AFTER two Alabama teens were brutally murdered in 1999, their cases went unsolved for two decades, until a DNA website helped police find the man who killed them.
Coley McCraney, captured and brought to justice 20 years after he committed his horrific crimes, is the subject of 20/20’s latest true crime exposé, Forever 17, airing on ABC on Friday, May 10, 2024, and available to stream on Hulu.
Who is Coley McCraney?
Coley McCraney seemed like an everyday, average man.
He married, started a family, and worked as a truck driver and as a pastor at a local church.
His wife, Jeanette McCraney, said she was “living an American dream” in Dothan, Alabama.
“My kids are growing up in church,” she told ABC News.
“They’re seeing their mom and their dad do the right thing,” she added.
However, that American dream came crashing down following Coley McCraney’s arrest on March 15, 2019.
He was charged with the murders of two 17-year-old teens, J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, who were found shot and killed in the trunk of Beasley’s car in 1999.
On July 31, 1999, the two girls were celebrating Beasley’s birthday and headed to a party in Headlands.
They got lost on the way to the party and asked for directions at a rural gas station in Ozark.
The duo even called Hawlett’s mother, confirming they received directions to get home.
Unfortunately, they would never make it to the party or back to their homes.
The next day, August 1, 1999, Beasley’s car was found, along with all of the girls’ belongings.
The girls were found in the trunk of the car, each suffering a gunshot wound to the head.
A recent graduate of Carroll High School, McCraney was 23 at the time of the murders.
He had already served in the US Navy and was living on Lisenby Drive, about a mile from the crime scene.
A year before the murders, he was sued in a paternity case, though he failed to submit to DNA testing and ignored child support petitions for several years.
Notably, McCraney committed no crimes following the horrific events in 1999 and kept a relatively low profile for the remainder of his life.
Where is he now?
In April 2023, Coley McCraney was convicted of capital murder in the killings of teenagers J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett.
Just a few months later, while still imprisoned at the Dale County Jail, McCraney requested a new trial.
McCraney’s attorneys, David Harrison and Andrew Scarborough, claimed that jurors had been using and posting to social media channels during his April trial.
“We wanted to get into juror misconduct, and for jurors to be in the deliberation room and making posts to Facebook is a violation of the judge’s instructions,” Harrison said, as reported by WTVY Channel 4 News.
“You couldn’t get on social media and not see [news coverage] of this highly-publicized case,” said Scarborough, who also claimed “the case was prejudiced” against McCraney.
Despite their best efforts, Dale County Circuit Judge Bill Filmore denied the request.
After spending four years behind bars in Dale County – from the time he was first apprehended and for months following his guilty verdict – McCraney was finally moved to the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in late 2023.
The maximum security prison, located near Birmingham, Alabama, houses about 1,400 inmates.
Many of those inmates, like McCraney, are serving life without parole.
He is labeled as a “medium security inmate,” which indicates that “he is suitable for work, treatment, and other programs within the confines of the prison,” as reported by WTVY Channel 4 News.
Still, McCraney’s defense team isn’t giving up hope.
They’ve asked the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn his convictions, and are expecting a decision to be made sometime in 2024.
To this day, McCraney denies any involvement in killing or even harming Beasley and Hawlett, as stated in an exclusive interview with 20/20’s Deborah Roberts.
“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,” he said during a phone interview from prison.
How was Coley McCraney caught?
Over the last 20 years, police have reportedly conducted over 500 interviews and tested the DNA of more than 70 potential suspects.
They even previously arrested Johnny William Barrentine, who later told police he had lied about his involvement in the murders to get the hefty reward money.
Police later released Barrentine when his DNA did not match the DNA found on Beasley’s clothing.
It would take investigators approximately two decades to find a DNA match.
On Friday, March 15, 2019, McCraney was apprehended by police and charged with one count of rape and five counts of capital murder.
Investigators had found McCraney, who had never been on their radar in the last 20 years, after “a DNA match was found through a family DNA website in a genealogy search,” as reported by Alabama News.
After news broke that forensic genetic genealogy was used to catch the Golden State Killer in California, Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker sent DNA preserved in the teens’ case to a Virginia lab, Parabon NanoLabs.
Parabon NanoLabs specializes in DNA engineering
Months later, Walker noticed something unusual when he received the results.
“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 told 20/20, as reported by ABC News.
He contacted his former classmate, Coley McCraney, who voluntarily gave a DNA sample at the Ozark Police Department.
Lab results proved that McCraney’s DNA was a match to the traces of DNA found on Beasley.
Though he initially denied knowing both victims, McCraney eventually admitted he had met Beasley at the mall in 1999.
He said Beasley had said her name was Jennifer, and the duo exchanged phone numbers.
He said they had made plans to meet in Ozark that night and had consensual sex in the back of his truck.
Still, he vehemently denied harming or killing either of the teens and said he went home immediately after the encounter.
His attorneys claimed the DNA evidence, found in the form of semen, only proves that McCraney and Beasley had consensual sex.
Despite his defense team’s best efforts, McCraney was found guilty of capital murder and rape.
“I was in shock,” Carol Roberts, Hawlett’s mother, said.
“We’d waited 24 years for this, and finally somebody’s going to be held accountable.”
“When they read, ‘Guilty,’ I fell forward and tears just streamed down my face,” Cheryl Burgoon, Beasley’s mother, added.