Solved cold cases in Tennessee
5 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.
Holly Bobo
Holly Bobo, a 20-year-old nursing student, was taken from her family's home in Parsons, Decatur County, Tennessee, on the morning of April 13, 2011. Her brother told police he saw a man in camouflage lead her into the woods; her blood was found in the carport, and her phone and lunch box turned up in the woods. The TBI called it the most expensive investigation in its history, but for three years the lead agent pursued a local sex offender who was never charged, and the case stalled. In March 2014 a grand jury indicted Zachary Adams, a methamphetamine user from the same county, for aggravated kidnapping and felony murder; his friend Jason Autry was charged in April, and later Adams's brother. On September 7, 2014, two men digging ginseng found her skull in woods off Interstate 40, about ten miles from the Adams family property; dental records confirmed it the next day. No DNA linked Adams to Holly. At his September 2017 trial, Autry testified that he kept watch under a river bridge while Adams shot her, and friends and jail inmates said Adams had spoken of harming her. The jury convicted Adams on all counts on September 22, 2017, and he was sentenced to life plus 50 years. His brother pleaded guilty and got 35 years; Autry got eight. In 2024 Autry recanted, saying he built the story from discovery files; a judge dismissed the petition, and in July 2026 a further request for a new trial was denied.
Janet March
Janet March, a 33-year-old artist and mother of two, was last seen on August 15, 1996 at her home in the Forest Hills area of Nashville, Tennessee. That night her husband, attorney Perry March, told her parents she had left after an argument. She had arranged to see a divorce lawyer the next day. Her parents reported her missing on August 29, and her Volvo was found on September 7 at an apartment complex. When detectives came to search the house, the computer hard drive had been removed. Perry March moved the children to Chicago and then to Mexico, and for years there was no body, no blood and no charge. A grand jury secretly indicted him in December 2004. Mexico expelled him in August 2005. In jail he asked a fellow inmate to kill Janet's parents, and the inmate, working with police, recorded the plan and phone calls to Perry March's father, Arthur, in Mexico. Arthur March was confronted at an airport, charged, returned to Nashville, agreed to plead guilty and testify, and told investigators he had helped his son move and hide Janet's remains in Kentucky. A jury convicted Perry March of second-degree murder in August 2006. Her body has never been found.
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.
Samuel Pettyjohn
Samuel Pettyjohn, a Chattanooga liquor store owner whom the district attorney later called an alleged mob associate and a friend of Jimmy Hoffa, was shot four times inside his store, the Beverage Center on Market Street, in the early morning hours of February 1, 1979. His cash and jewelry, worth more than $100,000, were not taken. Pettyjohn had testified before a federal grand jury and cooperated with the FBI in Operation TennPar, the investigation of a scheme in which people paid Governor Ray Blanton's office for early releases from prison. Two men charged in 1982 had their charges dismissed after alibis, and a 1987 review produced nothing. Hamilton County's Cold Case Unit took the file up in 2015 and rebuilt it from old statements and interviews with associates of William Edward Alley, a bank robber who died in federal custody in 2005. Prosecutors said Alley admitted to cooperating witnesses that he was hired for between $25,000 and $50,000, and one witness said an undisclosed third party may have paid part of it on behalf of the Blanton administration. On June 8, 2021, a grand jury found it would have indicted Alley for first-degree murder had he lived. The district attorney announced the finding the next day. No one was charged, and Blanton, who died in 1996, was never indicted in the scandal.