Solved cold cases in Alabama
2 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.
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.