Bossier Doe, Carol Ann Cole, Cold Case No. 81-018329

Carol Ann Cole

"Once was lost but now i'm found."

She was such beautiful, happy and carefree child and as a teen, she had a lot of aspirations and dreams. Carol brought smiles to anyone who was around her. She was caring, ambitious, rambunctious and loving.

She was born on November 5th, 1963 in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Daniel and Sue Cole. Carol and her sister Linda "Jeanie" Phelps lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, primarily under the care of their grandmother, Emily, after their mother and father divorced. 

Carol and Jeanie were best friends. The last time Jeanie saw her sister was in 1979, when 15-year-old Carol moved away with Sue Cole to Austin, Texas. Jeanie stayed behind to live with her grandmother. Carol would call her sister everyday.

Carol and her mother had a good relationship until she started acting out and skipping school. She start hanging around with the wrong people and the girl upstairs, her name was Diane. 

"They were sneaking out of the house and running around with guys." Sue said. 

In May of 1980, Carol ended up in a girl's home run by the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, also called PDAP, on West 23rd St., in Austin. Sue would come to visit her. Carol still would call and write her sister and family religiously. At the end of every phone call, she would say, "I love you so much."

Then one day in October 1980, Carol bolted from the rehab and turned up 375 miles away in Shreveport, Louisiana. Carol, now 16, called her mom from there. Carol had told her mom she was in Louisiana living with some people. "Those people" were the Chesson family.

Carol was hitch hiking when she was picked up by the Chesson family after they had just made a trip to a metal scrap yard on McNeil Avenue. Carol stayed with the Chesson family for about a week. Frances remembers Carol being there and then suddenly disappearing.

"I went to school, I remember her being there, I went to school and came home and she was gone, and I never asked Where'd she go?, if she's coming back, I never asked any questions." said Frances.

The phone calls and letters from Carol stopped coming.

"We immediately knew something was wrong. It was heartbreaking,"  Carol's Aunt Tamme Cole said.

Carol's grandmother called the Chesson residence where she was informed that her granddaughter had departed to attend a party but she had never returned. 

Jeanie filed a missing person's report for Carol, although she suspected foul play and the report was also entered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, abbreviated as NAMUS.

Frances never asked questions because her dad, John Chesson, was mean and violent with anger management problems and a habit of beating his kids.

"He used to hold knives to my throat, puncture me with them, beat me, throw me in the closets, feed me off the floor, throw me naked outside," said Frances.

One morning, some say in December 1980 and some say in January 1981, Chesson told his kids they were all going hunting, even 13-year-old Frances who had never been invited before. He told Frances and her brother to walk down a particular path on a logging trail into the brush.

"I thought that was kind of peculiar, actually thought the man was bringing me out there to get rid of me, to kill me -- this is the type of person he was to me, this is how he treated me," said Frances. "So we started walking and I started getting this gut feeling, this scared feeling and I'm looking back and looking at the truck, noticing he never leaves the truck, never walks too far from the truck, is still in front of the truck on the road."

Frances and her brother came across a badly decomposed female body The body had been stabbed 9 times in her back and chest. The victim was believed to have been white with possible Native American ancestry and was murdered approximately four to seven weeks before her body was located. She was around five feet five to five feet six inches tall and weighed between 125 and 140 pounds. The victim's hair color was determined to have been blond, straight and shoulder-length with unknown eye color.

She used to wear braces and may have removed the brackets from her teeth herself or by someone not affiliated with an orthodontic company. She wore sneakers with with the names "Michael Brisco", "David", "Resha", and "D. Davies" written on them. She had blond hair. She wore jeans, a white, long-sleeved shirt with pink, yellow and blue stripes, a beige sweater with a hood, white socks with blue and yellow streaks, white boxer briefs, a white bra and a leather belt with a buckle reading "Buffalo Nickel", with a buffalo design. None of the names on the clothing amounted to meaningful leads, although they were speculated to have belonged to companions of the deceased girl. The victim had also painted her fingernails prior to her murder. The shoes were later determined to have been size seven. A knife found in the soil near her remains is thought to have been the murder weapon. 

Investigators had difficulties with establishing the identity of the victim, as there were no means of identification present at the scene and there were no known witnesses.

A reconstruction of what she might have looked like was made. From that moment on, the remains were refereed to as "Bossier Doe," after Louisiana's Bossier Parish, where she was found.

Years later, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confesses to killing Bossier Doe and another woman in the early 1980's.  He was not considered to be credible since was in Florida when Bossier Doe was killed. He died of a heart attack in 2001.

Carol's grandmother spent years trying to find her until she died in 2000, but Jeanie kept tirelessly searching for her sister. Jeanie used Facebook as well as Craigslist to garner awareness and information for the case.

Most of the evidence recovered from the scene of the Bossier Doe's murder was destroyed due to a fire in 2005 at the facility in which they were stored. However, DNA was eventually extracted from the victim's teeth that would be used to compare against missing persons.

Eventually a new artist completely remade the composite of what Bossier Doe might look like. Inspired by the new sketch, Bossier Parish Sheriff's Lt. Shannon Mack started a Facebook page calling it "Bossier Doe". 

"I was talking to our crime scene guys and I said 'What if we just give her a Facebook page like she's a real person, not create a page and "like" it,'" said Mack. "But you have to 'friend request' her and she talks, just like, 'Hey, this is everything about me, can you guys help out.' I think I did that Friday afternoon, last-ditch effort out of desperation really."

Within days after the creation of the Facebook profile, over five hundred individuals had "friended" the "Bossier Doe" account, which increased to well over one thousand after less than a week.

Fast forward to February 6th, 2015. 911 operator, Linda Erickson, was home sick with bronchitis. She saw the Facebook page with Bossier Doe's image. Later she came across a Craigslist ad with a photo of Carol. It was a Craigslist ad that Patty Thorington, a friend of Carol's sister, had placed in an effort to find any information on the missing girl's whereabouts. 

"I thought, 'I've seen that jawline before,' I reread it, thought 'This is same time frame as what I read just a few hours ago, so I went to Facebook, and I went back to the Bossier Doe picture," said Linda, the operator.

Linda notified detectives and by February 13th, someone at the Sheriff's Office emailed her regarding their Bossier Doe case. Investigators then got DNA from Carol's mom and dad and rushed it to a lab. After tests were completed, it was announced that Carol and "Bossier Doe" were indeed the same person.

"It feels good that she is found. We don't have to wonder in anymore. She is in Heaven," Jeanie said.

The family was struggling to pay the means to transport Carol's body and for a headstone. A GoFundMe account was then created and Carol was later buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Comstock Township, Michigan on June 18, 2015 after a funeral service. Before Carol was buried, Jeannie wrote a note on a small piece of paper and placed it in a box that contained the urn. 

It read: "I love you sister. I haven't forgotten you and never will."

Frances, eventually ran away from home, was on Facebook and saw the revelation of the identity of the Bossier Doe. 

"It was like a nightmare. I was just going backwards, I could hear her talking, I could feel her touch on my hand," said Frances.

Frances told officers that she suspects her father is responsible for the Carol's death. 

"My dad's in prison for murder, and after looking back, going through this and having to relive this, I believe and I strongly believed before anything prior to him going to prison, I strongly believe that he had gotten rid of her," said Frances. "I strongly believe my dad killed Carol Ann before he had done anything to go to the prison, this murder that he had committed." 

When investigators had first came around all those years ago, Mr. Chesson would make Frances stay in her room and she was not allowed to speak with anyone about Carol.

"He can't tell me to shut up anymore. I'm sorry but he can't keep me quiet anymore," said Frances.

In 2002, Mr. Chesson was found guilty of slitting the throat of  74-year-old Lucy Thibodeaux in 1997. He was was apparently upset after his wife left him and was determined to find her. Mr. Chesson drove to the home of his wife's former mother-in-law and close friend, Lucy Thibodeaux, but Thibodeaux wouldn't lead him to Agnes. Mr. Chesson became enraged, left and then returned and killed Thibodeaux. During his trial, Mr. Chesson blamed his own daughters for the murder.

In 2008, Frances' brother, a witness in finding the body, committed suicide.

Investigators say with the details his daughter provided, there could be enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury for a murder charge against Mr. Chesson.

For now, Carol Ann Cole's murder is unsolved.