Tammy Alexander
The Girl In The Field
Unsolved Cold Case
Murdered: November 9, 1979
Tammy Jo Alexander was an American homicide victim found in the town of Caledonia, New York, on November 10, 1979. She had been fatally shot twice and left in a field just off U.S. Route 20 near the Genesee River after running away from her home in Brooksville, Florida earlier that year.
For more than three decades, Tammy remained unidentified under the name Caledonia Jane Doe or “Cali Doe” until January 26, 2015, when police in Livingston County, New York announced her identity 35 years after her death.
Tammy Alexander was 16 years old when she murdered, though her age was not clear to investigators at the time. Most potential forensic evidence was washed away by heavy rain on the night she died, but they knew she had come to the Caledonia area from a distant, warmer locale because she had tan lines on her upper body.
Advances in technology allowed investigators to make use of rapidly improving and new forensic techniques to evaluate trace evidence they had collected and, following a successful DNA extraction from her remains in 2005 and a palynological analysis of Alexander’s clothing, they concluded that she had spent time in Florida, southern California, Arizona, or northern Mexico prior to her death. Later analysis of isotopes in her bones would lend further support to this conclusion. In addition, a portrait was made of her based on a facial reconstruction, in the hopes that someone would recognize her image, and it was uploaded to an online public database in 2010.
Identification was achieved based on a combination of factors; in 2014, a renewed search for her by a close high school friend and Alexander’s half-sister resulted in the filing of a new missing persons report with police in Florida, as she had not been seen or heard from since the late 1970s. The artist of the reconstructed photo, a moderator at the Websleuths online community, notified the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office about a potential match between the two pictures, and in 2015 a follow-up mitochondrial DNA analysis confirmed a match with Alexander’s half-sister based on the DNA results from 2005.
Tammy Alexander’s case was well-publicized in the time she was unidentified, and the Livingston County police continued to process thousands of leads from the public. The investigation stalled in 1980, leading county officials to arrange for her burial as “Unidentified Girl” at Greenmount Cemetery in Dansville, New York.
In 1984, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed to the crime, but his statement was not considered credible. The perpetrator remains unidentified.
Tammy Alexander
Tammy Jo Alexander was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 2, 1963. She attended high school in Brooksville, Florida.
Pamela Dyson, Tammy’s half-sister, believes that Tammy left to escape a turbulent household. Dyson had a different father from Alexander, and, after about age 11, she lived with her paternal grandmother. She said that Alexander’s biological father was not really part of the younger girl’s life. She grew up with their mother and a stepfather. Their mother had become addicted to prescription medication and was emotionally volatile, erupting into temper tantrums.
Alexander’s mother, Barbara Jenkins, had worked as a waitress at a truck stop and was joined by Tammy when she was a teenager. Tammy had a history of running away in this period.
Laurel Nowell, Tammy’s friend, said that she and Tammy had sometimes hitchhiked together with truckers, once traveling all the way to California together. When they got there, Nowell called her parents, and they paid for airline tickets for both girls so they could return to Florida.
Barbara Jenkins died on January 17, 1998, at the age of 56. Her obituary had listed Alexander as deceased, which the family had assumed to be the case by that time.
Discovery of Tammy Alexander
The body of Tammy Alexander was discovered on the morning of November 10, 1979, by a farmer in Caledonia, New York, 23 miles southwest of the city of Rochester. The farmer saw red clothing in one of his corn fields near the Genesee River and went to investigate, believing that he had spotted a trespassing hunter. Instead, he found the body of a young woman. He notified the police.
Alexander was fully clothed and showed no signs of sexual assault. Investigators initially ruled that she had died from a severe hemorrhage caused by two gunshot wounds, one to the head over the right eye and one to the back. The wound to the head indicated she had apparently not turned or flinched, a common phenomenon of a headshot, and the entry wound suggested complete surprise. With her pockets turned inside out to indicate that any identification she carried had been removed, the investigators later named her “Caledonia Jane Doe” or “Cali Doe” as they worked to identify her.
An autopsy indicated that Tammy Alexander had first been shot in the head while next to the road bordering the cornfield, at or near a blood spot found on the ground. She was then dragged into the cornfield, where she was shot again in the back and left for dead.
Heavy rains on the night of Alexander’s death washed away a large portion of potential forensic evidence, such as physical and DNA traces of the perpetrator on her body and clothes.
Tammy Alexander was formally identified on January 26, 2015, more than 35 years after her discovery.
Two Images – One Girl
Laurel Nowell, a friend in high school from Brooksville, Florida, had started trying to reach Tammy Alexander in 2010 on social media. She eventually reached Alexander’s half-sister, Pamela Dyson, who knew that Tammy had often run away from home, but Dyson had not lived with her younger half-sister after about age 11. She learned that no one in her family knew anything of Alexander’s whereabouts since the girl had left sometime between 1977 and 1979. An ex-boyfriend of the victim verified he’d last seen her in the spring of 1979. It is believed that Tammy hitched a ride with a trucker while working as a waitress at the truck stop.
Dyson and Nowell became concerned that Alexander had fallen victim to a crime after leaving home. Dyson said that her mother did report Alexander as missing, but she has since believed that, since Alexander had a history of running away and returning, police may not have taken the case seriously. In August 2014, the Hernando County sheriff’s office told them no missing persons report had been filed for her, and promptly filed one.
Carl Koppelman, a California artist, came across the “missing person” report on Tammy Alexander as a moderator of the Websleuths online community, where volunteers try to solve cold cases including those of unidentified bodies. In 2010, four years earlier, Koppelman had sketched the portrait of “Caledonia Jane Doe” and posted it in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. In September 2014, he saw the new listing for Alexander and quickly realized that they were the same person. He emailed the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office to tell them of the strong resemblance between the two images. Police arranged to take a DNA sample from Dyson.
In January 2015, the Monroe County medical examiner’s office found that MtDNA from the unidentified body matched that of Dyson, confirming that the victim was her half-sister. A week later on January 26, 2015, the Livingston County sheriff, Thomas Dougherty, announced at a news conference that Caledonia Jane Doe had been identified after 35 years.
The case of Tammy Alexander remains unsolved.
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