Cold Cases in Alabama
ColdCaseIndex documents 10 cases in Alabama, dated 1944 to 2019. 3 are recorded as unsolved. The earliest is Recy Taylor (1944) and the most recent is Aniah Blanchard (2019).
- Unsolved 3 (30%)
- Charges or trial pending 1 (10%)
- Solved or convicted 4 (40%)
- Closed without conviction 2 (20%)
Homicide clearance in Alabama, 1965 to 2024
A homicide is "cleared" when police make an arrest or close it by exceptional means, so an uncleared case is not always an unsolved one. Source: Murder Accountability Project analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Report data, as published by Project: Cold Case. These are statewide totals and are separate from the ColdCaseIndex entries listed below.
By type
All Alabama cases
Aniah Blanchard
Nineteen-year-old Aniah Blanchard, stepdaughter of UFC fighter Walt Harris, disappeared from Auburn, Alabama, in October 2019. Her remains were found a month later in Macon County.
Connie Ridgeway
Connie Ridgeway, 59, was found stabbed to death in her Rogersville, Alabama, apartment on October 23, 2015. Inmate Casey White was indicted for capital murder in 2020 after confessing, then recanted; in July 2023 prosecutors…
Amore Wiggins ("Opelika Jane Doe")
Skeletal remains of a young girl found at an Opelika, Alabama, mobile home park on January 28, 2012, went unidentified for almost 11 years. In January 2023 police named her as Amore Joveah Wiggins, born in 2006.
Brittney Wood
Brittney Nicole Wood, 19, was last seen on May 30, 2012, leaving west Mobile, Alabama, with her uncle Donnie Holland, who was found shot in his SUV two days later in a death ruled a suicide.
Natalee Holloway
Natalee Holloway, 18, of Alabama, disappeared in Aruba on May 30, 2005, after leaving a nightclub with Joran van der Sloot and two other men. Her remains have never been found. In October 2023 van der Sloot pleaded guilty in U.S.
Frank Hilley
Frank Hilley died on May 25, 1975, in a death first attributed to infectious hepatitis. After his daughter Carol was found to have been poisoned with arsenic in 1979, his body was exhumed and arsenic was detected.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, a church deacon and voting rights activist, was shot by Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler in Marion on February 18, 1965, and died eight days later.
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Victims
A dynamite bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11, at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963.
Daniel Barter
Four-year-old Daniel "Danny" Barter vanished on June 18, 1959, from his family's campsite on Perdido Bay, Alabama. A search lasting more than a week, with hundreds of volunteers, divers and bloodhounds, found no trace of him.
Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old Black sharecropper, was abducted and raped by six white men while walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, on September 3, 1944. Two all-white grand juries declined to indict anyone.