Solved cold cases in Alabama
6 documented cases.
Ada Elizabeth Fritz
On May 18, 1976, the body of an older woman was found in Sessions Creek in Grand Bay, in south Mobile County, Alabama. She had been shot in the back of the head, and her hands had been removed. With no hands for fingerprints and no identification, she became a Jane Doe, and after an autopsy her remains were cremated in 1979 and placed in a mass grave, leaving investigators with no body to test. For 47 years no one knew who she was. In December 2022, Mobile County Sheriff's Office cold-case investigator and genetic genealogist Olivia McCarter, working with Moxxy Forensic Investigations, located an old ceramic dental mold made from the victim's mouth that still carried trace skin cells. Intermountain Forensics in Utah used an M-Vac wet-vacuum system to recover an uncontaminated DNA profile from the mold and performed whole-genome sequencing in early 2023. Through investigative genetic genealogy, McCarter identified the woman within about 19 days of research as Ada Elizabeth Fritz, born in 1914 in Sheridan, Wyoming, and last known to live in Batesville, Arkansas; she had never been reported missing. A nephew in another state provided a confirmatory DNA sample, and the Mobile County Sheriff's Office announced the identification in August 2023. Investigators have said they believe Fritz was killed by Henderson James Williams, a man later convicted of murdering his elderly mother in Mississippi in a strikingly similar manner, with her hands removed and her body left in water near Grand Bay; Williams died in a Mississippi prison in 2008. Because Williams is deceased and was never charged in Fritz's death, the attribution is the investigators' stated conclusion rather than a court finding.
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley
On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb planted beneath the stairs of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded as the congregation gathered for Youth Sunday. Four girls getting ready for the service in the basement were killed: Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14. Addie Mae's younger sister lost an eye, and more than twenty others were hurt. Robert Chambliss, a known Klansman, was charged that fall but cleared of murder and fined over the dynamite. In 1965 the FBI formally named Chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jr., Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Frank Cash as the bombers, but J. Edgar Hoover blocked prosecution and the file was closed in 1968. Alabama's attorney general, Bill Baxley, pried loose part of the FBI's evidence in the 1970s, found Chambliss's niece as a witness, and in 1977 won a conviction and life sentence for the murder of Denise McNair. Chambliss died in prison in 1985; Cash died uncharged in 1994. After a 1993 meeting between FBI officials and Birmingham's Black ministers, the Bureau reopened the case. Agent William Fleming found a box of 1960s surveillance tapes in the Birmingham office, including a 1964 kitchen recording of Blanton telling his wife about the meeting where they planned the bomb, and investigators found relatives and acquaintances who said Cherry had boasted of lighting the fuse. Both men were indicted in 2000. Blanton was convicted of four counts of murder in May 2001 and Cherry in May 2002; each received life, and each died in prison.
Christopher Alvin Dailey
Christopher Alvin Dailey, a 26-year-old server at the Huntsville Hilton, was last seen on April 25, 1995, after an employee meeting and was reported missing the next day. His body, with a single gunshot wound to the head, was found in a wooded area of southwest Decatur, Alabama, and his tan 1983 Toyota Tercel was discovered half-submerged in the Tennessee River with a rock tied to the accelerator. The case went cold for 25 years. In November 2020, Johnny Dwight Whited, a Trinity, Alabama, man dying of stage-four lung cancer, telephoned the Decatur Police Department and confessed to the killing, providing details about the crime scene that detectives said only the killer or crime-scene technicians could have known. Whited was charged with murder and indicted in March 2022, but he died of his cancer in June 2022 before the case could go to trial, and the charge was dismissed.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, a farmer, woodcutter and the youngest deacon in the history of St. James Baptist Church in Marion, Alabama, had tried several times to register to vote. On the night of February 18, 1965, he joined a march of more than 200 people protesting the jailing of a civil rights organizer. When Alabama state troopers broke up the march, Jackson went into Mack's Cafe with his mother and grandfather. Witnesses said he was trying to protect them when trooper James Bonard Fowler shot him in the stomach. Jackson died in a Selma hospital on February 26. His death led to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the Voting Rights Act. The shooter was never in doubt: Fowler said he fired in self-defense. But federal and state grand juries brought no charges, and nobody was prosecuted for more than 40 years. In an interview with the Anniston Star, Fowler publicly admitted firing the shot. In 2005 a new district attorney, Michael Jackson, reopened the case, and a Perry County grand jury indicted Fowler for murder on May 9, 2007. On November 15, 2010, two weeks before trial, Fowler pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and received six months in jail. He died in 2015.
Katherine Foster
Katherine Foster, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, vanished on February 21, 1980, after telling a friend she would meet her at the car. A search party of students found her body in the woods near the dormitories within days; she had been shot twice in the head. The friend, Jamie Kellam Letson, who had grown up with her in Pascagoula, Mississippi, was the last person known to have seen her, but the first investigation produced no substantial suspect and the case went cold. Prosecutors later said that in 2002 Letson, working through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote an unsigned letter to Foster confessing to the killing, and that she also told her sponsor. Investigators reopened the case after learning of the letter, and a grand jury indicted Letson in November 2008, when she was brought to Mobile from a Christian shelter in Jackson, Mississippi. At trial in May 2010 her lawyer argued that she had falsely confessed to impress a friend. On May 27, 2010, a Mobile County jury convicted her of first-degree murder after about six hours. On June 18, 2010, a judge sentenced her to life in prison, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction on December 9, 2011.
Lori Ann Slesinski
Lori Ann Slesinski, 24, a 2004 Auburn University graduate who worked at a mental health center in Auburn, Alabama, was last heard from on the evening of June 10, 2006, when she called her best friend on the way to a girls' night; the friend could hear Derrill Richard "Rick" Ennis, a friend of Lori's from a bowling alley, in the background. Lori never arrived. Her mother reported her missing on June 13, and the next day her Mazda Tribute was found burning at the dead end of DeKalb Street. Ennis, the last person known to be with her, had fresh scratches on his arms and hands when police questioned him; he left Auburn soon afterwards and the case went cold. In 2016 the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency's new cold case unit took the file as its first case, re-interviewed witnesses and sent the old evidence to a laboratory, which found Ennis's DNA on a hand-rolled cigarette near the burned car, in blood inside Lori's front door and in semen on her bedsheet. A Lee County grand jury indicted him on August 2, 2018, and a fugitive task force arrested him in Pilot, Virginia four days later. At trial in 2022 Ennis testified that the two had consensual sex and that Lori left to meet a drug dealer; the defense said evidence had been planted. On April 14, 2022 a jury convicted him of capital murder during a kidnapping and during a burglary. At her mother's request prosecutors dropped the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Lori's body has never been found.