Murder of Tammy Alexander

Tammy Jo Alexander (November 2, 1963 – November 9, 1979) was an American teenage girl who was found murdered in the village 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.

Tammy Jo Alexander was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 2, 1963, and attended high school in Brooksville, Florida.

Pamela Dyson, Alexander's half-sister, believes that Alexander left to escape a turbulent household.

Dyson had a different father from Alexander, and, after about age 11, she lived with her paternal grandmother.

According to Dyson, Alexander's biological father was not part of the younger girl's life; she grew up with their mother, Barbara Jenkins, and a stepfather.

Their mother had become addicted to prescription medication and was emotionally volatile, erupting into temper tantrums.

"She did prescription drugs," Dyson said of Jenkins.

"She was suicidal. I think she had issues back then that they didn't diagnose."

Jenkins had worked as a waitress at a truck stop, and was joined by Alexander when she was a teenager.

Alexander had a history of running away during this period.

Her friend Laurel Nowell said that they 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.

Alexander's body was discovered on the morning of November 10, 1979, by a farmer in Caledonia, New York, 23 mi 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 and notified police soon after.

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.

The autopsy by the medical examiner indicated that 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 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.

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.

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.

Until the identification, Dyson believed that her half-sister had made a new life somewhere away from her mother and stepfather.

She had hoped that it included a happy household, with a husband and children.

"I thought she just wanted to go away and start all over," Dyson said.

Advances in technology allowed investigators to make use of improving 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 Alexander 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 Alexander by her half-sister and a close high school friend resulted in the filing of a new missing persons report with police in Hernando County, Florida, as she had not been seen or heard from since the late 1970s.

For more than three decades, she remained unidentified under the names 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.

Alexander was aged 16 when 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.

Carl Koppelman, the artist of the reconstructed photo, notified the Livingston County Sheriff's Office about a potential match between the two pictures, and in 2015 a follow-up mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis confirmed a match with Alexander's half-sister based on the DNA results from 2005.

Alexander's case was well-publicized in the time she was unidentified, and Livingston County police continued to process thousands of leads from the public.