About a month before the year of 1995 was out, a woman’s body would be discovered in North Carolina; her identity would not be established until early 2019, and the circumstances surrounding her death still remain a puzzling mystery.
It was December 6th, 1995, and the skeletal remains were discovered in a field in Jacksonville, North Carolina. At the time the body was found, authorities believed that the decedent was a Caucasian woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old, who stood between five-foot-five and five-foot-eight. She was believed to have reddish hair, and had a great deal of expensive dental work. She was clad in a yellow shirt with shoulder pads, an additional red shirt, also with shoulder pads, black jeans, and one white Nike sneaker. In addition, she wore an eighteen-karat gold necklace, several gold bracelets, and a black watch. Gold hoop earrings were found nearby, as were two New York Transit Authority tokens and a set of two hotel keys on a ring with a burned tag attached.
Though cause of death was unable to be determined, the positioning of the body suggested homicide. According to the coroner, the woman had likely died about two years previously.
For more than two decades, the victim, dubbed Jacksonville Jane Doe, remained unidentified, but in February of 2019, a DNA comparison uncovered the fact that that victim was actually thirty-three-year-old Randi Stacey Boothe-Wilson, primarily known as Stacey, an African-American woman from Greenburgh, New York.
Stacey was a former Marine who had left the service in August of 1994. She had been married to another Marine, Earle Wilson, until their divorce shortly after her discharge. The couple had three children, Earl III, Elliot, and Leslye. Stacey had been living in New York with her daughter and two sons, and working as a security guard at a museum in Manhattan.
In late October of 1994, though, Stacey told her children that she was going to visit her sister in Queens, but she never arrived there. Her vehicle was later found abandoned. Even weirder, her estranged husband found letters, supposedly written by Stacey, in which she claimed that she was leaving her children. Earle also told police that Stacey had sent him her debit and credit cards in the mail before she vanished. She was reported missing shortly afterward.
Since the victim’s identity was proven, detectives have been stumped as to how Stacey Boothe-Wilson ended up dead nearly six-hundred miles away from home, and whether she had either voluntarily abandoned her old life and perhaps committed suicide, or was alternately abducted and murdered by someone who staged the entire scenario.
The most compelling lead thus far concerns a connection between Stacey’s death and the crimes committed by another former Marine, possible serial killer Matthew Lorne Alder. Alder was convicted in 1995 of raping and murdering nineteen-year-old Lisa Gipson, who he had picked up from a nightclub and later burned alive. Alder was also charged with the 1993 murder of nineteen-year-old Wanda Musk in Genesee Township, and is further suspected in the 1992 slaying of twenty-five-year-old Camille Marie Whalen.
The inquiry is still active.
Crime Immemorial 