Killing of Tammy Alexander

Tammy Jo Alexander was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 2, 1963, and grew up in a difficult household in Brooksville, Florida, where her mother struggled with prescription drug addiction and emotional volatility. Alexander had a history of running away from home, sometimes hitchhiking long distances with truckers. She was last seen by an ex-boyfriend in the spring of 1979 and had not been in contact with her family since.

On the morning of November 10, 1979, a farmer discovered her body in a cornfield near U.S. Route 20 and the Genesee River in Caledonia, New York, roughly 23 miles southwest of Rochester. She had been shot twice — once in the head near the roadside and once in the back after apparently being dragged into the field — and her pockets had been turned inside out, removing any identification. She showed no signs of sexual assault. Heavy rain on the night of her death washed away much potential forensic evidence. Investigators noted tan lines suggesting she had recently been in a warm, sunny climate, and other physical details including dental characteristics indicating she had received no prior dental care.

For more than three decades, Alexander remained unidentified as "Caledonia Jane Doe" or "Cali Doe." Investigators pursued forensic advances over the years, including a successful DNA extraction in 2005, palynological (pollen) analysis of her clothing conducted at Texas A&M University in 2006 and reexamined in 2012, and isotope analysis of her teeth and bones. These analyses pointed to prior time spent in Florida, southern California, Arizona, or northern Mexico. A facial reconstruction portrait, created in 2010 by artist Carl Koppelman, was uploaded to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

Identification efforts accelerated in 2014, when Alexander's half-sister, Pamela Dyson, and a close high school friend, Laurel Nowell, filed a new missing persons report with the Hernando County, Florida sheriff's office. Koppelman recognized a resemblance between the missing persons listing and his 2010 reconstruction and alerted the Livingston County Sheriff's Office. A mitochondrial DNA comparison in January 2015 confirmed a match between the unidentified remains and Dyson. Livingston County Sheriff Thomas Dougherty announced the identification at a news conference on January 26, 2015, 35 years after Alexander's death.

Investigators have described a white male "person of interest" seen with Alexander at a diner in Lima, New York on the night of her death, who was reportedly between five feet eight and five feet nine inches tall, drove a tan station wagon, and wore black wire-rimmed glasses. In 1984, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed to the murder without identifying the victim by name, but investigators found his confession lacked credible supporting evidence. Male DNA recovered from Alexander's clothing has been compared against several persons of interest and, as of 2020, against national DNA databases in search of a familial link. The case remains unsolved.