ALColdCaseAdvocacy

📰𝐏𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 (𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭) 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐔𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 Many people across Alabama may remember the Amber Alert that went out in 2024 after a man allegedly shot his wife and left with their young son. That man was Willie Edward McClain. According to court records, McClain was charged with attempted murder and custodial interference after allegedly shooting his wife and leaving the scene with their child. At the time of the incident, McClain was already out on bond in a separate domestic violence case after he allegedly struck his wife in the face. In December 2025, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted McClain on the attempted murder charge, and bond was set at $60,000. Earlier this week, a preliminary hearing was held where McClain entered a plea of not guilty. He is currently being held in the Jefferson County Jail on failure to appear charges. What some people may not realize is that McClain was also charged in connection with the 1997 murder of 28-year-old Huelon “Juice” Hardwick. That case was later dismissed, and no one has ever been held accountable for Huelon’s death. Nearly three decades later, Huelon’s family is still waiting for answers. If you know something about what happened to Huelon in 1997, now is the time to come forward. You can contact Birmingham Police Department, Alabama, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, or Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama. Justice should never have an expiration date. #HuelonHardwick #unsolved #unforgotten #Birmingham #Alabama #JeffersonCounty

⚖️VERDICT UPDATE After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury found Ibraheem Yazeed guilty of murder and felony murder in the death of Aniah Blanchard. While the jury did not return a conviction for capital murder, meaning the death penalty will not be pursued, this verdict still represents a measure of accountability. Our hearts remain with Aniah, her family, and all who love her. No verdict can undo this loss, but we continue to stand with them and hold space for their grief, their strength, and their pursuit of justice. 📷 #justiceforaniah

𝑺𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 16 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒔𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒅. 𝑴𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒉𝒔 𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓, 𝒔𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒉𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒘𝒂𝒚. 𝑵𝒐 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒌𝒏𝒐𝒘𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕. Sixteen-year-old Mary Jo Burnett disappeared from Rockford, Alabama on June 1, 1984. Just two months later, she was confirmed to be in Atlanta, traveling with an unidentified male. After that, her trail disappears. More than 40 years have passed, and her case remains unsolved. Someone knows what happened. If you have any information, please contact the Coosa County Sheriff’s Office or your local law enforcement agency. #MaryJoBurnett #Missing #Rockford #Alabama #CoosaCounty #AlabamaColdCaseAdvocacy #Unforgotten

Alabama is taking important steps to remove civil time barriers for survivors of child sex abuse. Families of homicide victims often face the same reality. Evidence, witnesses, and answers do not always come quickly. But civil access to the courts can still expire before the truth is uncovered. In practice, this can mean losing access to civil remedies such as wrongful death actions, claims against responsible or negligent third parties, and civil discovery tools that may uncover new evidence. It is a conversation worth having.

Nearly every Monday I’m on the road somewhere in Alabama meeting with families or agencies and laying the groundwork for the kind of change that hopefully one day makes these drives unnecessary. Advocacy isn’t always loud. Most of the time it’s quiet work. Patience. Persistence. A lot of miles. Mile by mile, conversation by conversation, piece by piece, we move a little closer to bringing the truth home.

March 25 will mark 21 years for another case that is too many years unsolved. Please help us keep her case in the public eye and share. On March 25, 2005, Yu Chin Chang Goodson vanished from a group home in Russellville, AL. Considered an endangered missing adult, she is mentality and physically disabled. Without medication, Yu would likely be very disoriented. After walking out the door of the group home, she was last seen getting into an older gray/silver car on Hwy 24, possibly heading towards Decatur, AL. Sightings were reported in Florence and Huntsville. Yu is an Asian female, 5'2", 150 lbs, with black graying hair that may be completely gray now and brown eyes. Those that know her have said she loves children and prays often. It’s never too late. If you've seen her, please contact Russellville PD at (256) 332-2230. #missing #HelpFindYu #FranklinCoAL #RusselvilleAL #FlorenceAL #HuntsvilleAL #DecaturAL #Unforgotten #ACCA #IfYouKnowSomethingSaySomething Alabama Cold Case Advocacy: Info@alcoldcase.com (251) 501-2653

March 24th is coming up. Another year down. Another year still waiting. More than two decades have passed since Melinda Wall McGhee disappeared, but the questions her family carries have never gone away. Someone knows what happened. Someone knows where the truth begins and where the silence ends. Time does not erase what was done. It only deepens the need for answers. If you have information about Melinda’s disappearance, please come forward. Even the smallest detail could help bring the answers her family has been waiting for. Because no family should have to keep counting the years without the truth. If you have information, please contact Escambia County Sheriff's Office - Alabama. #melindamcghee #missing #alabama

National Crime Victims Rights Week 2026 Events🗓️ April 11 @ 10:00 am-2:00 pm - Jefferson County Sheriff's Office Bridging Hope for Safer Communities - Bill Harris Arena Complex April 21 @ 6:00 pm - Mobile DA Resource Fair and Vigil - Government Plaza Atrium April 21 @ 4:30 pm - Baldwin County District Attorney's Office Resource Expo and Vigil - Loxley Civic Center April 21 @ 6:30 pm - Montgomery County District Attorney's Office Evening of Remembrance - The Multiplex at Cramton Rd April 26 @ 12:00-4:00 pm - Victims of Crime and Leniency One Heart in the Park - Union Station Train Shed (Montgomery) We will be adding event details as we get them! If you’ve been looking for a way to help families, this is a great opportunity for communities to support victims and families 🩵 #nationalcrimevictimsrightsweek #ncvrw #unforgotten #bethespark

Cold case murder of Long Island mom, Barbara Waldman, solved 52 years later.. Eric Waldman brushed the snow away from his mother’s headstone at Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon as his brother Larry Waldman and sister Marla Waldman Conn stood nearby. "Hey, mom, miss you, love you, wish you were here," he said. "And they found your murderer." "It’s over," Marla said. Their mother, Barbara Waldman, was murdered in their Oceanside home in 1974. The crime remained unsolved until late last year, when the Nassau County Police Department told the family they closed the case after identifying a suspect, who had died in 2004. Local and federal law enforcement are expected to announce the development at a news conference on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The family contacted Newsday recently after seeing the Newsday documentary, "The Forgotten," on WLIW/21. The documentary chronicled the cold cases of women murdered on Long Island. Haunted for decades.. For 52 years, the murder of Barbara Waldman has haunted her children, who were 5, 6 and 7 years old when their mother was killed. They went on with their lives, had their own families and moved off Long Island. But the case never left them. Eric was the one who found her. He got off the bus from kindergarten and went to the front door expecting to see his mother there, but didn’t. He went upstairs to her bedroom. That’s where he found her. "She was tied up in dark stockings. There was one around her neck. She had a pillowcase in her mouth, and I saw a hole in her head," he recalled. He tried to untie her, but the knot seemed to tighten when he did. Then he thought he heard a noise in the closet. Terrified, he ran out to a neighbor’s house. The first neighbor didn’t believe him, he said, so he ran to another neighbor’s house. They agreed to check. They found her. He remembers looking out his neighbor’s window and seeing his mother’s body being carried out under a sheet. 📷Barbara and Gerald Waldman in 1971.  Credit: Waldman Family Barbara Waldman was 31 years old. She had graduated from New York University with a teaching degree, but stayed home to rear her children. A blonde, she was vibrant, fun-loving and nurturing, her children said. She was always singing and dancing with her children, and toys were scattered all over the house. The morning of the murder, she had been planning to go dress shopping, Marla said. Their block on Sally Lane in Oceanside was a tightknit neighborhood, where the children all played with each other and parents vacationed together. It was a new development, and young families with children all moved in around the same time, said Stanley Roban, a family friend. "People were comfortable leaving their doors open," he said. "After that, no." Roban had just come home after doing his turn in the neighborhood carpool when Barbara’s husband, Gerald Waldman, called him. He arrived at the house and saw his friend looking down and saying, "They killed my Barbara." 'Us against the world' Thirty detectives descended on the scene. They set up a special trailer at the corner of Mott and Oceanside roads to collect information, but had few clues. The medical examiner said she had died of strangulation and a bullet wound, according to Newsday stories at the time. Detectives questioned Waldman, but he was working at his dental office at the time of the killing. Years later, he voluntarily gave police a DNA swab, and testing ruled him out as a suspect, family members said. Neighbors gave police a description of the man they saw walking away from the house on the day of the murder. A police artist produced a composite sketch of a man with a mustache wearing a fur-lined snorkel jacket, a hooded winter parka. But they never matched the sketch to a suspect. A composite of the suspect in Barbara's killing.  Credit: NCPD It fell to Waldman, who died in 2007, to explain to his children what happened. He gathered them together the night of the murder and said, "A bad man came in the house, and your mom’s in heaven. She’s not coming home." He never spoke about it again. Neither did the children. Their mother’s pictures came off the walls. "It was something that we all silently decided," Marla said. "We never talked about it." Their father beefed up their home security. He bought an alarm and two German shepherds. To this day, both Larry and Eric said they share an obsession with security. Larry can’t sleep without his Doberman. Eric checks door locks repeatedly. Waldman remarried within six months. Years later, Marla asked him what he was thinking. He told her, "I was thinking I was going to jump off the top of a building, and I needed a mother for my children." There was a falling-out with their mother’s side of the family because they blamed him for her murder, the children said. Neighbors gossiped, too. "We knew it was there," Marla said. But their father was adamant that they not let the rumors drive them apart. "It was us against the world," Larry said. They moved around the corner to a different house. They never went back to Sally Lane, even though they had friends there. A break in the case... Police zeroed in on a suspect in prison who confessed to the murder. But when they tested his DNA years later, it wasn’t a match. The case went cold. Marla periodically called the department to ask if there had been any developments, but was told police couldn’t reopen the case without new evidence, she said. Then in December 2022, Eric read a news story that serial killer Richard Cottingham was set to plead guilty to the 1968 murder of dance teacher Diane Cusick outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream after semen found on the victim was retested. He called his sister, who called the police department. The department agreed to reopen the case. After about eight months, they learned there was no match to Cottingham, Marla said. She pushed the department to try genetic genealogy, a forensic technique that compares DNA from a crime victim or suspect with genetic profiles in publicly available DNA databases. It was used to identify the remains of Karen Vergata, whose body parts were found in 1996 on Fire Island and in 2011 near Gilgo Beach, Newsday has reported. In August 2024, Det. Gina Salerno, the Nassau homicide detective handling the investigation, called Marla. "We got a match," she told her. That wasn’t enough, however, to close the case. "I found out very quickly that just because somebody’s sperm is found at the scene of the crime does not make them a murderer," Marla said. The since-deceased suspect, who Newsday is not naming until the person is identified by police, was not a member of the family. Now that the case is closed, the siblings said they feel a sense of relief for their mother and their father. "I feel like it’s a huge ‘I’ve told you so’ for 50 years because of some people that doubted my father," Larry said. "You don’t really have closure; but I feel justice has been served, which, for me, was really important. The truth, I wanted the truth to come out," Marla said. Back at the cemetery, the siblings placed a card on their mother’s headstone from the detective who helped solve the case. The card said, "To the living, we owe respect, but to the dead we only owe the truth." The siblings then hugged each other and said, "We did it. We did it." Newsday's Jim Baumbach and NewsdayTV's Shari Einhorn contributed to this story. @sandrapeddie newsday.com/long-island/na…

Today Governor Kay Ivey commuted Sonny Burton's death sentence to life without parole. For weeks, media outlets and community members rallied together, presenting a unified front and speaking out against what they believed was a wrongful sentence. When their voices joined together, they amplified one another, building into something larger than any single voice alone. The sound became impossible to ignore, as though the waves themselves were strong enough to move mountains. And this time, they did. That is the power of a community working together toward a common goal. Reading the news today about the commutation of Sonny Burton's sentence, I found myself thinking about something else entirely. If the families of victims with unsolved cases had even half that level of amplification, their mountains could be moved too. But where is the community outrage and determination for the family whose son and brother was murdered in Birmingham in 1997? The sole suspect is a man who, between 1992 and 2024, has been indicted on five separate murder-related charges and carries a lengthy criminal record involving serious offenses, yet still walks free today. (#HuelonHardwick) Where is the community's demand for answers for the teenage girl who was taken from her high school in Alexander City and later found murdered and callously discarded in the woods? More than twenty years later, her case remains unsolved. (#ChantyShiverdecker) And where is the heartbreak and collective resolve for an eleven-year-old girl abducted from the mobile home park she called home and later found brutally murdered in Prattville? Twenty-five years have passed, and her family is still waiting for justice. (#ShannonPaulk) There are between 300 and 400 missing person cases in Alabama. Yet you would never know it, because the databases do not agree with one another. Some names appear in NamUs but not ALEA. Others appear in ALEA but not NamUs. And the numbers surrounding homicide are just as troubling. Data collected by the Murder Accountability Project reflects 22,077 homicides in Alabama between 1965 and 2024. Of those, only 13,181 have been cleared. That leaves thousands of families still waiting for answers. I think it is wonderful that Governor Ivey was compelled enough to right what many believed was a significant wrong. It would also be wonderful if she felt compelled to sit down with some of the families we work with and ask a simple question: Is there something we can do to help right their wrong, too?

@GovernorKayIvey @AGSteveMarshall @KGRob27 - we would sincerely appreciate someone taking another look at this case, as well as the other cases connected to McClain.

📰𝐏𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 (𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭) 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐔𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 Many people across Alabama may remember the Amber Alert that went out in 2024 after a man allegedly shot his wife and left with their young son. That man was Willie Edward McClain. According to court records, McClain was charged with attempted murder and custodial interference after allegedly shooting his wife and leaving the scene with their child. At the time of the incident, McClain was already out on bond in a separate domestic violence case after he allegedly struck his wife in the face. In December 2025, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted McClain on the attempted murder charge, and bond was set at $60,000. Earlier this week, a preliminary hearing was held where McClain entered a plea of not guilty. He is currently being held in the Jefferson County Jail on failure to appear charges. What some people may not realize is that McClain was also charged in connection with the 1997 murder of 28-year-old Huelon “Juice” Hardwick. That case was later dismissed, and no one has ever been held accountable for Huelon’s death. Nearly three decades later, Huelon’s family is still waiting for answers. If you know something about what happened to Huelon in 1997, now is the time to come forward. You can contact Birmingham Police Department, Alabama, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, or Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama. Justice should never have an expiration date. #HuelonHardwick #unsolved #unforgotten #Birmingham #Alabama #JeffersonCounty

@RobinsonCarol @aldotcom

I think the decision to commute his sentence came from the media and community pressure that was building. Can you imagine what changes would come about if there was a unified front addressing how the cases were handled to begin with? I'd strongly encourage anyone to go look at Huelon Hardwick's murder from 1997. The person of interest there has accumulated five murder/attempted murder charges over the years. His most recent occurred while he was on bond for DV assault charge in 2024. Yet he was still granted bond in the attempted murder charge. I can't wrap my mind around it.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has commuted the death sentence of Charles Lee Burton to life in prison. Good on her. Under Alabama law, if someone dies in the course of a crime, all of the accomplices can be charged with murder. But in this case, the shooter was sentenced to life in prison. Burton wasn’t even in the store when it happened. But Burton got the death penalty. It took until the week of Burton's scheduled execution to put things right, but better late than never.

@K8te_k8te_k8te Just put it up on the site! The images will be there shortly 💙

@ALColdCase Thank you so much for doing what you do to help cold cases! A tote bag would be nice in the summer to carry to different events, etc. I feel like requesting a merch for your organization may seem a bit odd so I apologize for the request but it was just an idea!

3/9/2026 Enterprise Police Department update: The last confirmed sighting of Genesis was Christmas Day. Around 11:30 p.m. on Christmas Day, Adrienne Reid was captured on a nearby camera pulling a rolling duffle bag to the apartment dumpster. She was later seen taking toys and other items belonging to Genesis to the same dumpster. Authorities now believe that Adrienne willfully murdered Genesis, placed her in the duffle bag, and disposed of both in the dumpster. As of today, Adrienne Reid has been charged with capital murder and abuse of a corpse. The 12th Circuit District Attorneys Office - Coffee and Pike County plans to seek the death penalty. A team from Atlanta that specializes in land field searches will be coming in to assist local agencies in an upcoming search of the land field. This is not the update anyone was hoping for. Our heart goes out to Genesis' family, Enterprise Police Department, Coffee County Sheriff's Office - Alabama and the Coffee 12th Circuit District Attorneys Office - Coffee and Pike County.

@K8te_k8te_k8te We will keep that request in mind. Thank you so much for supporting our cause!

@ALColdCase Thank you so much for sharing. I hate to comment on this post about this question but I couldn’t message you on this app. I have a T-shirt from you. I’m about to order the sweatshirt. Is there any interest in making a tote bag in the future?

Today, Genesis would have been 3 years old. Our hearts are broken for this little angel.

Our new season is coming up soon, so we thought the best way to ease into season 4 is to catch everyone up on recent goings on and upcoming plans for ACCA and Unforgotten. So, the two of us are going to chat about all of that and a bit more. Thanks for joining us, and be sure to share! #UnforgottenTalk #Season4 #TheNamesWeCarry #OperationSafeReturn Find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts...like ours! Here are a couple: Red Circle - redcircle.com/shows/3af541ba… Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/18Zq3N…