Murder Mystery

Nobody’s Child

– By Sarah Russell

El Dorado police had cuffs on the killer almost before the blonde was even lifted onto the gurney. With a rap sheet for a resume, James McAlphin was one local the cops could identify on sight. They recognized the victim, too. Her name was Mercedes, a young woman who was new in town. Police had a crime scene, a killer and a victim – but they didn’t realize that this murder had a twist.

The Whitehall Court – where the couple lived – wasn’t the kind of place you would book your mother for a stay. McAlphin called himself her boyfriend, in the territorial way pimps do. His fierce, frequent beatings of her caused alarm among the emergency room staff, fears shared by local cops.

There was something different about this one. She’d smile sweetly, glancing downward sheepishly when she talked. The good vocabulary and the careful enunciation of her words were odd for a girl of that lifestyle. There was, too, a certain vulnerability about her. They tried to get her away from him. She tried, too.

But on July 10, 1991, McAlphin caught the fleeing Mercedes in the parking lot, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back to their motel room. This time, he didn’t beat her. Instead, he fired a single fatal gunshot to her head. Her family, of course, would have to be notified.

Cheryl Ann Wick – that was the name on her driver’s license, social security card and birth certificate. Using her birthplace as a starting point, officials located the Wick family in Minneapolis. A surprised and very much alive Cheryl Ann Wick hadn’t realized the contents of her stolen purse had been used for identity theft. And no, she didn’t recognize the girl in the pictures.

That girl now had a new name – El Dorado Jane Doe. Her description was posted: between 20 to 30 years old, 162 pounds, skin marked with scars mixed in with freckles and most notably, she was almost 6 feet tall. McAlphin got 15 years for her murder. While he was serving his sentence, Cathy Phillips was rising in the ranks of the El Dorado Police Department to the position of captain. She became the protector of a cold case file that told little about the life that came bearing a single suitcase. Nothing in the contents helped to identify her – not the pictures, the journal or the Bible listing family members sharing the last name “Stroud.” The clothes in the suitcase were, as Phillips sadly noted, “just rags.” And oddly among the items was an old evening gown. Clearly whatever money was made, this girl hadn’t benefitted from. Phillips worked the case until her retirement, which lasted all of one week. She was so attached to the Jane Doe case that all parties involved gave Phillips permission to take the file to her new position, as an investigator with the Union County Sheriff’s Department. Phillips wasn’t the only one holding on to the case. Other local cops and authorities couldn’t let go of Mercedes either. Even the coroner tried, while on his vacation, to locate the Stroud family. Night dispatchers scoured social media for clues. Persistent online crime sleuths found nothing more than their own frustration. Year after year, decade after decade, El Dorado Jane Doe remained “nobody’s child.”

On the web was another investigator who didn’t seem to settle into retirement any better than Phillips. Within law enforcement, Yolanda McClary draws immense respect. Almost 30 years with Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and an investigator on over 7,000 cases, McClary is renowned for her serious forensic skills. Publicly acknowledged as the real deal behind the character of Catherine Willows on long-running network television series, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” McClary works the front of the camera, too. Previously featured on the Oxygen network’s “Cold Justice” series, this year, McClary debuted her own Oxygen series, “The Jane Doe Murders.”

“Closing the Case,” McClary’s website, reflects another role she fills as a genetic detective. Recent advances in DNA technology, combined with traditional genealogy, are impressively accurate tools for targeting criminals and giving names to the unidentified. McClary wanted a shot at El Dorado Jane Doe. She made the call. El Dorado officials had tried everything within their power, but still had nothing. Their response to McClary? “Thank you, ma’am.”

El Dorado Jane Doe’s real name has now been returned to her – it is Kelly. In their findings revealed in May of this year, McClary’s team says Kelly was 23 years old when McAlphin took her life. Her maternal family has requested that her last name and actual birthdate remain private. The paternal side of her family has chosen privacy as well. Both families are prominent Virginia natives. The team traced Kelly’s biological father to two brothers, one of whom is deceased. The other man, who is either her father or her uncle, has refused to take the DNA test, as have others on that side of the family. Kelly never knew of him, and if he knew of her existence is uncertain. Another unanswered question was whether Kelly was conceived before or during her mother’s first marriage.

Did the man Kelly thought to be her biological father know that he wasn’t? Maybe, maybe not – but within three years, Kelly’s mother, Brenda, had another daughter and a pending divorce. Kelly’s exposure to violence came with her second stepfather, who for seven terrorizing years, spared neither his wife nor her daughters. A third stepfather committed suicide two months after that marriage, leaving Brenda with a large life insurance settlement.

She took it and ran to Virginia Beach, effectively abandoning her daughters to her sister’s care for almost two years. At this point, Kelly had no paternal parent and a “gone girl” mother – effectively leaving her as nobody’s child. When her girls hit their early teens, Brenda reclaimed them, taking them back to Virginia Beach with her. However, she wasn’t succumbing to maternal urges. To get money, Brenda entered her 13-year-old in a bikini contest. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come for Kelly.

Kelly’s sister quickly returned to her aunt. But Kelly stayed. There would be no more school; the 15-year-old’s education was of no use to Brenda. Kelly’s life would now start to unravel by her mother’s choices. With no money coming in now from family or husbands, Brenda and her cocaine habit increasingly became dependent on a series of men, crimes and her daughter’s paychecks.

When the law and the drug dealers began closing in, Brenda ran again, taking Kelly with her to Florida. Now the girl’s aliases began lining up like beads on a rosary, one coming right after the other: Cheryl Wicks; Shannon Wiley; Kelly Lee Karr; Cheryl Kaufman and more. The common thread was that all the aliases came with a legal age – necessary for Brenda to get her 16-year-old daughter into the more lucrative world of strip clubs.

The exact details of what happened to Kelly over the next few years emerge only in bits and pieces. “Flailing amid Texas, Florida and Virginia, it seems Kelly was just trying to survive,” Phillips says. Life was the men’s clubs, homeless shelters, broken-down motels and, briefly, her aunt’s home in Texas – her arrival with a drug problem of her own didn’t make it a permanent stay. Kelly’s subsequent rehab stay wasn’t a sure thing, but her mother’s dependency on her was. It was clear, as McClary notes on her website, that even though Kelly understood the toll her mother’s choices were taking on her own life, she still chose to be there for her. Kelly’s mother’s decisions continued to devour her daughter’s vitality. And in some ways, her mother wasn’t the worst of the evils she would face.

Kelly finally broke free from Brenda when the first of three “boyfriends” took control of her. The third one, McAlphin, found her at the Carousel Club, a Dallas strip club. From 1986 on, Kelly was working strip clubs in Little Rock and possibly Fayetteville as well. It’s believed that McAlphin, the El Dorado man, was the link to her presence in Arkansas, and had brought her to the local scene. Phillips says that by this point, like her mother before her Kelly was depending on men for everything she had. “She wasn’t working it on her own,” she notes. It was in early 1991 that McAlphin brought “Mercedes” to El Dorado. Why did Kelly call herself Mercedes? It was her mother’s favorite car. ************

It is easy to avert our eyes from these women and their lives. But every one of them has her own story, and it is all too often an ugly tale tainted by neglect and others’ greed.

“Sometimes they don’t choose that life; that life chooses them,” Phillips says. “Sometimes they’re just not strong enough to get out of it.”

Kelly, the sweet, shy, upper-class girl from Virginia is a testament to that. In many ways, she was then, and is still, nobody’s child. Yet in one small Arkansas town and across the internet, Kelly has lots of people who have adopted her in their hearts.