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The Girl in the Cornfield

The unsolved murder of Tammy Jo Alexander.

Jennifer Baldwin

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Upstate New York has beautiful farmland. It’s quiet and far away from the big city. It isn’t a place where the residents ever expect anything bad to happen so it came as quite a surprise when a farmer tending to his cornfields in Caledonia found the body of a teenage girl on his property early one morning.

The Girl in the Cornfield

On November 10, 1979, a farmer made a horrifying discovery in his cornfield along Route 20. No one ever could have guessed murder was going to come to town. Local police were on the case quickly, but they had little to go on.

Police found a young, teenage girl without any identification on her. They determined that she had been shot in the head along the road, dragged into the cornfield, and then shot in the back.

Tammy Jo Alexander (Source: Democrat and Chronicle)

Due to the heavy rainfall on the night of the girl’s murder, it was hard to collect decent forensic evidence in 1979. However, police believed that the victim most likely came from Florida, Arizona, or Southern California. The police based their belief on two pieces of evidence. The first was the victim had tan lines which were unlikely in Upstate New York in November. The second piece of evidence was the type of pollen found on…

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