Stephen Pearson has been lacking for practically 25 years, vanishing at some point after he informed a neighborhood postmaster he had mistakenly signed for a bundle containing 10-15 kilos of marijuana and delivered it to a neighbor’s home.
Ten days later, his station wagon was discovered deserted in a wooded space in a scene that investigators believed was staged. Authorities targeted on two neighbors suspected of dealing giant portions of marijuana, however one refused to cooperate, and one other took a polygraph that got here again inconclusive. The case has lengthy gone chilly.
“It’s the opinion of (Mobile County) Sheriff (Paul) Burch and myself that a homicide has been committed,” mentioned Cell County Commissioner Randell Dueitt, a former investigator with the Sheriff’s Division. “You have to keep in mind, a person is still at large. If you’re capable of committing one homicide, I’m under the impression you are capable of committing another.”
On Monday, the fee authorised $3,750 for a billboard in Grand Bay, the place Pearson, then 53, first went lacking on Dec. 28, 2000. It will likely be displayed for a 12 months in hopes of producing new leads.
Billboard partnership
The challenge marks the primary partnership between Cell-based nonprofit Alabama Chilly Case Advocacy and a authorities physique. The Sheriff’s Division, which has lengthy investigated the case as a murder, additionally helps the trouble.
“This is the first time we’ve had someone actually sponsor a billboard for as long as we need it,” mentioned Keri New, co-founder and president of Alabama Chilly Case Advocacy, which launched on social media in 2022 and gained nonprofit standing in 2023.
Cell County Fee Randall Dueitt on the Monday, Feb. 24, 2025, fee assembly at Authorities Plaza in downtown Cell, Ala.John Sharp
“We hope this is the first of many,” Dueitt added. “Anytime you can put new eyes on a case, you never know. No matter how big or small, if you have information, please call the sheriff’s office.”
New hopes the billboard marketing campaign will generate leads within the Pearson case and encourage comparable efforts throughout Alabama.
The group, which operates on a shoestring funds, had relied solely on digital billboard commercial. The digital commercial was donated to the advocacy group, and people earlier efforts included alerts that lasted for under two weeks. A lot of the billboards had been nowhere close to the scene of the unique crime.
The Pearson billboard will likely be positioned just a few miles from the place he went lacking.
“We believe that any effort to keep cold cases in the public eye is valuable and may generate new leads,” Burch mentioned, expressing appreciation for the fee’s monetary assist. “The Mobile County Sheriff’s Office will continue to work diligently to bring closure to the Pearson family and all families of cold case victims.”
Future laws
The billboard effort is barely the start of what the chilly case group is hoping to do. Chief amongst their priorities is addressing a discrepancy between knowledge stored inside a lacking individuals database by the Alabama Regulation Enforcement Company (ALEA) versus these maintained by the federal authorities.
New mentioned the distinction is about 70 instances – 230 instances within the state knowledge in comparison with 292 Alabama instances tracked by the FBI.
A change.org petition, signed by 3,121 folks, can be calling for opinions of chilly instances each 4 years by a newly established Impartial Evaluation Board. The board will then be charged with figuring out whether or not the case needs to be reinvestigated, and by whom.
New mentioned that laws shouldn’t be prone to floor this spring. However she mentioned her group is teaming with different teams just like the non-profit Victims of Crime and Leniency (VOCAL) and CrimeStoppers, to assist craft laws that ensures chilly instances are reviewed frequently in Alabama.
“Right now,” mentioned New. “They are not.”
The state legislative concerns come after President Joe Biden, in 2022, signed a bipartisan chilly case investigation invoice that establishes a requirement for federal legislation enforcement businesses to assessment unsolved homicide instances.
The federal Murder Victims’ Households Rights Act provides relations of chilly case victims a solution to formally request federal investigators assessment their case with the most recent obtainable expertise, prohibits earlier investigators from main renewed probes, and instructs businesses to maintain households up to date on the case.
The legislation’s emergence comes amid some staggering statistics of over 250,000 unsolved homicide instances within the U.S., a quantity that will increase by 6,000 yearly. Statistics present 4 in 10 homicide victims’ households don’t obtain closure of their family members’ instances.
New clarified that the federal legislation solely applies to federal homicides.
“We took that and used it as a guidepost to tailor something that includes suspicious death cases and homicides (investigated by Alabama state and local agencies),” New mentioned.
Some states are taking motion. In 2023, Georgia lawmakers handed the Coleman-Baker Act, modeled after the federal legislation.
The Georgia state legislation provides crime victims’ households the power to take a look at case recordsdata if six years have handed, and forces lawmakers to reinvestigate a case if households name for it. It additionally offered for $5.4 million to arrange a unit devoted towards investigating cold-case homicides inside the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
In Illinois, lawmakers pitched the Murder Victims’ Households’ Rights Act in 2023. That invoice, which didn’t go by the Legislature, would have offered households the choice of a assessment of first- or second-degree homicide instances that had not been resolved after three years
