DNA match leads to arrest of minister two decades after murders of two Alabama teenagers

Jeanette McCraney said she once “lived an American dream,” happy in Dothan, Alabama.

“My children are growing up in the church,” she remembers life in early 2019. “They see their mother and father doing the right thing.”

But on March 15, 2019, that dream quickly turned into a nightmare for the McCraney family. Police arrested Coley McCraney, Jeanette’s husband and father of her two children, for the 1999 murders of two 17-year-olds, JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, who were found in the trunk of Beasley’s car.

Coley McCraney’s DNA was matched to Beasley’s DNA. McCraney, who was a minister at the time of his arrest and also worked as a truck driver, eventually had to stand trial on murder and rape charges.

A new “20/20” episode, airing May 10 at 9 p.m. ET and streaming the next day on Hulu, explores the investigation, including interviews with law enforcement, victims’ family members and Jeanette and Coley McCraney.

On the night of July 31, 1999, Beasley and Hawlett met to celebrate Beasley’s 17th birthday. They set off in Beasley’s car to join their friends at a field party in Headlands, Alabama, but couldn’t find the location.

Instead, they ended up at a gas station in rural Ozark, Alabama, where they asked for directions back to Hawlett’s home in Dothan.

While she was at the station, Hawlett called her mother, Carol Roberts, from a pay phone.

“‘We have the way,'” Roberts recalled her daughter saying on the phone. “She didn’t talk like something was wrong. There was no fear or anything in her voice. We said, ‘We love you,’ to each other and I went back to bed,” Roberts told “20/20.”

The girls never made it home.

Roberts woke up early the next morning to find her daughter had not returned.

She quickly alerted the authorities. Within hours on August 1, 1999, law enforcement discovered Beasley’s black Mazda sedan on the side of the road, less than a mile from the gas station where they had made their last call. Everything in the car looked intact. The girls’ belongings, including purses and wallets containing money and Tracie’s keys, were still there.

Police patrolled the area looking for the girls but found nothing. Finally, a police officer decided to open the trunk of the vehicle. Both girls were found dead, each with gunshot wounds to the head.

“This crime scene, this suitcase, these two girls are the only murder cases where I’ve ever turned around and had to walk away,” said Barry Tucker, a now-retired trooper captain with the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. “When you see the innocence and a life that has just been snatched away, it’s hard to take.”

The murders sparked a decades-long investigation that produced more dead ends than leads. Although there were few clues, a key piece of DNA found on Beasley would play an important role.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2018, Ozark Police Chief Marlos Walker learned the news that forensic genetic genealogy had been used to catch the Golden State Killer in California.

“That information would be great, and so I started making some phone calls the following week,” Walker told “20/20.”

Walker sent DNA stored in the teen’s 1999 file to a lab in Virginia in hopes of finding names that could be linked to a specific donor. Five months later, in 2019, Walker received results and noticed a familiar name on the list of possible matches.

“I looked at the list again and when I saw the name McCraney,” Walker recalled, “that stood out because I knew of a McCraney in high school.”

Hoping to get closer to an exact DNA match, Walker then contacted his former classmate Coley McCraney and asked if he would volunteer a DNA sample. Coley McCraney agreed to assist in the investigation by providing a DNA sample to the Ozark Police Department.

Walker said he was “overwhelmed” by the news he later learned from the lab with results confirming that Coley McCraney’s DNA matched the DNA traces found exclusively on Beasley.

On March 15, 2019, police arrested Coley McCraney and charged him with four counts of first-degree murder and first-degree rape.

Walker said Coley was not a suspect in 1999 and was not on investigators’ radar. In an interrogation video obtained by ABC News, Coley McCraney denied ever knowing the girls or having anything to do with their murders.

Investigators said they never found a murder weapon and found no witnesses who saw Coley McCraney with the girls that night.

While the announcement of his arrest brought some lull to the local community, some still harbored doubts about Coley McCraney’s involvement in the teens’ deaths.

McCraney’s defense attorneys claim that the DNA evidence found in the form of semen only proves that McCraney and Beasley had a sexual encounter.

In 2023, McCraney was charged with murder, with the possibility of the death penalty.

During the trial, Coley McCraney took the stand and claimed he met Beasley at the mall in 1999, a few months before the teens were found murdered. Coley testified that Beasley said her name was Jennifer and that he gave her his phone number. He said they had planned to meet that evening in Ozark and, according to him, the two had consensual sex in the back of his truck, after which he returned home. McCraney told ABC News that he only made the connection between the girl he met in 1999 and JB Beasley after his arrest.

On April 26, 2023, a jury found Coley McCraney guilty of murder and rape and later sentenced him to life in prison.

The conviction finally brought much-needed closure to Beasley and Hawlett’s families, who have waited more than two decades for justice.

“I was in shock,” Roberts said. “We have waited 24 years for this and finally someone is being held accountable.”

Cheryl Burgoon, who called her daughter JB Beasley a “beautiful gift” in an interview with “20/20,” recalled her emotional reaction to the verdict.

“When they read ‘Guilty,’ I fell forward with tears streaming down my face,” Burgoon said.

ABC News’ Deborah Roberts spoke with Coley McCraney in an exclusive telephone interview from his Alabama prison in which he maintained his innocence.

“You can call me a cheater, you can call me a dog. They can call me a lot of things back then, but they can’t call me a murderer,” McCraney said in a telephone interview.

Coley McCraney’s defense attorneys filed a motion with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in hopes of obtaining a new trial. This verdict is expected later this year.

ABC News’ Shana Druckerman, Paige Harriss, Kyla Milberger, Emily Moffet and Jeff Schneider contributed to this report.