At a little past four a.m. on the morning of May 11th, 2002, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Mahogany Davis staggered out of her flat and into the parking lot of the Little Dipper apartment complex in Fairbanks, Alaska. She was clad only in skimpy pajamas and was bleeding profusely; she soon collapsed onto the asphalt, at which point a neighbor called police.
The nearest police station was nearly two hours away, but despite the distance and the severity of her wounds, Mahogany was still alive when emergency services reached her. According to officers, she was able to speak to them before succumbing to her injuries about ninety minutes after arriving at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. Authorities have never disclosed what Mahogany told them, but it presumably had to do with the identity of the person or people who attacked her.
Mahogany had three children: a four-year-old, a twenty-month-old, and an infant born only three weeks previously. All three children apparently witnessed the horrific attack on their mother, and the oldest was able to tell police that the man was black with a “yellow complexion,” and that Mahogany had been stabbed multiple times, but with some implement other than a knife.
From the beginning, investigators theorized that Mahogany was murdered by someone she knew, as there was no sign of forced entry into the apartment. One of the most compelling suspects in that regard was a man named Jason Wallace, an associate of Mahogany’s ex-boyfriend William Holmes, who was the father of one of her children.
Jason Wallace indeed had a yellowish skin tone, and even more damningly, was arrested later in 2002 for breaking into a woman’s home and beating her to death with a hammer. He had also stabbed a man with a screwdriver in a separate incident that same year.
Police have long surmised that Jason Wallace, either with or without the assistance of William Holmes, may have targeted Mahogany because she had knowledge of some illegal activity they were involved in. In spite of this assumption, however, and in spite of the fact that Mahogany allegedly gave law enforcement information about the attack prior to her death, no arrests in the case have ever been made, and the investigation has since gone cold.
Crime Immemorial 