TRACIE Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were found dead on August 1, 1999.
Their case is the subject of a 20/20 episode premiering on Friday, May 10, 2024.
Who were Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley?
Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were two 17-year-old girls from Alabama.
They had met up to celebrate Beasley’s 17th birthday when they went missing in July 1999.
What happened to them?
Hawlett and Beasley disappeared on the night of July 31, 1999.
As ABC News reported, the two girls had met to celebrate Beasley’s 17th birthday, taking the latter’s car to meet their friends at a field party in Headlands, Alabama.
However, they ended up at a gas station in rural Ozark when they couldn’t find the party, asking for directions to Hawlett’s home in Dothan.
Hawlett used a payphone at the station to call her mother, Carol Roberts.
“‘We’ve got directions,'” Roberts recalled her daughter saying during their phone call, while speaking with ABC’s 20/20.
“She didn’t talk like anything was wrong. There wasn’t any fear or anything in her voice. We said, ‘we love you,’ to each other and I went on to bed,” Roberts continued.
On the morning of August 1, 1999, Roberts called the police when she discovered that Hawlett had not made it home.
Law enforcement soon located Beasley’s Black Mazda sedan on the side of a road less than a mile from the gas station where the teenagers made their last phone call, ABC News reported.
Everything “looked intact” inside the vehicle. The girls’ belongings, including purses and wallets with money, and Hawlett’s keys, were there.
A police officer eventually opened the car’s trunk, where he found both Hartlett and Beasley dead.
They had each suffered gunshot wounds to the head.
The investigation into their deaths lasted decades and “yielded more dead ends than leads,” per the outlet.
In 2018, Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker learned from the news that investigators had utilized forensic genetic genealogy to find the Golden State Killer in California.
“This information would be great, and so that following week, I started making some phone calls,” Walker said to 20/20.
He sent DNA that had been preserved in the teens’ case file from 1999 to a Virginia lab “with the hopes of finding names that would link to a specific donor,” per ABC News.
In 2019, five months after he sent the DNA, Walker received results and recognized a name on the list of possible matches.
“I was looking at the list again, and when I saw the name McCraney, that stood out because I knew of a McCraney in high school,” Walker said to 20/20.
Walker then contacted Coley McCraney, his former classmate, and asked if he would voluntarily give a DNA sample, per the publication.
McCraney agreed and provided the sample at the Ozark Police Department.
Walker said he was “blown away” by the results, “which confirmed McCraney’s DNA was a match to the traces of DNA solely found on Beasley.”
McCraney was arrested and charged with four counts of capital murder as well as first-degree rape on March 15, 2019.
At the time of his arrest, he was a minister who also worked as a truck driver.
In an interrogation video obtained by ABC News, McCraney said he never knew the girls and did not have anything to do with their murder.
According to investigators, no murder weapon has ever been located, and they have not found any witnesses who saw McCraney with Hawlett and Beasley on the night of July 31, 1999, per ABC News.
As the outlet reported, McCraney’s defense attorneys “claim the DNA evidence, which was found in the form of semen, only proves that McCraney and Beasley had a sexual encounter.”
McCraney was tried for capital murder in 2023 with the possibility of being sentenced to death.
McCraney took the stand during the trial and claimed he met Beasley at the mall in 1999, a few months before she and Hawlett were found murdered.
He “testified Beasley said her name was Jennifer and that he gave her his phone number.”
McCraney “said they made plans to meet that night in Ozark and, according to his testimony, the two had consensual sex in the back of his truck after which he returned home.”
He “told ABC News that he did not make the connection between the girl he met in 1999 with J.B. Beasley until after he was arrested.”
Where is Coley McCraney now?
McCraney is now in an Alabama prison.
On April 26, 2023, he was found guilty of capital murder and rape, per ABC News.
CBS News reported that McCraney was sentenced to life in prison on April 27, 2023.
ABC News’ Deborah Roberts“spoke with Coley McCraney in an exclusive phone interview from his Alabama prison, during which he maintained his innocence.”
“They can call me a cheat, they can call me a dog. They can call me a lot of things at that time, but they cannot call me a killer,” McCraney said in the interview, per ABC News.
The outlet reported that McCraney’s defense attorneys filed a motion with Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals in hopes of securing a new trial. That ruling is anticipated to take place later in 2024.
How can I watch the 20/20 episode about Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley?
A 20/20 episode about Hawlett and Beasley’s murder titled Forever 17 is premiering on ABC on Friday, May 10, 2024, at 9 pm ET.
According to ABC News, the television program will be available for streaming the following day on Hulu.
20/20’s X account, @ABC2020, has taken to the social media platform to share information about the episode.
“Two teen girls murdered in cold blood on their way to a birthday party. Decades go by until the case breaks wide open – a minister is charged with their murder,” it wrote on May 10, in part.