Crime Immemorial

Before 1980 came to a close, a troubled young girl in Kalamazoo, Michigan would disappear without trace, and though her body would be found only a month into the new year, she would remain unidentified for decades, known only as Bossier Doe until authorities in 2015 finally matched her with her true identity: Carol Ann Cole.

Carol was seventeen years old in 1980, and had something of a dysfunctional family life. Her parents had divorced some time before, and Carol and her sister Jeanie had gone to Kalamazoo to live with their grandmother. By all accounts, Carol had also been having trouble with drugs, and in 1979, traveled to San Antonio, Texas to live with her mother and begin attending rehab meetings at the Palmer Drug Abuse Program.

Though Carol had left her sister and grandmother behind in Michigan, she was fairly diligent about writing them letters and keeping them apprised of her movements by phone. That was why, in late December of 1980, Carol’s grandmother became worried after she hadn’t heard from Carol in quite a while. She managed to discover that Carol had left the drug program and gone to live with friends in Shreveport, Louisiana, but these friends claimed that Carol had left to go to a party sometime in December and had never come back.

There was also some evidence to suggest that Carol may have spent some time at another facility subsequently, the New Bethany School for Girls in Arcadia, Louisiana. Photographs taken at the facility appear to show a girl that closely resembles Carol Cole, and it has been hypothesized that the clothes Carol was wearing when her body was later found were consistent with dress codes put in place by the school.

Whatever the truth of the matter, though, it would be at least four weeks before her remains turned up, and almost four decades before she was definitively identified as Carol.

On January 28th, 1981, a man named John Chesson was out hunting with his son when the pair reportedly came across the degraded remains of a young woman. The victim was determined to be a white female between fifteen and twenty-one years old, of average height and weight, with shoulder-length blonde hair. It appeared that she had painted her fingernails and forcibly removed the braces from her teeth not long before her death. She was clad in a white, long-sleeved shirt with colored stripes, jeans, and a beige hooded sweater. Oddly, her size seven shoes had several names written on them, including Resha, David, and Michael Brisco.

An autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed to death approximately one to two months previously; the knife thought to be the murder weapon was discovered in the dirt near her body. As the victim carried no identification and did not seem to match any known missing persons, she was given the name Bossier Doe, after Bossier Parish, where she had been found.

Shortly after the discovery, serial killer and known exaggerator Henry Lee Lucas confessed to killing the unknown victim, just as he had in the previous murders of Orange Socks and Caledonia Jane Doe (who would later be identified as sixteen-year-old Tammy Jo Alexander). Skeptical authorities almost immediately dismissed his admission, as it was known that Lucas was in Florida when Bossier Doe had been murdered.

The case thenceforth went cold, and many years passed. Then, in 2015, a follower of a Facebook group concerning the Bossier Doe case happened to cross-reference the photo reconstruction of the victim with a photo of a known missing person from a Craigslist ad: seventeen-year-old Carol Ann Cole, who had vanished sometime in December of 1980 after allegedly leaving a house in Shreveport, Louisiana. DNA tests conducted later that year confirmed that Bossier Doe was indeed Carol Cole, and the remains were eventually sent back to Michigan to be buried by the girl’s family.

Though there are no solid suspects in the murder of Carol Ann Cole, there is an intriguing person of interest in the form of John Chesson, the man who stumbled across the body and reported his discovery to police. Chesson’s daughter, Frances Aucoin, told police that she believed her father had taken the hunting trip specifically to “find” the remains and thus allay suspicion from himself, and further claimed that she had seen a girl resembling Carol Cole in the company of her father after he reportedly picked her up hitchhiking.

Frances also alleged that her father was abusive, and indeed, John Chesson was later convicted of murdering his mother-in-law in 1997, and as of this writing in 2022, is currently serving a life sentence for the crime.

John Chesson’s son, who was present when his father found Carol Cole’s body, committed suicide in 2008.