Solved cold cases in Tennessee
2 documented cases.
Carolyn Fisher
Carolyn Fisher, a 41-year-old woman, was found dead on May 22, 1998, alongside Interstate 40 East near the Jefferson Street exit in Nashville, Tennessee, after being sexually assaulted. DNA collected at the scene came from a single male suspect but went unmatched for more than 20 years. In 2020, a Metro Nashville Police Department cold case detective submitted the profile to ancestry research databases, and in 2023 a private genealogy company developed a potential match. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation laboratory confirmed the DNA belonged to Michael Anthony Bean, who had himself been murdered on June 23, 1998, in an unrelated case about a month after Fisher's death. On February 4, 2026, the MNPD announced Bean as the suspect, concluding no one other than Bean was involved in the homicide.
Joyce Goodener
Joyce Goodener, a 35-year-old Nashville woman, was found dead on July 5, 1995, inside an abandoned house at 4522 Ashland City Highway in Davidson County, Tennessee, after two passersby spotted smoke and went to investigate. Her body had been beaten with a cinder block, stabbed twice in the neck, rolled in a rug and doused with an accelerant and set on fire; an autopsy showed she had no carbon monoxide in her blood, meaning she was already dead before the fire was set. Metro-Nashville police developed James Murray Washington as a person of interest in 1995 after the victim's boyfriend said Washington may have been with her that day and a passerby reported seeing a black Camaro and a male figure at the house, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the killing and the case went cold for years. The break came not from forensics but from Washington's own mouth. On March 3, 2009, while incarcerated for another offense and being transported to a Nashville hospital after reporting seizures, Washington told corrections officer James Tomlinson and Corporal Homer Lee Carey that he needed to confess, saying he had beaten a woman named Joyce to death. He survived his medical crisis and tried to take the confession back, but the two officers had come forward and reported what he said. Washington was charged with first-degree murder in 2009. At a 2012 trial his defense argued the confession was an unreliable product of medication and possible hallucinations, but the Davidson County jury convicted him, and the court imposed a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction on March 31, 2015. The case was solved by the witnesses who heard and reported his confession.