Murder victim identified 34 years later - Killer remains at large
Solve This Crime 11/30/2015 12:02 pm PST
Who killed "Bossier Jane Doe?" The victim would simply go as "Jane Doe" for more than 30 years. Until a most unlikely break would finally give this face a name.
At least once a week, Jeanie Phelps makes the painful trek from her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan to the grave site of her older sister, Carol Ann Cole.
The last time anyone heard from Carol was in the winter of 1980. The last time Jeanie actually saw her sister was when she moved away with her mom, Sue Cole, from Kalamazoo 1,275 miles south to Austin, Texas. Jeanie stayed behind to live with her grandmother.
Carol Ann Cole was 15 years old then.
"Me and Carol had a good relationship until she started acting out and I tried to straighten her out then we'd argue about that. I said, 'You're gonna get in trouble,' and she was skipping school too," said Carol's mother, Sue Cole.
"She just start hanging around with the wrong people and the girl upstairs, her name was Diane, they were sneaking out of the house and running around with guys, so I was afraid she was really gonna get in trouble, get pregnant or something," said Cole.
Carol ended up in a drug rehab facility in Austin. Sue visited Carol. Carol also stayed in touch with the family she left in Kalamazoo, particularly her little sister.
Things suddenly changed. Carol had bolted from the rehab in Texas. She had hit the road and turned up 375 miles away in Shreveport, Louisiana. Carol, now 16, called her mom from there.
Carol didn't give her mom any details about her life, but what she wrote in letters to her sister was harrowing.
Then the letters stopped. So did the calls to Jeanie and her grandmother.
Carol had told her mom she was in Louisiana living with some people. "Those people" were the Chesson family. Daughter Frances Aucoin remembers Carol being there and then suddenly disappearing.
"Carol Ann stayed with us for possibly a week," said Frances. "I went to school, I remember her being there, I went to school and came home and she was gone, and I never asked Where'd she go?, if she's coming back, I never asked any questions."
Frances never asked questions because her dad, John Chesson, was one mean, violent guy with anger management problems and a habit of beating the hell out of his kids.
One December morning, John Chesson told his kids they were all going hunting. Frances had never been invited before. He told Frances and her brother to walk down a particular path into the brush.
"I thought that was kind of peculiar, actually thought the man was bringing me out there to get rid of me, to kill me -- this is the type of person he was to me, this is how he treated me," said Frances Aucoin. "So we started walking and I started getting this gut feeling, this scared feeling and I'm looking back and looking at the truck, noticing he never leaves the truck, never walks too far from the truck, is still in front of the truck on the road."
They walk right into a nightmare: Frances and her brother found the remains of a female, remains that would go unidentified for 34 years.
The body had been stabbed multiple times in her back and chest. She used to wear braces. She wore sneakers with the writing on them. She had blond hair. A reconstruction of what she might have looked like is made. And that's all investigators know. They refer to her as "Bossier Doe," after Louisiana's Bossier Parish, where she was found.
Years pass and suddenly serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confesses to killing Bossier Doe and another woman in the early 1980s. Interest in the case flares and a second composite picture is made.
But it becomes clear that Lucas didn't do the crime. Bossier Doe's case fell off the front page and it would be years before she would resurface. Several unrelated actions happening simultaneously would finally reveal her identity.
A new artist completely remade the composite of what Bossier Doe might have looked like.
That inspired Bossier Parish Sheriff's Lt. Shannon Mack to do something completely different.
"I was talking to our crime scene guys and I said 'What if we just give her a Facebook page like she's a real person, not create a page and "like" it,'" said Mack. "But you have to 'friend request' her and she talks, just like, 'Hey, this is everything about me, can you guys help out.' I think I did that Friday afternoon, last-ditch effort out of desperation really."
Meanwhile, back in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a family friend posted a page on Craigslist searching for information about Carol Cole.
And then in a million-to-one shot, a 911 operator in Lousiana, home sick with bronchitis, happened onto both sites the same day. Something about the picture in the ad stuck in her mind and wouldn't go away.
"I thought, 'I've seen that jawline before,' I reread it, thought 'This is same time frame as what I read just a few hours ago, so I went to Facebook, and I went back to the Bossier Doe picture," said Linda, the operator.
She called investigators, who got DNA from Carol's mom and dad and rushed it to a lab. The results: the DNA all matched. Boosier Doe finally had a name. Jeanie finally found her sister.
Mission number 2: Track down Carol Cole's killer. And then out of nowhere a bombshell revelation from Frances Aucoin, the woman who found Carol's body all those years ago.
"My dad's in prison for murder, and after looking back, going through this and having to relive this, I believe and I strongly believed before anything prior to him going to prison, I strongly believe that he had gotten rid of her," said Frances. "I strongly believe my dad killed Carol Ann before he had done anything to go to the prison, this murder that he had committed."
John Chesson is currently locked up for stabbing another woman to death.
The Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office has already named Chesson a person of interest in Cole's death. They say with the details his daughter provided, there could be enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury for a murder charge against Chesson.
