Yahoo News DNA Just Led To Major Break In Murder Case That's Stumped Police For 27 Years
After years of fruitless tips and dead-end leads, authorities got a big break in identifying “El Dorado Jane Doe,” a mysterious woman who was killed at a seedy Arkansas motel nearly three decades ago.
El Dorado Police Detective Lt. Cathy Phillips told HuffPost that authorities were able to use DNA evidence to track down relatives of Jane Doe, a major step forward in the process of identifying the woman.
A recent conference call with the DNA Doe Project led to Doe’s DNA being shared with GEDmatch, the same genomics and genealogy website cops in California used to identify a suspect in the Golden State Killer case.
Phillips said she was notified two weeks ago of the first DNA hit.
“We did a genealogy background and a woman in Alabama was our first link to it,” the detective told HuffPost on Wednesday. “I couldn’t find a phone number for her, so I contacted the family on Facebook. At first, they thought I might be a quack, so they did some checking and found out you did a story on it and then it went from there.”
Phillips said a genealogist she is working with has since identified Doe’s father as a descendant of Daniel Wood and Mamie Carter, who had nine children and lived in Virginia. The couple is the great-grandparents of Christina Tilford, the Alabama woman whose DNA provided the first link in the case.
Tilford, who learned she’s Doe’s second cousin, told HuffPost she didn’t recognize Doe but could see a family resemblance. She said she shared her DNA with the website about a year ago in hopes of tracing her family roots.
“I was really shocked,” Tilford said of being notified by the detective about the match. “I didn’t expect something like this to come from my DNA test.”
Phillips, a 25-year veteran of the department who has spent nearly 15 years looking for answers in the bizarre case, said she is “ecstatic” about the recent developments.
El Dorado Jane Doe had a history of prostitution and frayed relationships. She went by a number of aliases but told most friends to call her “Mercedes.”
Her life ended on July 10, 1991, when she was shot and killed at the Whitehall Motel in El Dorado, Arkansas. James “Ice” McAlphin, her lover and alleged pimp, denied killing her ― claiming she’d committed suicide ― but ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served nearly 15 years behind bars.
At the time of the killing, authorities found a number of her personal belongings, including menus from restaurants in Texas and Virginia; diary entries in which she refers to “Tyrone” and “Gail”; and a Bible inscribed with family members with the last name Stroud. Detectives followed up on it all.
El Dorado police also found friends and law enforcement agencies that knew her by names other than Mercedes, including Cheryl Wick, Cheryl Kaufman, Shannon Wiley, Sharon Wiley, Kelly Lee Carr and Kelly Karr.
In interviewing others who knew her, police learned she had once worked as an exotic dancer in Dallas, Texas. It was there, police were told, that McAlphin first met her. She was also known to dance in Little Rock, Arkansas, and possibly Virginia and Minnesota.
“She told quite a few different things to different people,” Phillips said. “She told people she was in the witness protection program and that her father was in the Mafia. There were rumors she was wanted for bank robberies on the East Coast, and she told some people she had been with a black male at a truck stop. She said he made her go up to the trucks and make contact with the truck drivers and that he actually shot and killed one of the truck drivers and they were on the run for that.”
Despite all the pieces of the puzzle, there just wasn’t enough to put it all together.
In 2016, HuffPost spent several months looking into the case and found a number of people who considered El Dorado Jane Doe a friend. While none of them had any clue as to her real identity, she had told several people that she was a mother of two. Some even speculated she had worked on the fringes to send money to them.
McAlphin, who at the time was behind bars on an unrelated domestic violence offense, broke his silence for the first time in 2016. He told HuffPost in a series of exclusive interviews that he knew her real identity but would only reveal it if someone paid him $4,000.
“If you’re sincerely interested in this information, go ahead [and put the money] on my books and I’ll give you all the information I have and I’ll keep working with you in case I can remember more,” McAlphin said.
He provided a number of tantalizing clues, which may or may not be true, and said she used the alias Helen Stenner.
“She may not have even divulged a whole lot of truths about herself to him,” Phillips surmised at the time. “I think she’s a runaway, and I think he’s a creature of habit, and if he knew who she was he’d tell to try to get out of something.”
According to Tilford and Phillips, no one in the Wood family ever knew of Doe’s existence until now.
“They didn’t have any knowledge of anybody running away, reported missing or put up for adoption or anything, so we think she was born out of wedlock,” Phillips explained. “So, we’re getting DNA from other family members to narrow it down.”
While the search for El Dorado Jane Doe’s name is ongoing, authorities are closer now than ever before to finding it and providing answers to a family who, until now, was oblivious to her fate.
“Her story just breaks my heart,” Tilford said. “She deserves [a name] and it would be wonderful if we could find any children she might have had.”
Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact Lt. Cathy Phillips at 870-881-4810. Anyone wishing to remain anonymous may provide information by calling El Dorado Crime Stoppers at 1-870-863-4636. Additional information can be found at eldoradojanedoe.wix.com and Facebook.
El Dorado Jane Doe
!["From everything I can gather, there are a couple things that are consistent," Detective Cathy Phillips said about Mercedes. "She went with black males, she did prostitute and [she] was an exotic dancer."](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/LXnATrclXCto2yzhlJZsoQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTY3Nw--/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/73wabDQMWVlXsI38IcBjuA--~B/aD01MDY7dz03MTg7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/56a3a5c91a00002d00ab133a.jpg)
El Dorado Jane Doe
El Dorado Jane Doe
According to Mercedes' friend, Andrea Cooksey, "She just didn’t want to be with him anymore."
Cooksey added, "She broke up with him. He just couldn’t accept it."
El Dorado Jane Doe
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"He told my mom and my aunt that they were at motel fighting," she said. "He was freakishly big and she was tall, but dainty. He said they were arguing and he pushed her out the door and apparently she fell and broke her neck. He said he thought she was dead, so he shot her to make it look like she killed herself."
El Dorado Jane Doe
"She worked many jobs under my name and she got arrested under my name in places I've never been -- like Dallas," said the real Cheryl Wick. "I had to go to the social security office and say, 'No, I've never worked at that place.' It was a hassle. It's like a case that doesn't go away. I wish I could help, but I can't."
El Dorado Jane Doe
This entry, dated Aug.19, 1990, reads: "I thought we would leave today but no such luck. Gail came home today. She didn't seem very happy to see us here. Tyrone gave her $100.00 dollars. He can't get that stupid VW to work. So he doesn't no what to do. I just want to get to Texas and get to work. Gail is leaving tomorrow for Fresno, her grandma had a heart attack. Well I'm going to sleep so night, night."
Authorities suspect the diary entry was written while Mercedes was in Louisiana. They have never been able to identify Tyrone or Gail.
El Dorado Jane Doe
The first, undated, reads: "Book. Well I'm going to sleep in the bed tonight. I wish he would talk to me. Maybe I'll say something to him tonight. Well good night."
The next entry is dated Aug. 16, 1990. It reads: "Oh thank God: He finally talked to me this morning. I don't believe it. He said he was sorry and didn't mean those things he said to me. I'm so in love with him. I'm glad we are going to work things out. We had a good time this morning. Hee. Hee...Hee..."
El Dorado Jane Doe
According to Detective Cathy Phillips, it has been incorrectly reported that McAlphin is related to the Stroud family. Authorities have been unable to locate the Stroud family members.
"I don’t know where that came from," Phillips said. "We mailed out letters to all of them in Irving, Texas, and they were all sent back. Did she just pick that Bible up because she felt like she needed it?"
El Dorado Jane Doe
![Authorities found a business card for a Wylie, Texas, recording studio in Mercedes' possessions.Contacted by HuffPost, the owner, Anthony Boyd, said he does not recognize any of the photos of Mercedes.<br /><br />"For the life of me I tried to recognize [her], but I just can't place the young lady," he said. "Nothing looked familiar to me at all. I wish I could help."](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/rUS4.q6VIzC_r0MskwyYLQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/56a3a6261f00007f002168d3.jpg)
"For the life of me I tried to recognize [her], but I just can't place the young lady," he said. "Nothing looked familiar to me at all. I wish I could help."
El Dorado Jane Doe
El Dorado Jane Doe
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"I did love Mercedes and I always will," he said.
Dwayne McCorkendale
James McAlphin mentioned McCorkendale's death in one of his correspondences with HuffPost, in which he hinted that uncovering Mercedes' identity would reveal other unsolved crimes.
"The cold cases I spoke of was not about the truck driver she shot with the shotgun when she was running with Tyrone and it's not about the banks they allegedly hit in Virginia," he said. "Those were only things that she talked about. I was talking about cold cases I have factual information about when she and I were together. Her cold case would unravel the mystery of another cold case."
Missing Trio
"These girls were like sisters to Mercedes," he said. "We use to visit them. They grew up in captivity in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, sometimes in the same town where their parents were. By the time they were adults, they were willing members of the stable. The younger girl died giving birth to a child at home."
McAlphin appears to be referencing the Dec. 23, 1974, disappearance of Rachel Arnold Trlica, 17, Lisa Renee Wilson, 14, and Julie Ann Moseley, 9, from Seminary South Shopping Center in south Fort Worth.
There was nothing to corroborate whether he is telling the truth.
El Dorado Jane Doe
"She was a very sweet girl," McCaster said. "She was out of place in that environment."
James McAlphin
"My grandma, my grandpa are from El Dorado, but they used to drive truck and moved to Texas," she said. "He's the middle child and was kind of fat when he was young and people used to pick on him." McAlphin's niece added, "He's not really close to anybody. He's been in jail his whole live. I don't think he's been out more than five or six months at a time."
WARNING
El Dorado Jane Doe
According to Detective Cathy Phillips, Mercedes tested positive for cocaine in her system.
"She had two injuries -- blunt trauma and the gunshot wound to her head," Phillips said. "The trauma was to her neck, but she died from the gunshot wound. It was to her temple."
El Dorado Jane Doe
"She was 70 inches tall," Detective Cathy Phillips said. "Some reports have her at six feet, but the coroner says she was 70 inches tall, 162 pounds. She had a cut scar over her right eye that was old and she had an old stab wound scar on her left waist."
The coroner also noted Mercedes had three piercings in her right ear and two in her left ear.Phillips said
Mercedes could have been in her 20s or early 30s.
"What threw us off in beginning was she wore a lot of makeup to cover up her freckles and she dyed her hair," Phillips said. "I think her hair was a brown or had a reddish tint. The morgue pictures give you a true look at her."
El Dorado Jane Doe
"I have most of it," said Detective Cathy Phillips. "She had Jordache jeans, Alfred Dunner sweaters, a pair of Essentials jeans and a Victor Costa evening dress. She had several negligees, Peter Ashley ladies shirts, an Open House cooking apron, a pair of Britannia blue jeans, GoodFellows shorts, several bathing suits and several belts."
El Dorado Jane Doe
Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact Lt. Cathy Phillips at 870-881-4810. Anyone wishing to remain anonymous may provide information by calling El Dorado Crime Stoppers at 1-870-863-4636.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
