A Twisting, Deeply Reported True-Crime Narrative: The Wiregrass by Matt Kessler
Chapter 5
August 1, 1999
Later, when she’d narrate her morning to the police, Carol Roberts
would describe how she woke up before sunset and began her day as
she always did— by checking on her children. An overly protective par-
ent, Carol was short and meek with unfashionably large glasses and a
mole at the bottom corner of her mouth. Late in her first marriage to
a police officer named Bob Hawlett, she’d given birth to a girl, Tracie.
Carol would take Tracie to visit her father at the Dothan police station,
where she became something of a department mascot, cheering up the
other officers coming back from patrol. One weekend, Bob went fish-
ing on Lake Eufaula with another officer and their boat capsized in the
freezing waters; Carol spent days roaming the shore, hoping for a sign
of life as search crews dragged the basin. The grief of his death still
followed her, a constant shadow that sharpened the fragile features of
her face and personality.
Carol met her second husband, Mike, two years after Bob’s death,
when Tracie was six. Mike was a no- nonsense guy with a sandy- red
mustache and a Southern accent so thick he whistled whenever he said
a word ending in s. As the years went on and Tracie became a teenager,
Mike laid down the law: She couldn’t curse, drink, or make weekend
plans without his approval. Field parties, where teenagers stood around
kegs, dropped ecstasy, hooked up in the woods, and blared Dave Mat-
thews Band out of their car stereos until the batteries almost died,
were certainly out of the question. Not that Tracie wanted to go any-
way. She liked to spend weekends with her Sunday school teacher and
Bible study group. Mike had a quick fuse, which intimidated Tracie’s
friends, but she loved him like a father; he doted on her behind closed
doors, just as he did on her two younger half brothers.
Tracie and Carol had a special relationship, staying up late in bed,
exchanging secrets they didn’t even tell their best friends. Carol had
shared the same connection with her own mother and thought it was
normal for them to be so close, even long into the years of teenage
rebellion, but her friends told her what they had was rare. Not that
Tracie was particularly rebellious. She shocked friends by drinking a
beer at a party one weekend and often joked that she was the only teen
left in the Wiregrass who was still a virgin. But she was also down to
hang with the bad kids, including her good friend Joshua Howard, a
teenage delinquent and stoner; some days, after school, she’d chill with
him as he puffed on a blunt, and they’d debate deeper, philosophical
questions, like how God could be real if the world was so evil. During
her junior year, she left school without permission to grab lunch and
got into a terrible car accident, flipping over after being hit by a truck
and staying in intensive care for a few days with a concussion. Carol
was so thankful Tracie survived that she didn’t have the heart to pun-
ish her for this first major act of defiance.
Now entering her senior year, Tracie was a tall and stunning
seventeen- year- old, a well- mannered beauty pageant contestant, with
sandy- brown hair curled to flip out at her shoulders, big hazel eyes,
and a strong chin. If she’d been mean, she would have been the school knockout, but instead, she was approachable and shy, a people pleaser
the popular boys took for granted, making her wonder if she was even
pretty. She had been sleeping in all summer, and, as Carol would later
tell the police, she worried that this morning would be especially bad,
as Tracie had been uncharacteristically out past curfew with her friend
J.B. The girls would need to shower before the early Sunday church ser-
vice, and Carol was prepared for a long morning of five- minute warn-
ings. The night before, her sons had dressed the sleeper sofa for the
girls, and Carol had tried to wait up in bed for them to return. Carol
figured she’d hear the door open as they let themselves in, but she’d
worked a double at the nursing home and had fallen asleep, exhausted.
As Carol told the police, she walked along the carpeted hallway
in her bathrobe and took another step toward the living room. When
she saw that the oven light in the kitchen was still on, which she’d
kept illuminated so Tracie and J.B. would be able to see when they got
home, she knew something was wrong. The sofa bed was still made,
the pillows fluffed. Tracie wouldn’t just not come home; that wasn’t her
Tracie. Carol rushed to her daughter’s bedroom. The family had moved
into the house a few weeks earlier, and although Tracie’s bed frame
hadn’t been set up yet, the girls might have slept in there for privacy.
She opened the door, but the only sign of life was the blinking light
on the answering machine, indicating a new message. Carol pressed
Play, and as the tape rewound, she came up with possible explanations:
Maybe they’d stayed over at a friend’s house; maybe there’d been car
trouble; maybe they were in the hospital.
A loud beep, and the message began, a message the police would
later archive in their internal files. It was that boy they wanted to meet,
Wade; he sounded agitated. He had waited at the Shell station in Mid-
land City until 11:45 p.m. and wanted to know why Tracie and J.B. never
showed up. He said, “Hey, Tracie, this is Wade. . . . I guess just give me a
call whenever you can, whatever is convenient for you, okay? Bye.”
Carol would later tell the police that, frantically, she tried to put
the pieces together. She’d last spoken to Tracie at 11:30 p.m., when
she’d called from a pay phone to ask for a curfew extension. The girls were supposed to already be home, but Tracie said they’d missed a
turn, accidentally ended up in Ozark, and needed an extra hour and
a half to stop by Midland City to say hello to Wade, Karl, and Chops,
the twenty- year- olds they’d had dinner with at Ruby Tuesday the night
before, and whom they’d been trying to meet when they got lost. Carol
had told Tracie to come home immediately. Tracie had pushed back,
saying it’d be rude to not say hello after the boys had been waiting all
evening. In the background, Carol could hear J.B. talking to someone.
She compromised: They could stop in Midland City, but for no longer
than ten minutes, and they had to be home by 12:30 a.m. at the latest.
Tracie accepted the terms of the new curfew and ended the call as she
always did, by saying, “I love you, Mom.” She sounded just like herself,
happy and calm.
But some things about the call were unusual. Tracie didn’t call
collect, like normal, but had used exact change. She hadn’t called the
house line but her own private number, which her brother happened
to hear ringing and picked up. It was as if Tracie had hoped to play it
both ways: to let Carol know that she’d be out past curfew but not to
have to ask for permission.
Carol had already made exceptions that weekend. It was J.B.’s sev-
enteenth birthday, so she’d let them attend a party in Haleburg, a town
twenty- five miles away near the Alabama– Georgia border. But she
hadn’t liked how J.B. had gone about asking, driving to the nursing home
to request permission on Tracie’s behalf, with a curly- haired blond boy
who hadn’t even introduced himself. Carol suspected that J.B. wanted
to approach her without Mike around, because Carol was the “softie.”
J.B. said the party was for her birthday, but later, Carol learned it was
just a regular Saturday night party, and a field party at that. She would
also learn later that Tracie had told a colleague at JCPenney, where she
worked the floor of the men’s section on weekends, that she didn’t really
want to go, but that it was J.B.’s birthday, and she was the designated
driver. Plus, she felt she needed to take care of J.B.
J.B. and Tracie hadn’t been particularly close until that summer.
They’d been good enough friends since middle school, when they worked together on yearbook, but classmates were surprised to dis-
cover they’d suddenly become inseparable. J.B. was a popular girl who
quickly moved from group to group, forging close friendships that never
seemed to stick more than a year or two. She was short, fit, and charm-
ing, more cute than beautiful, with short hair just like Tracie’s, rosy,
round cheeks, and a personality that still haunts the many boys who
had crushes on her over twenty years later. She seemed so much more
adult than everyone else and focused all her attention on you in con-
versation, which made you feel special. She was bubbly, yet other girls
found her quietly controlling and closed off. Even her closest friends
felt they didn’t truly know her.
She and Tracie— ever loyal, kind, and agreeable— made an odd
couple. J.B. dated hot guys with blond hair who fit in with both the
jocks and the druggies. Tracie cared more that guys were respectful
and polite and had dated some funny- looking boys from church who
friends considered beneath her. Yet the two had more in common than
their classmates thought. They were both learning to cope with a new-
found adult beauty and the power and vulnerability that came with it.
They were funny and liked to act out small inside jokes as if they were
characters in a sketch, often pretending to be airheaded Valley girls.
They loved to blast Britney Spears and sing at the top of their lungs as
they drove along country back roads. And they both danced. J.B. was
serious about modern dance, already pinning her hopes on attending
Northwestern University in Chicago and joining the Gus Giordano
Dance School, a prestigious troupe near the university. Tracie was a
majorette in the school marching band and, after a recent church trip
to Texas to teach vacation Bible school, had tentative plans to pursue
missionary work, although she didn’t really know where. Her friend-
ship with J.B. was tinged with the unacknowledged recognition that
their paths would soon pull them apart.
As Carol would later tell the police, she worried J.B. was a bad
influence. Her mother, Cheryl, was known around town as an eccen-
tric drunk who could flatten anyone with her sharp tongue and who’d
leave her daughters alone at the house unsupervised for long weekends while she went on romantic getaways to nearby Panama City Beach.
J.B. now lived with her dance teacher, Patti Simpson, after Cheryl
kicked her out of the house that spring. J.B. rimmed her eyes with
black eyeliner; her friends drank and smoked. What Carol didn’t know
was that J.B. was trying to escape the dramas and demands of casual
hookups, ex- boyfriends, and late- night field parties, and used “protect-
ing Tracie” as an excuse.
Carol’s husband, Mike, lay asleep in bed. Upon hearing the girls
hadn’t returned, he threw back the covers and made a beeline for the
driveway. He’d warned Tracie never to take a ride from a stranger if her
car broke down and hoped that she and J.B. were waiting for him on
the side of the road somewhere near Ozark or Midland City. It wasn’t
yet 5:00 a.m. The Roberts lived in a subdivision on the north side,
closer to the farming communities that surrounded Dothan than its
neglected city center. It was muggy, and Mike drove with the windows
rolled down to prevent the early- morning dew from fogging up the
windshield of his pickup. In the half dark, he scanned the long, rural
landscape for flashing emergency lights, worrying the Mazda might be
tits up in a ditch. The harvest had just passed, and the peanut fields
were barren.
Nothing.
He continued to Ozark, a small town with a bad reputation. In
the late 1970s, a woman had been fatally stabbed in her apartment so
many times that a physician later testified the stab wounds were too
numerous to count; in the early 1980s, a woman who’d been raped
downtown alleged that the City of Ozark, the mayor, and the chief of
police had deliberately suppressed news of prior rapes in the city to not
jeopardize commercial activity; and in 1990, a young mother’s dead
body was found in the Choctawhatchee River, with signs of strangu-
lation, a case that remained unsolved for thirty years. Locals called
the town “Krazo,” reversing the town’s spelling in honor of both its
hard- partying ways and its unique brand of justice, which was often
served “home- cooked.” Ozark, alongside the nearby towns Enterprise
and Abbeville, was rumored to be a hub of cocaine trafficking for the Dixie Mafia, a loose- knit gang of Southern white gangsters who’d got-
ten their start in the 1940s in nearby Phenix City, the short- lived Las
Vegas of the South. Ozark had all the elements to carry out a drug
operation: It was close to the Florida coast, had a minor commercial
airport, and had a local police department with a drug task force small
enough to count on one hand.
Young women had to watch their backs in Ozark. Not only were
police officers repeatedly caught dating girls from Carroll High School
and partying with them in abandoned houses in the country, but the
town’s elder business leaders also participated in traveling parties
throughout the Wiregrass, where girls just over the age of sixteen were
coerced by employers to moonlight as waitresses while the big shots
played poker. Whatever happened at those parties went unreported,
but the girls who waitressed there described it to friends as the type of
situation where they’d say yes so they wouldn’t have to admit to them-
selves that they’d been raped.
Mike patrolled the city, driving around in circles, past the empty
brick department store buildings from the 1930s and ’40s that hovered
like ghosts over the meticulously manicured town square; the court-
house statue of a soldier holding a rifle to his chest to honor the Con-
federate dead, facing north so that Ozark would never be caught with
its back turned to the enemy again; the row of Greek revival mansions
that looked like funeral homes; the moldy wooden houses with slanted
porches and rusty screen doors; and the dumpy, two- pump gas stations
on the outskirts by the railroad tracks. Nobody was out. He finally gave
up and took US 231 back to Dothan, cutting through an endless grove
of loblollies, hoping good news awaited at the house.
—————
It was 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, the kind of Alabama August afternoon
so hot the humidity seemed to speckle the air. Dothan police officer
Alton Miller’s uniform clung to his skin as he pushed past poison ivy
and jimsonweed, scouring the sandy soil of the overgrown lot for J.B.’s
and Tracie’s footprints. J.B.’s Mazda 929 had been located at 9:00 a.m. that morning in Ozark, on an isolated side road near the softball fields.
The road, Herring Avenue, was tucked away near the railroad tracks in
a heavily wooded area known to teenagers as a make- out spot. When
Alton arrived, almost five hours after the girls had been reported miss-
ing, nobody was at the scene.
Earlier that morning, after Mike returned home empty- handed,
Alton stopped by the Roberts house to gather information for a missing
persons report. A Black sergeant in a predominantly white department,
Alton had been a colleague of Carol’s late husband, Bob, who’d always
told her Alton was one of the good ones, somebody to be trusted in case
of an emergency. When Carol opened the door, she hugged his neck
and said, “Alton, my baby’s gone.” A grandfatherly man a year away
from retirement, with the steely- eyed objectivity of a seasoned inves-
tigator, Alton got to work, asking Carol about Tracie’s weekend, where
she’d been, when she’d left, and who she’d been with. Hopefully, it was
nothing more than a flat tire or a party with friends that’d gone late.
Carol showed him pictures of her daughter, who he’d recently gotten to
know again while patrolling the Northview High football games, where
Tracie was a majorette. She was now a towering seventeen- year- old
wearing eyeliner and hoop earrings; a far cry from the toothy four- year-
old he’d last seen as he stood guard over Bob’s casket at the funeral.
Alton wasted no time, telling the Dothan Police dispatcher to issue
a BOLO (“Be on the lookout”) for two white teenage girls. Almost as
soon as Alton’s call went out, the Ozark Police Department reported
that an officer had found J.B.’s Mazda 929— a unique import that
caught people’s eyes in the car- obsessed Wiregrass— on the side of
the road by an empty lot. OPD went to work, canvassing the area and
interviewing nearby neighbors. By lunchtime, Carol and Mike were
impatient, as were J.B.’s mother, Cheryl, and her dance teacher and
legal guardian, Patti Simpson. Alton felt responsible for Tracie and
J.B. and decided to drive to Ozark to check it out himself. They were
“Dothan girls,” after all.
With a population of fifty- eight thousand, Dothan was big for
the region. But it was mostly a hub city, a stopover for tourists from Georgia and Tennessee on the way to the Florida shore. Dothan con-
sidered itself different— a Southern euphemism for “more cultured”—
than Ozark while Ozark considered Dothan characterless and boring,
a highway city, and an unpleasant reminder of corporate America’s
relentless infringement on the local landscape. Alton had a soft spot
for the rural stretches of the Wiregrass. It was in the country where
you could find the mom- and- pop restaurants serving fried corn bread
and chili dogs with oysters, and rowdy honky- tonks that stayed open
until sunrise. It was there, too, that you found the agrarian splendor of
the region, the large peanut fields, paint- chipped water towers, and flu-
orescent Gulf Coast sunsets that hung above tractors and grain mills.
But Ozark, and the wider Dale County that surrounded it, could get
rough, and Dothan folks had to look out for their own.
Alton pulled into Ozark, passed the hospital, and parked on the
side of a quiet road. Under the blinding sun, he now scanned the empty
lot for clues. A softball field stood about fifty feet up the hill above a
deep ditch, and a footpath led up the embankment to a cluster of for-
ested picnic tables, where teenagers would smoke cigarettes and drink
alcohol late at night. The 929 was parked on a grass shoulder, facing
town, with go- kart tracks and footprints leading into the overgrowth.
But Alton lost the trail in the thicket of sweet gum trees. “Damn it,”
he said aloud.
He heard a voice near the Mazda and rushed back to Herring Ave-
nue. An OPD patrolman had just returned from canvassing the neigh-
borhood, and after exchanging updates, Alton put on latex gloves to
examine the vehicle. He didn’t like what he saw. The car was dusty, like
it’d been driven down a dirt road, the windows rolled down, and the
doors unlocked. A wicker purse and leather clutch sat in the front seat,
with the teenagers’ cash and ID cards still in the wallets. The rearview
mirror lay on the floorboard, no longer attached to the windshield, as if
there’d been a struggle. And there were muddy footprints beneath the
steering wheel and in the back seat, on the passenger’s side.
Alton decided to pop the trunk. It was 2:00 p.m., and the Mazda 929
had been sitting in the heat, now up to 101°F, for five hours since being spotted by OPD. The trunk release was not at the foot of the
seat. Nervous, he kept looking and, remembering that his wife drove a
similar model, checked the door by the power window switch. Bingo.
He pushed it and walked to the trunk, which had opened about an
inch. That’s when the smell hit him: It wasn’t the smell of rotting flesh,
which had almost made him pass out the first time he’d sat in on an
autopsy. Rather, it was spoiled blood, a gamey scent so specific he’d
once been able to save his mother from colon failure by insisting she
rush to the emergency room when he’d smelled it in her bedroom. The
girls, he knew, were dead, and they hadn’t been sitting there long.
The Ozark patrolman said, “They’ve been shot, they’ve been shot.
Oh, Jesus, no.”
Needing to calm the rookie down, Alton raised his voice and asked
if he had any crime scene tape in his patrol car. Alton had his own
but knew he’d have to assign this guy a series of menial tasks to help
him get his head straight. After twenty- five years on the force, Alton
had seen the worst imaginable atrocities, mutilated bodies at traffic
accidents and children burned alive in house fires; the only way to get
through was to focus on the crime scene investigation, not the victims.
But the rookie hadn’t built up that wall yet. Alton said, “Take your tape,
go to that stop sign, and block off James Street. Go to the other end of
the road and block off Herring Avenue. And then notify your super-
visor we have a crime scene on our hands.” Truth be told, the rookie’s
freak- out was a gift, a distraction that allowed Alton to calm his own
mounting nerves.
He returned to the Mazda and opened the trunk a bit wider. As
he eased it up, he saw jeans, and before he could lift it all the way, the
girls. Both were fully clothed, covered in blood, with severe trauma to
the head. J.B. and Tracie lay flat, facing opposite directions, clutching
their hands to their faces; a shell casing rested on J.B.’s thigh. All of a
sudden, a vision of Alton’s own daughter— a classmate just a few years
younger— lying with them flashed in his mind.
Alton shut the trunk and walked around the vehicle to catch his
breath. The most important thing now was to preserve the crime scene and gather as much evidence as possible. He looked beneath the Mazda
and saw a distinct blood pattern. On the passenger side, beneath J.B.’s
body, the blood was blown back from the rear tire onto a patch of dried
mud on the bottom side of the car, indicating that she’d been shot
elsewhere and driven to Herring. As he scoured the brush for cartridge
cases, supervisors from multiple agencies reported, including Ozark
Police Chief Tony Spivey and Ozark Lead Investigator Deg Malloy.
Spivey and Malloy made an odd pair— even though Spivey was
the supervisor, Malloy asserted himself more forcefully. Spivey, a
boyish- looking man in his mid- thirties, had a reputation for being a
well- intentioned but naïve police chief. Many suspected he got played
by the bad cops in his department, including Malloy, who was known
to be a womanizer and a boozer. Malloy was short and pudgy, a shade
younger than Spivey, with dark brown hair, a thick mustache, and a
tendency toward aggression to make up for his height. The officers
instructed Alton to go check out another potential crime scene a few
miles away, where gunshots had been heard late the night before,
hoping it might lead somewhere. The supervising officers then began
to examine the Mazda.
J.B.’s and Tracie’s bodies were so hot that, according to the internal
police files, the forensic examiner worried their skin might slip off. Both
had been shot at close range, execution- style: Tracie in the right temple
and J.B. in the right cheek, beneath the eye. A few things immediately
struck the reporting officers as unusual: There was no sign of rape or
theft; the girls were fully clothed, and money was still in their wallets.
The condition of their jeans was odd, too. J.B.’s jeans were so wet from
the knee down that her socks were still soggy when the pathologist
conducted the autopsy the next day. The mud was a dark brown color
that didn’t match the sandy orange dust on the Mazda. Had they been
forced to kneel in the dirt? Had J.B. walked into a body of water, like a
lake or stream, trying to escape?
Lastly, and most confounding: the empty cartridge case that sat atop
J.B.’s left thigh. If the teenagers had been shot in the trunk on Herring
Avenue, how did the casing land there? If they’d been shot elsewhere, wouldn’t it have rolled off? So much about the crime scene didn’t make
sense. To make matters worse, the supervising officers examined the
Mazda without wearing gloves. If one of them had been in the car that
night, it would now be impossible to know. An FBI- appointed officer who
was assigned the case the next year would describe their behavior that
afternoon as so negligent, it raised suspicions of criminal involvement.
When Alton Miller returned to the crime scene over an hour later,
he asked his supervisor, Dothan Police Chief John White, if anyone
had notified the parents yet. White, who’d also been a colleague of
Tracie’s father, and whose son had carpooled with her to Northview
High, looked at Alton and said, “You’re on your way.”
—————
Alton drove south to Dothan along US 231, preparing himself to break
the news to Carol. Now, no longer absorbed in the details of the inves-
tigation, the enormity of the situation hit him. The sun cast its hyp-
notic shadow across the branches of the loblolly pines on the side of
the road. There’d be no good way to tell her; he’d have to be compas-
sionate but firm.
It was hard to believe Alton had ever become a cop. One day, he was
a recent high school graduate without a worry in the world, an assistant
manager at Burger Chef, making enough money to enjoy the weekends.
Then, his older cousin Robert Jackson, who Alton admired more than
anyone, convinced him to join the force. As a young patrolman, Alton
would hear the horror stories from older Black officers about the way
things used to be, how Black officers in the ’60s couldn’t even arrest
white people but had to detain them at the Bottom, a police- owned
shed where white officers would make the actual arrests.
Alton took small revenges, parking behind hedges in white neigh-
borhoods and aggressively enforcing speed limits. But nothing could
make up for the years of workplace mistreatment, the disparaging
comments, and rejected promotions. The worst had been in 1978, just
three years after joining the force, when his beloved twenty- nine- year-
old cousin Robert, who’d scored so highly on written tests that white supervisors had been forced to promote him to sergeant, had been
gunned down in his driveway. It was a widely repeated town rumor
that Wykle Williams, a major player for the Dixie Mafia, had hired
the hit because Jackson was about to arrest him for drug trafficking.
But the case remained officially unsolved, even after the man’s son,
Wykle Williams Jr.— the same police investigator who’d later work
with J.B.’s father, Lanier— came forward to make amends.
Alton turned in to a working- class neighborhood on the northern
outskirts of Dothan and parked in front of an A- frame that looked just
like the other tan brick houses on the block. A barricade of vehicles
had gathered around the Robertses’ front lawn as if to protect the fam-
ily from more bad news. Alton took a deep breath, walked between
the parked vehicles, and rang the doorbell; Carol’s church friends
answered. Alton asked who her best friend was, and together, they
walked along the carpeted hallway to the master bedroom.
