Death Row Confession - The Missing Part II
- Jun 23
- 9 min read
EPISODE 24
The Girl in the Cornfield: How a Sister's Refusal Gave Tammy Jo Her Name Back
For thirty-three years, she was nobody.
A beautiful teenage girl, sixteen years old, found shot dead in a cornfield just off Route 20 in Livingston County, New York.
She had been shot twice — once above the right eye, once in the back, as though she had tried to run. She was fully clothed, but she carried nothing that could tell anyone who she was. No purse. No licence. No name. The man who killed her had made sure of that.
So they buried her as Caledonian Jane Doe after the small farming community near where she was found. And there she stayed — unclaimed, unnamed, unmourned by the people who loved her — for more than three decades. Because more than a thousand miles away, in Florida, a family believed she had simply run away and built a better life somewhere far from home. They had no reason to think otherwise. That was the cruellest trick of all.
This is the story of how that silence was finally broken. And it begins, as so much of this case does, with a sister who refused to give up.
A girl with a zest for life
Tammy Jo Alexander was, by every account, the bright spark of a difficult household.
Her older sister Pamela describes her as adventurous, always smiling, "generally full of happiness." She had a happy-go-lucky personality and a nickname — Stink Pot — that the family still laughs about today.
The two girls grew up in Brooksville, Florida, in a home Pamela describes with painful honesty: a mother who struggled with undiagnosed mental health problems and prescription drugs, and whose pain too often came out as anger, yelling, and worse.
The girls ran away to escape it. Pamela stayed local. Tammy Jo went further — all the way to California once — because she wanted, more than anything, to see the world. She loved the sun. She loved the water. And she dreamed, like so many sixteen-year-olds, of becoming a model. Of being looked at and told she was beautiful. Of a life that looked nothing like the one she was running from.
It is a dream that should have carried her somewhere wonderful. Instead, we believe, it was used to lure her to her death.
Found a world away
The first thing that didn't make sense was the geography.
Tammy Jo was a Florida girl through and through. She loved the warmth. So when her body turned up in a New York cornfield in November 1979 — cold, grey, the wrong end of the country — it stopped investigators in their tracks. As the detective now working the case told us, you don't get a suntan in Western New York in November. Whoever this girl was, she wasn't from here.
That tan, in the end, was one of the few clues they had. It told them she had come from somewhere far warmer. But it would take another thirty-three years, and the arrival of DNA technology that simply didn't exist in 1979, before anyone could put a name to her.
When the call finally came, it came in the middle of the night. A detective told Pamela that the Caledonia Jane Doe was her little sister, Tammy. She had been in denial for so long — certain that no Jane Doe could possibly be her — that the news landed like a physical blow. They took her to the place where Tammy Jo had died. A cornfield, 1,200 miles from home.
The questions a sister can't put down
Pamela has her own theory about the night her sister died, and it is heartbreaking in its clarity.
Tammy Jo was shot at point-blank range to the head. To Pamela, that means she let her killer get close — that she trusted him, or at least felt safe enough not to run. And then, she says, after he had already killed her, he shot her again, between the shoulder blades.
"You've already killed her," Pamela says. "Why do that? It's personal anger. That's my take."
Whether that anger was personal or the cold signature of a practised killer is exactly what this episode sets out to explore. Because the more we learned about Tammy Jo — the runaway, the dreamer, the Florida girl found at the far end of America's most notorious highway — the more one name kept rising to the surface.
The shadow of Christopher Wilder
Christopher Wilder was an Australian-born racing driver and businessman who, in 1984, went on one of the most infamous killing sprees in American history. He preyed on young, beautiful, often vulnerable women by posing as a photographer, dangling the promise of a modelling career, and luring them away.
A pretty blonde sixteen-year-old. A dream of modelling. A tough home she was desperate to escape. A body found 1,200 miles away at the end of Interstate 95 — the very road Wilder loved to drive. To the team, it didn't just whisper of Wilder. It shouted.
And then there was the jacket. When Tammy Jo was found, she was wearing an oversized, man-sized, bright red Auto Sports racing jacket with black stripes down the arms — clearly not bought for her. It was exactly the kind of jacket Christopher Wilder was known to wear.
Investigators later found similar apparel during a search of his property in Florida. It is, as the detective on the case calls it, a lead — though one tragically compromised by the fact that the jacket was handled decades before anyone understood how to preserve DNA.
There was an eyewitness, too: a waitress who saw Tammy Jo in a diner the night before she died, in the company of a man whose description is uncomfortably close to Wilder's — and who was driving a car the same make and colour as one Wilder was trying to sell at the time.
The confession that started it all
But this episode opens somewhere darker still: on death row.
Decades ago, after Wilder was already dead, a prisoner in San Quentin told the FBI an extraordinary thing. He said that Christopher Wilder, over drinks one night, had confessed to killing eleven women — before his 1984 rampage had even begun.
That prisoner was Charles Edward McDowell, a convicted murderer with his own appalling history. As we discovered, McDowell wasn't a stranger to Wilder. He worked on Wilder's racing team — for three years, and worked for him in his construction company. The two men shared a childhood of brutal paternal abuse, a hatred of authority, and, chillingly, a near-identical violent sexual fantasy. If anyone on earth might have been trusted with such a confession, it was him.
The FBI made one tentative approach and never followed up. The connection between the two men — the depth of it — was never fully understood. Until now.
What makes Tammy Jo's story land so hard is not just the horror of how she died, or the four decades it took to even begin asking the right questions. It is Pamela.
A sister who never believed the easy story that Tammy Jo had simply moved on. A sister who gave her DNA, who travelled to the cornfield, who sat with us and conjured her little sister back to life — smiling, happy, full of that zest she never lost.
"It's extremely important for her to have her name now," Pamela told us, "and not be forgotten."
She has her name back. Now she deserves the truth. And we don't intend to stop until she has it.
If you knew Tammy Jo Alexander, or have any information about her death, the Livingston County Sheriff's Office is still actively investigating. You can reach Investigator James Merrick on 585-243-7100.
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Ten Threads, One Name: The Links Between Christopher Wilder and Tammy Jo Alexander
For more than forty years, the murder of sixteen-year-old Tammy Jo Alexander sat unsolved — and, for most of that time, unidentified. But as Catching Evil pulled at the threads of this cold case, a pattern emerged that points insistently toward one man: Christopher Wilder.
Here are the connections we've uncovered.
1. Taken in Florida, killed in New York. Like Shari Lynne Ball before her, Tammy Jo was a Florida girl found murdered 1,200 miles away in New York State. Two near-identical journeys to death, at opposite ends of Interstate 95 — the highway Wilder was known to drive obsessively.
2. She was Wilder's "type." Tammy Jo matched the profile of Wilder's victims with disturbing precision: young, blonde, slim, similar in height and build to the women he is known to have targeted.
3. The murder scene. Shari Lynne Ball's body was found just 30 miles from where Tammy Jo was discovered, four years apart. This was country Wilder knew.
4. The bait: a modelling dream. Tammy Jo told friends she wanted to be a model — precisely the ambition Wilder exploited in victim after victim, posing as a photographer or agency scout.
5. The beauty pageant. The team discovered that a beauty pageant was being held in the area on the very day Tammy Jo died — just as one was held near where Shari Lynne Ball was murdered. We believe Wilder used these events as hunting grounds.
6. A vulnerable target. Tammy Jo came from a deeply troubled home and was a repeat runaway — exactly the kind of isolated, vulnerable young woman Wilder sought out and could most easily manipulate.
7. The red racing jacket. Tammy Jo's body was found in an oversized, man-sized Auto Sports racing jacket — red with black stripes — a make and style Wilder favoured, and similar to apparel found during the search of his Florida property.
8. The eyewitness. A waitress — the last person to see Tammy Jo alive — saw her in a diner with a man matching Wilder's description. Taking young women to roadside diners was a documented part of his pattern.
9. The car. That same eyewitness described a vehicle of the exact make and colour as a car Wilder's father had left him to sell — a car we've traced through Wilder's own classified ads.
10. The St. Petersburg condo. Tammy Jo's boyfriend recalled dropping her at a condo in St. Petersburg, Florida. Through his classified listings, Wilder can be linked to a condo building in that very area.
And two more
The murderous "tell." Wilder was a prolific user of newspaper classifieds — except when he was killing, when his ad activity fell silent. Both Tammy Jo and Shari Lynne Ball were murdered during one of those telling pauses.
The bullet. Tammy Jo was killed with a .357 calibre weapon — the same calibre used to murder another of Wilder's suspected victims, known only as Ellery Jane Doe.
No single thread proves a case. But together, they weave a picture difficult to look away from — and a name the team believes the authorities should never have let slip through their fingers.
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Help Us to Keep Investigating
Contact us here if you know something about Christopher Wilder. If you had an encounter with him, are you are a friend or a family member of someone who never made it home, we want to hear your story:
Email: info@catchingevil.com
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Catching Evil is committed to making a meaningful impact in the lives of those affected by violent crime, particularly in light of the chilling legacy of serial killer Christopher Wilder, who left behind a still-growing number of victims. In our pledge to honour these individuals and support their families, we donate to not-for-profit groups in both America and Australia.
Survivors of Homicide Inc, based in Connecticut, provides assistance to anyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime.
All services are offered to members free of charge, including one-on-one counselling, support groups, court support throughout the judicial process and personal advocacy in working with law enforcement and other community agencies.
It was founded in 1983, just before Christopher Wilder went on his rampage, by a group of families trying to cope with the murder of a loved one that shattered their lives.
When you donate to Yesterday Today Tomorrow Women, you are investing in the empowerment of women across generations. This Florida based nonprofit was founded by Kris Conyers, who was abducted off the street at gunpoint by Christopher Wilder when she was 11 years old.
YTT Women is dedicated to advancing women’s mental health and social wellbeing and contributions directly support community-based initiatives that raise awareness, provide resources, and foster safe, supportive spaces for women to grow and heal.
Mary’s House Services was founded in 2015 by a dedicated group of concerned citizens from Sydney’s northern suburbs, close to where Christopher Wilder was born and lived wth his family. Members of the local clergy, health authorities, philanthropists and community and business leaders came together to help provide safety for women and their children, victim-survivors of violence and abuse.
The Mary’s House refuge was established to address the significant gap in government funded services and to save lives in the region by providing critical support and a safe space to cope with their trauma and begin to rebuild their lives.
How to donate: https://mhs-summer-appeal-2025.raiselysite.com/#donate