tell him of a rumor. He gave Spivey a name and was told that police had already checked out the rumor and that the man Barrentine named was not a suspect.
Also several days after the murder, Barrentine reportedly said, he and his wife and brother-in-law went to the scene on Herring Street where the Beasley car was found. Barrentine said they were looking for something that might help the police solve the case.
Barrentine said he was tired when he told the story to police in the September 1 interview at the police station. He said he was interviewed for more than four hours and was not told he could go to the bathroom or could leave at any time.
Barrentine said police "tricked me" into telling the story.
At one hearing, it was reported that Barrentine finished the seventh grade and a portion of the eighth grade, and that he was in special education courses.
Daleville lawyer Joe Gallo said he didnt believe police, who were under intense pressure to solve the case, would drop charges against Barrentine if they believed he was remotely involved. Yet Gallo offered no explanation for Barrentine's stories, except to say Barrentine suffered mild mental retardation. "You've got me," he said.
In January 2000, a Dale County grand jury declined to indict Barrentine.
Barrentine is living in Daleville now, Kominos said at the time, and is trying to pick up the pieces. Kominos said no physical evidence exists that links Barrentine to the murders.
Police still consider him a suspect, Spivey said, noting that Barrentine is also alleged to have made a jailhouse confession.
Police have said Barrentine could be charged later if new evidence points to him.
A man from Michigan who was at a party the night of the murders near where the car was found is also a "very viable" suspect, Spivey said. The man, whom Spivey would not name, left town within days of the murders, the chief said, adding that investigators had traveled to Michigan three times to interview him. The man cannot account for three or four hours of his time on the night of the murders, and later made "suspicious" statements to people, Spivey said. He would not elaborate on what he meant by suspicious.
A video surveillance camera inside the Big/Little Store caught a grainy, poor quality image of what appeared to be a small white pickup truck at the gas pumps at the same time that Beasley and Hawlett were at the outside phone calling Hawletts mother. The store had closed, and there was no record of a gas purchase being made at the pump by credit card or debit card at that time, Chief Spivey said. The video doesnt reveal anyone getting out of the truck, and never clearly shows the driver. After releasing a photo of the truck to the media a month into the investigation, no one had come forward to say it was him in the truck.
According to media reports, the truck and its driver were located in Delaware in 2001.
In 2014, former lead investigator Rex Tipton verified this: That is correct the truck was located and the owner was cleared.
Police were stumped almost from the beginning. When state and county detectives joined the hunt, more than 50 investigators were working on the case in a city with just 45 officers on its force.
An FBI suspect profiler was brought in. But the profile revealed nothing dramatic, Chief Spivey said. The profiler said the killer most likely was a young male who could be described as a loner.
According to an update given by Spivey in 2009, new leads had been investigated over the past year and a majority of those leads have taken investigators out of Alabama. Theyd interviewed about a dozen people, according to Spivey, in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Michigan, Arkansas and South Carolina. But in the end, he said, they came up empty-handed. Spivey said it was personally frustrating that they had not found the killers, but the department continued to work with the Attorney Generals Cold Case Unit and the Alabama Bureau of Investigation.
Other agencies reportedly involved in the investigation include: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Alabama State Troopers, Dale County Sheriffs Department, Daleville Department of Public Safety, Wiregrass Violent Crime/Drug Task Force, FBI Violent Crimes Task Force, Dothan Police Department, Houston County Sheriffs Department, Alabama Department of Game and Fish, Dale County District Attorneys Office, Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, Cold Case Investigator Richard Walters and Attorney General Troy Kings Cold Case Commission.
Since the day police discovered the bodies, they said that Beasley and Hawlett were shot while inside the Mazda's trunk. And, they said, they believed the actual shooting happened somewhere other than where the car was found.
Yet, months into the investigation, police couldn't say where that somewhere else was.
Then, in March 2000, a woman who lived just south of town reported that she heard screams and what sounded like two gunshots on the night of the murders.
The woman didn't report the information sooner because she "didn't want to get involved," Spivey said.
The area, next to what neighbors said is a now-vacant house, is surrounded by trees and has two World War II-era buildings on the property. The spider-web-encrusted buildings wooden structures that appear to be a barn and a half-collapsed garage sit about 100 feet off the roadway.
With FBI help, Spivey said, crime scene specialists and investigators combed the area and found a spent 9mm shell casing, the same caliber casing found in the trunk with the bodies.
Police sent the casing and a soil sample from the area to the state forensics lab. Tipton said forensics experts would compare the dirt from that location with dirt found on the girls clothing.
He also said they would examine the unique extraction marks left on the two casings by the gun that ejected them.
The results of these tests were never released to the public.
Addendum: Very recently I spoke at length with a retired detective, not local to Ozark, about the case. Keeping in mind that his assessment was informal and based only on the barest of facts that were reported in the media, he said his initial impression was that this was the work of a serial killer.
