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 parent, 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 fishing 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 Matthews Band out of their car stereos until the batteries almost died, were certainly out of the question. Not that Tracie wanted to go anyway. 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 punish 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 service, and Carol was prepared for a long morning of five-minute warnings. 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 Midland 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 seventeenth 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 discover 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 charming, 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 conversation, 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 newfound 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 friendship 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 eccentric 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 “protecting 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 herapartment 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 deliberatelysuppressed news of prior rapes in the city to not jeopardize commercial activity; and in 1990, a young mother’s dead body wasfound 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 ofcocaine 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 themselves that they’d been raped.
Mike patrolled the city, driving around in circles, past the empty brick department store buildings from the 1930s and ’40sthat 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 enemyagain; the row of Greek revival mansions that looked like funeral homes; the moldy wooden houses with slanted porches andrusty 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.
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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 missing, 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 investigator, 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 considered 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 cornbread 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 fluorescent 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 forested 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 Avenue. An OPD patrolman had just returned from canvassing the neighborhood, 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 rookiehadn’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 supervisor 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’sown 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.”
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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 investigation, the enormity of the situation hit him. The sun cast its hypnotic 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 compassionate 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 neighborhoods 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 into 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 family 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.
