Decades-Old Questions Remain In West Alabama 'Screwdriver Murders'

BROOKWOOD, AL. (July 23, 1979) — A retiree living in Fairfield who'd grown up in Tuscaloosa County told investigators that he'd been out walking some "old familiar areas" near Brookwood about a hour before sundown that balmy Monday evening.

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Contemporaneous weather reports show it was an unseasonably wet July for Tuscaloosa County and "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer was in its second of three weeks atop the Billboard 100 as the Disco Era came to an unceremonious end.

A Dade County, Florida, jury handed down a guilty verdict for serial killer Ted Bundy that week after hearing the details of his heinous crimes during a 1978 rampage on the Florida State University campus and Ridley Scott's groundbreaking sci-fi thriller "Alien" had just been released in movie theaters days before.

But as that unassuming retiree plodded along a red-dirt logging road near the intersection of Crisstown Road and Alabama Highway 216 trying to get his steps in, he stumbled upon the badly decomposed body of a partially nude young Black woman.

An autopsy conducted over the next couple of days revealed several key pieces of information: The woman's cause of death; the fact she was between 20-25 years old; and that she had been dead anywhere from two to four weeks before her body was discovered.

There were also conflicting media reports about her attire in the days and weeks that followed that surely contributed to ill-informed speculation in a terrified community.

Indeed, while some reports that quoted Tuscaloosa County law enforcement said the only clothing identification that could be made was that the dead woman was wearing dark pants, others provided more detailed accounts. This included a few newspaper stories reporting that the young woman was wearing burgundy colored pants, with a yellow-and-white striped pullover shirt found near her body.

These contemporary news stories were likely where the International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons got most of its information for its online profile on the victim.

While Patch could not independently confirm it, the Center also says there were two pairs of women's underwear recovered from the scene, along with a Playtex-brand bra — size 34D — and no shoes.

A more modern account in the Tuscaloosa News in 2012 reported she was found wearing a Puma brand shirt, an onyx ring, a dinner ring and gold earrings.

Investigators at the time and Captain Jack Kennedy — the present commander of the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit — also believe that she wasn't the only victim brutally slain by her killer.

“We are thinking that it was a sharp instrument, such as a screwdriver,” Tuscaloosa County County Coroner J.B. Cunningham told reporters after the unidentified woman's body was found. “It was the same type of instrument that was used in the Birmingham case and the same type used on Sharon Williams, whose body was found almost just across the road from this one.”

When this reporter respectfully pressed Kennedy for any identifying visual aides of the victim for the sake of this research project and story, he said investigators only had a handful of aged Polaroid pictures of a decomposed body, understandably not fit for public viewing.

"The area that the body was found was in [the killer's] operating area, and there were things at the crime scene, including the way that the victim was killed, that are indicative of how his other victims were killed," Kennedy told Patch.

While it was not widely publicized, at least one report in the Birmingham News said the unidentified woman died of a stab or puncture wound to the right temple, before publishing law enforcement speculation that she was between 17 and 25 years of age — 5-foot-3 and weighing 110-115 pounds.

Despite Kennedy still giving the case attention decades later, what the medical examiners and Tuscaloosa County coroner at the time have all failed to determine is the young woman's identity.

Lt. Shirley Fields of the Tuscaloosa County Homicide Unit — the precursor of the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit — said in 1980 that the young woman was the first murder victim investigated by the homicide unit in the modern era to be buried without any positive identification after numerous attempts came up short.

Indeed, it's a mystery that persists through this very moment, has a close personal connection to this reporter and is one that Kennedy hopes will eventually see justice delivered for the victim's family ... wherever they might be.

Trail Of Death

JUNE 19, 1979 — Henry Crenshaw lived near McCalla's Lincoln Memorial Cemetery and told police he saw a tall Black man about 250 yards away at the edge of the cemetery about 4:30 p.m. as he was out taking a stroll.

Crenshaw also said he saw that same man standing near a camel-tan colored car, which sped away after the man got in and fired up the engine. He later testified he knew the man but didn't think a whole lot of it.

A short time later, Crenshaw went to the area where the man had been and saw “a lot of flies.”

After getting spooked by his intuition, he got a relative to return to the scene with him where they found two pools of blood on the ground, along with a shoe and a screwdriver with a red stripe on its handle.

Hours before Crenshaw's discovery, Shelby County resident Marilyn Copeland had been trying to make it in the big city as a waitress at a Birmingham restaurant.

She was beloved by coworkers, friends and family but not without her faults. Indeed, a lone witness recalls her hitchhiking through Birmingham on the way to Tuscaloosa on June 19, 1979.

By all accounts, hitching rides to and fro was a regular practice for the 21-year-old free spirit.

The Birmingham News reported she'd called her father the night before to tell him “she was happy she had just found a job and was making some money."

"She was sort of shy until you got to know her,” her sister Barbara Copeland told reporters. “She just wanted to be independent. She went to Birmingham a couple of months ago with a friend. She lived with this family. I don’t know their name. She had worked at Hardee’s in Selma and worked in Mobile at a small business while living with her sister."

Her brother also described her as "troubled" in an interview with the Selma Times Journal.

He went on to tell the local newspaper that she had been legally separated from her husband and was "trying to find herself."

A woman acquainted with Copeland later testified at trial that she gave Copeland a ride to the Interstate 459 off-ramp in Hoover near Riverchase and let her out of the car around 3 p.m. ... the last time she was seen alive.

The Birmingham Police Department said at the time they believed she was going to visit her boyfriend in Tuscaloosa, but by all indications, she never made it and her unnamed boyfriend was never named as a suspect.

The next morning, her partially nude body — clad only in a multicolored T-shirt — was found laying on its side next to a concrete ramp in the third story of the parking deck of the Birmingham Board of Education building at 2015 Park Place.

She was found by a school board auditor who'd spotted the grisly scene as he arrived for work in his family van sometime between 7:40 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. — depending on whose testimony one chooses to believe. Her body was dirty with blood, grass and dirt.

“I knew right away it was the body of a dead girl,” the man said under oath.

A medical examiner eventually determined that Copeland had been stabbed 11 times and suffered multiple "blunt injuries to the head and neck."

He also testified a flat-tipped screwdriver could have been used as the murder weapon when pointing out what appeared to be a fatal injury to her skull.

Copeland's death would prove to be the first brutal killing of a young woman that investigators across two counties had to make sense of over that bloody summer.

JULY 5, 1979 — That week in July proved to be the hottest stretch of the year for Tuscaloosa County, with temperature gauges reaching 102 degrees on July 6.

It would also be a sweltering and emotionally taxing month for local homicide investigators.

The afternoon of July 5, a father and son were out searching for a lost dog in the area of Highway 216, about five miles north of east Brookwood.

After the pair made their way down an old logging road, approximately 500 yards from Highway 216, they found the body of 20-year-old Sharon Annette Williams — later determined to be a resident of Berkley Terrace in Bessemer.

It was believed she had been killed the same day she was found, likely between 9 a.m. and noon, according to legendary Tuscaloosa County homicide investigator Warren Miller.

The now-defunct Birmingham Post-Herald erroneously reported in a news brief in the paper the next day that an autopsy revealed Williams "died of gunshot wounds."

However, news reports a week or so later saw police reveal she had died from a single stab or puncture wound behind the left ear, possibly from a screwdriver.

Williams was fully clothed when her body was found and there was no other evidence recovered at the scene that would have given investigators insight into the killer.

A Black woman, Williams also presented a different racial victim profile than Copeland but investigators had yet to publicly connect the similarities with the slain woman found in that downtown Birmingham parking deck — most notably the cause of death and the fact that both women had been sexually assaulted.

It would take yet another killing for investigators to begin piecing things together.

Like Copeland, Williams' identity was also determined almost immediately after her body was found, with her family reporting her missing after last seeing her in the area of her home on Berkley Terrace.

But one more young woman in the prime of her life would have to die at the hands of a real-life monster before details started to make sense to investigators.

THE SUSPECT

Anthony Tyrone Washington, by all accounts, lived a kind of transient existence and died in prison sometime after his arrest at a Greyhound bus depot in El Paso, Texas, on July 16, 1979 — less than two weeks after the body of an unidentified Black woman was found on a logging road in Brookwood just a quarter of a mile from where Sharon Williams' body was discovered days earlier.

A picture published in the July 19, 1979 edition of the Birmingham News showed Washington in handcuffs and said he was also going to be questioned in the May 19, 1979, death of 18-year-old Kelly Ann Ware, whose nude body was found near White Springs Drive.

Ware was last seen alive the week before at Patrick’s Lodge off of the Bessemer Super Highway, less than a quarter-mile from her residence. Her nude body was found by a Hueytown police officer at a Jefferson County maintenance garage and Washington was later cleared as a suspect.

But when Washington's carrying case was inventoried by police following his arrest, one of the items recovered was a flat-head screwdriver that was "eight to 10 inches long."

The simple tool was distinguished by a red stripe — like the one found in that McCalla cemetery by Henry Crenshaw.

Referred to in contemporary news coverage as a resident of McCalla and in others as a Tuscaloosa County native, Washington would later be convicted of murder in the killings of Marilyn Copeland and Sharon Williams, and given life sentences without the possibility of parole.

But while the killings stopped that summer with Washington's arrest, the break in the case still left scores of questions in its wake.

Were there other victims?

What were his motives?

Why these women?

Who was that second woman found in Brookwood?

It's worth noting that he was never tried for murder in the case of the unidentified woman also found in Brookwood as investigators grasped at air to determine her identity.

Mike Cornwell was a young defense attorney in the Tuscaloosa County Public Defender's Office and represented Washington at trial for Williams' murder.

In an interview with Patch in the present day, he reflected back on the issues his client brought to the courtroom, most notably his silence.

"I had never experienced anything like it before or after with any defendant," Cornwell told this reporter. "Nor do I know any attorney who ever has. The guy never spoke a word. And the doctors really underscored that."

Indeed, newspaper reports also pointed out Washington's unwillingness to speak on his own behalf when he was sent to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa for a mental evaluation that ultimately proved him competent to stand trial.

"I made comments to the judge and on the record about how I'd had no conversation with my client or any information from him because he never spoke a word to me," Cornwell recalled. "I don’t think it was because he had a quiet nature that he never spoke. For whatever reason, he determined that that was what he was going to do. And he did it. And, you know, that’s hard to do when you're accused of murder."

In an interesting courtroom aside that came two weeks after his conviction of Sharon Williams murder in Tuscaloosa County, Washington was put on trial in Jefferson County for the murder of Marilyn Copeland when he tried to walk out of a court room and tossed a stale biscuit on his defense attorney’s table.

The Birmingham News reported that Washington attempted to walk out of Circuit Court Judge Charles Crowder’s court as defense attorney Al Hultquist was about to move that the trial be delayed because Washington had refused to talk to him.

It was at that moment that Washington stood up and started to walk toward the door of the courtroom.

The Birmingham News reported that the bailiff stepped between Washington and the door, and put a hand on Washington’s arm, before the accused slapped at the bailiff's hand without saying a word.

Birmingham Police Department Sgt. C.M. Melton rushed Washington during the exchange, forcefully escorted him back to his seat and pushed him down into the chair.

“You can listen to me if you want to,” Judge Crowder told Washington, before the accused killer stood up again and threw a biscuit from his pocket to the table.

Washington was silent for the duration of the hearing but reporters noted he shook visibly both before and after he stood up.

Despite pleading "not guilty" to the charges in the two murder cases he was tried for, evidence piled up quickly against Washington, who did little, if anything, to help his defense.

To this end, Henry Crenshaw — the McCalla man who claimed he saw Washington get into his car at a cemetery the day before Copeland's body was found — testified that at about 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m., he saw "a big tall man" who weighed "about 200 pounds" walk around the car.

Court records show that Crenshaw testified he saw the vehicle "running real fast on that rough road" out of the cemetery, before explaining that it "was an old abandoned road; had ruts in it some places almost knee-deep."

Investigators later stated their belief that Washington picked up Copeland on the interstate as she was hitchhiking. It was then speculated that he took her to the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in McCalla, where he sexually assaulted and murdered her with a flathead screwdriver before discarding the murder weapon in the graveyard and dumping Copeland's body in a mostly vacant parking deck in downtown Birmingham sometime in the overnight or early morning hours.

It should come as little surprise that the murder of Copeland — a white woman — received the most extensive media coverage, while little else was written about the other two murders other than testimony at trial.

Still, a piece of incriminating evidence came in the testimony of Washington's ex-wife during the murder trial for Sharon Williams in May 1981.

Washington's ex-wife took the stand and told the jury that the day Williams' body was found on a logging road in Brookwood, Washington said he was calling her from Detroit to say that the police were looking for him because "he was in trouble about an ex-girlfriend named Sharon, something about a murder case."

"I didn't make any sense out of it," she said.

It was also mentioned during one of Washington's later appeals that he left his tan Chevrolet Nova — the same car spotted by Crenshaw in McCalla the day Copeland was murdered — with his aunt in McCalla before he left for Detroit.

Blood stains and DNA evidence was later found in the trunk of the car that connected him with the murder of Marilyn Copeland.

Other testimony also pointed the finger squarely at Washington, including that of Linda Faye Coleman, who had worked with Washington at the Omelet Shoppe in Bessemer.

Coleman told the jury Washington had taken her home from work on more than one occasion and had become angry with her when she refused to "go out with him."

What's more, she testified that around 7 p.m. on the day Copeland's body was found, Washington came to the eatery and she asked him if she could borrow a screwdriver "to tighten the screws on the ice bin."

Washington told her she could borrow one and "went out to his car to get it" but when she attempted to follow him, "he looked up, and he saw me. And he met me and pushed me ... back to the door where, you know, I guess, it was something he didn't want me to see. And he closed the trunk."

She then described the screwdriver as being long with a red handle, much like the one found by Crenshaw in the cemetery in McCalla, which could be indicative of multiple screwdrivers belonging to the same set.

Coleman also testified that she had taken a trip to New Orleans after this incident and received a phone call from Washington on June 23.

"It sounded like he was upset, like he was crying," she told the jury. "He needed some money because he needed to leave town because he had killed somebody. He said 'it was a woman, and I stabbed her.'"

Washington was later pinched for witness intimidation after Coleman accused him of calling to threaten her before she took the stand.

The evidence was there, the jury believed it, but questions remained even after Washington received his life sentence.

The Loose End

JULY 3, 2012 — A story published in the Tuscaloosa News reported that 13 people attended the funeral at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church’s cemetery on Old Greensboro Road on Dec. 29, 1981, for an unidentified victim found in Brookwood two years before.

The newspaper cited past media coverage, mentioning gravediggers who dropped their shovels and acted as pallbearers, along with the Tuscaloosa County sheriff and two employees of a funeral home sitting in the seats normally reserved for family.

“We know that there’s a family somewhere that is missing a daughter,” Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit commander Captain Loyd Baker told the newspaper. “We want to be able to contact that family and hopefully give them some closure, to let them know where she is and how she died.”

Few investigators in Alabama likely have a comparable case load to Captain Jack Kennedy, commander of the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit — the metro task force that investigates murders, homicides, unnatural deaths and sexual assaults across Tuscaloosa County.

Despite the never-ending job of solving violent crimes as they happen, Kennedy also spends much of his energy and resources following up on numerous cold cases that still warrant a dedicated focus.

Indeed, under Kennedy's leadership and thanks to new-age investigative techniques, investigators were able to close the book in 2023 on the case of a serial rapist who was suspected of sexually assaulting two women in the Tuscaloosa area in 1990 and 2001, as Patch previously reported.

Even last month, the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit scored a DNA match that led to an arrest in a 15-year-old sexual assault case.

ALSO READ: Man Indicted For Murder In 1996 Tuscaloosa Cold Case

Kennedy is a staunch believer in the utility offered by burgeoning methods involving genealogical DNA and hasn't given up hope that it will one day be able to help identify the woman found on that secluded logging road in Brookwood in the summer of 1979.

"In 2012, your Dad and [other investigators] exhumed her remains," Kennedy told me, reminding this reporter of his own father's involvement in the investigation when he held the position Kennedy currently occupies. "They sent it to the [Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas Health Science Center] and they were able to get some DNA from it. So that’s where it’s at."

Dale Phillips, the newly-sworn mayor of Northport and the former commander of the Violent Crimes Unit, put in countless hours of work on many of the cold cases still being investigated by Kennedy and others. It's something we talk about every single time we get together but this case was one I stumbled upon almost by accident when looking for a long-form research project.

And while, ethically, I'm not too keen on interviewing my Dad as an official source, he is objectively one of the few still around with intimate knowledge of the case and recalled in a brief conversation how he and others combed the periphery of a secluded West Alabama church cemetery on a tip that it was where the unidentified woman was buried so many years ago.

"We had an old man who had been living in that community his whole life who said he remembered when she was buried there," he told me. "He walked us out in the weeds, it was all overgrown, pointed down and told us that's where she was buried and he was right."

As seen in other cases covered by this reporter, Kennedy has put in serious work following up on any and all leads while still working on the daily grind of violent crime. I even apologized for bothering him at one crime scene last month after my email earlier in the day for this very feature story.

"Since then, I've gotten a nonprofit organization, along with a federal agency, and they have taken that DNA and done genealogical work as well on her," Kennedy told me. "However, we don't have any real actionable leads to her identity still. If we could get her identified, then most likely, if [Washington] was to be alive, we would be able to get an indictment. But he’s not. More importantly, though, we might be able to contact some family members out there and let them know."

The problem is similar to another cold case being investigated by Kennedy that recently made headlines with the hopes that emerging technology might provide the spark needed to heat up leads.

As Patch reported in March 2023, new computerized facial images were published of an unidentified woman who was found dead in the Fosters area of Tuscaloosa County on the Black Warrior River in April 1982 — a few years after Washington was taken into custody for the murders he is suspected of committing.

"That's the same problem or same issue with the lady at the river," Kennedy lamented. "We don’t even know who she is. In that case, we don't have genealogical DNA at present. We have almost no DNA on her. But on this victim here from Brookwood, we do have it. Unfortunately, it has yet to result in any leads."

As Patch reported about the unsolved murder of University of Alabama librarian Kate Ragsdale, there are serious limits to how much police can accomplish with the current genealogical and DNA databases at their disposal.

Like with the DNA evidence in the Ragsdale case, Kennedy once again pointed out that popular platforms like Ancestry and 23andMe are barred by their terms of service from becoming readily accessible to law enforcement looking for leads on cold or active cases.

Leads may be scant and it could be easy for many to give up hope, but as seen with numerous other cases closed just in the last few years, a major break in identifying the young woman found on that Brookwood logging road in the summer of 1979 could come at any time.

"There's only a limited amount of family tree DNA sites where people have opted in to allow law enforcement, so [the chance of a hit is] very small," Kennedy said. "But that is still pending, so any day a person could opt in on one of those two websites, or something changes in the law or these other websites, so who knows? But right now, any day, somebody could opt in, like a close relative and we would get notified."

Those with any information into this case or any of the other cold cases mentioned in this story are asked to contact the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff’s Office at (205) 752-0616 or the Violent Crimes Unit at (205) 464-8690.

Have a news tip or suggestion on how I can improve Tuscaloosa Patch? Maybe you're interested in having your business become one of the latest sponsors for Tuscaloosa Patch? Email all inquiries to me at ryan.phillips@patch.com.