Cold Cases Solved This Year
Cold cases can sit on shelves for years without answers, but this year we’ve seen some amazing advancements in cases that police thought would never get solved. I want to tell you about three of them today, with twists that no one saw coming. We'll cover the Yogurt Shop Murders, and the shocking discoveries that led to arrests in the murders of Aliza Sherman and Doris Worrell.
Subscribe on Patreon to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt.
You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts .
Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.
SOURCES
https://www.cleveland19.com/story/30500759/lawyer-accused-in-bomb-threats-heads-to-trial-next-year/
https://people.com/aliza-sherman-murder-arrest-divorce-lawyer-11728188
https://fox8.com/news/unsolved-for-12-years-a-timeline-of-aliza-sherman-murder-case/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOnF_ThyUc8
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/03/texas-yoghurt-shop-murders-dna-testing
TRANSCRIPT
Cold cases can sit on shelves for years without answers, but this year we’ve seen some amazing advancements in cases that police thought would never get solved. I want to tell you about three of them today, with twists that no one saw coming
As always, welcome back to heart starts pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore. This is going to be one of our last episodes before we start some Winter specific stories in December. Think cozy mysteries, haunted castles, the kind of stuff you want to curl up by a fire and drink hot chocolate to, so you’re definitely going to want to stick around for those.
But for now, I want to tell you about an incredibly high profile true crime case that had a major, major break through this year and was ultimately solved. The Yogurt Shop Murders, in Austin, Texas:
Now, a refresher on this case: 11:47pm. Friday night on December 6th, 1991 in Austin, Texas. Something was not right at the strip mall off of Anderson Lane. The owner of a party-supply store was working late when he heard popping noises coming from one of the nearby stores.
He ran outside and immediately saw dark smoke billowing from The nextdoor froyo shop called I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! By the time he even tried to call 911, a group of firefighters were approaching the scene.
And the firefighters tried to enter the building, but they found the front door locked. That was to be expected, the workers had probably locked them when they closed up for the night. If anything that was a good sign. Maybe the shop was empty, and no one had gotten hurt.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. The firefighters forced their way into the shop and saw the layout. The charred counter was directly in front of the door, past some tables, there were booths on the right and left side of the store, covered in soot, and then past the counter was the back of the store. That’s where most of the fire seemed to have started.
Through all the debris, in the back part of the shop, they could make out the shapes of three bodies of teen girls that had been badly charred by the fire. None of them were wearing clothes, and they had been gagged and tied up. They looked as though they had been stacked on top of each other But had fallen over at some point once the fire started raging.
Further in the back of the shop, separate from the other girls was where they found the fourth and final body. also, a teen girl. She was not quite as badly burned as the others, but her body was still in gruesome shape. She seemed to have been shot twice through the face and head. Once the medical examiner had done the autopsies it was confirmed that one of the girls had been sexually assaulted.
The medical examiner also swabbed the bodies for DNA evidence, but never tested them for accelerant, so we don’t know if something was poured on them to start the fire.
The victims were confirmed to be Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison—who were both 17 and worked at the shop—, Jennifer’s sister 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, and Sarah’s friend 13-year-old Amy Ayers. Sarah and Amy had been planning to have a sleepover that night at Sarah and Jennifer’s house.
They were just waiting for Jennifer to close up so she could drive them home. Just normal teen girls having a normal night, when tragedy struck.
The Harbison parents recalled how much both Jennifer and Sarah were both into sports. Jennifer excelled at track, while Sarah’s dominated basketball. The girls also loved animals and spent as much time around them as they could. Amy was a natural at horseback riding and even had her own horse. Her mom described her as “an old soul” and happiest when around animals. Sonora remembers her sister Eliza with an incredible amount of love.
The community was reeling over these deaths. Austin in 1991 was not the Austin you think of today, not even close. It was small, and they didn’t have homicides like this. So police got to collecting clues to figure out who could have done it, and if it was someone within their own community.
They confirmed that the weapons in the attack used .22- and .380-caliber bullets. Because of the extensive damage done by the fire and then the water used to put the fire out, collecting evidence was proving to be extremely difficult and they hadn’t been able to collect any fingerprints. But because the front door was locked, police assumed that the crime had taken place after the store had closed and the girls had locked up, and that the attacker had fled out through the back.
Based on the crime scene and witness statements collected from people who had been in the yogurt shop in the hours before closing, the police put together an idea of what they thought happened.
At around 10pm, one hour before closing, a few witnesses remember seeing a man come in. They didn’t see his face, but they did hear his voice as he spoke to the girls behind the counter. He didn’t order anything but instead asked to use the bathroom. They said yes, and he went in. He still hadn’t come out by the time the customers who saw him left .
Two men. One with a padded tan jacket, another thin with light brown hair. At 10:47 the couple leave but there were two men behind, and the girls started cleaning up. Girls were supposed to lock the door at 10:50.
One theory became that this man could have snuck into the back without anyone seeing and jammed the rear door open for his escape later. He then either hid out in the bathroom until closing or came back through the propped open back door.
But, there were other witnesses who pointed out two other men who seemed suspicious in the store, One with a padded tan jacket, another thin with light brown hair, but no one got a good look at their faces. Some customers reported seeing the two guys sitting in a booth near the counter of the yogurt shop not long before closing, around 10:45pm that night, 5 minutes before the girls would have started closing up, and the last witnesses to leave the shop remembered that the men were still in there as they left. So these two men, in theory, were the last people to see the girls alive.
Just A week after the murders, police had a suspect in custody. A 16-year-old named Maurice Pierce was seen at Northcross Mall kind of sauntering around with a loaded 22-caliber pistol–the same caliber as one of the guns used in the murders–in the waistband of his jeans and bullets in his pockets.
The Northcross Mall was only two blocks from the yogurt shop. Amy and Sarah had actually walked over from the mall to go meet Jennifer on the night of the murder. Maurice was immediately taken into police custody, and this set off a really horrible chain of events that would last decades and ultimately ruin lives.
the police couldn’t prove that Maurice’s gun was the murder weapon. There actually wasn’t any physical evidence that tied the 16 year old to the crime, but police were really eager to make an arrest, so they would have to get a written confession to get the murder charges to stick.
After hours of interrogation without a lawyer, Maurice Pierce told police his friend, 15-year-old Forrest Welborn, had borrowed his gun the night of the yogurt-shop murders. He said Forrest disappeared for a while and later returned sweaty, smelling of hairspray—a possible accelerant used to start the fire. The next day, Maurice claimed, Forrest confessed to the killings. Detectives wired Maurice for a second conversation, but on tape Forrest insisted he was only joking.
Again, there was no evidence linking either teen to the crime, but a homicide detective pressed the boys relentlessly for confessions. When that failed, Maurice offered another lead—two more boys: 17-year-old Robert Springsteen and 15-year-old Michael Scott. Police interrogated them too, but again hit a wall; all four denied involvement. With no physical evidence, they were released, and the case went cold.
But then, In 1998, Detective Paul Johnson reopened the investigation. Revisiting the original suspects, he brought Michael Scott in again. After nearly 18 hours of questioning in 1999,, Scott confessed that he, Springsteen, Pierce, and Welborn had gone to rob the shop and ended up killing the four girls, then setting the fire. He said he and Springsteen were the shooters, and both men admitted Springsteen had sexually assaulted one victim. Neither Pierce nor Welborn ever confessed.
Based solely on these statements, all four were charged with capital murder. Scott received life in prison; Springsteen was sentenced to death. Now, if you go back and listen to any of these interrogations, you can see how flawed they were. The police ask leading questions, especially about the sexual assault element. One of the boys asked for a lawyer but was ignored. And despite how chaotic the scene was, none of the four boys left a shred of DNA, ballistics, any physical evidence that they had been there. And now one of them was sentenced to die for this crime.
Luckily, though the convictions collapsed on appeal—the confessions were riddled with inconsistencies on top of the lack of physical evidence.
Over the decades, investigators chased more than 1,200 suspects and countless false confessions. The case remained unsolved—until a dramatic break nearly 35 years after the girls were murdered.
The big break in the case was set into motion by an act signed into law by President Biden just three years ago in 2022. It was called “The Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act of 2021” and it was motivated by the yogurt shop murders specifically. The law was enacted to make sure the latest technological advancements were being used to help solve cold cases.
It turned out to be incredibly lucky that swabs were taken of the bodies back in 1991 before forensic technology would allow for DNA to be used to test against suspects’s DNA. Because, in 2022, the police could pursue new leads in the case with the new DNA testing technology available to them.
That same year, a man named Dan Jackson became head of the Austin Police Department’s unsolved homicide unit. He decided to take another look into the case, reopening it for the third time. He made it his mission to solve the crimes, much like other investigators had in the past. And It wouldn’t be until this year—2025—that he really made progress in the case.
In June of this year, Dan Jackson pulled out two crucial pieces of evidence for re-testing. The first being the bullet casing from a .380 caliber gun. The bullet had not been tested through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network in years, so Dan created a new profile for it and ran it through the system.
And low and behold, he got a match. It seemed like the gun had potentially been used in an unsolved murder in Kentucky, where a woman was sexually assaulted and then fatally shot. It shared enough similarities with the Yogurt Shop murders that it got Dan thinking, Was it done by the same guy, and if so, was his DNA now in a system somewhere?
Well, DNA material was collected in 1991 at the yogurt shop from underneath Amy’s fingernails. It had never been tested because back then the technology just wasn’t good enough, and they didn’t have enough DNA to run more than one test, or even upload it to Codis. CODIS, or the Combined DNA Index System, is a national database that lets crime labs share and compare DNA profiles. It uses technology to match DNA from crime scenes to other cases or to known criminals, helping investigators connect violent crimes and find suspects. They only had the suspect's Y chromosome DNA, but it was at least something.
So what Dan did, was he sent the profile of the DNA to individual police departments around the country, and asked them to manually check it against profiles they already had in their system. It was an incredibly tedious way to do it, and I wonder if part of him worried that some departments might not do it. After all, this was really the only chance he had.
But… just like with the ballistic testing, they got a match. From a police department in Greenville, South Carolina. The DNA tested matched DNA from the perpetrator of a sexual assault and murder committed in the area. Not only did the DNA match, but there was one eerily specific similarity between the cases: the victims were tied up using their own clothing.
Now this crime had been unsolved for decades, but in 2018, thanks to a Genealogist named Cece moore, the perpetrator had been named. And it was not anyone the police had on their radar
34 years later and the killer in the yogurt shop murders was finally identified as a man named Robert Eugene Brashers.
Now, Brashers had never been on any suspect list or approached by police at all in connection with the crime. His name coming up as the perpetrator was completely out of left field.
Brashers was as a serial killer, a mass murderer, and a rapist, whose crimes spanned multiple states. Sadly, the yogurt shop murders weren’t the only murders he committed.
The year before the murders he killed a 28 year old woman named Jenny Zitricky by strangling her with pantyhose in her apartment.
He also shot and killed 38-year-old Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan, in Missouri in 1998. Both of these victims had been tied up, and Megan had been sexually assaulted, which matched what happened at the Yogurt shop.
He killed women and children in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Missouri, and Tennessee making it more difficult for police to catch him.
But the craziest thing of all, All of his crimes remained unsolved until 2018, when geneologist CeCe Moore was looking through old cold cases and was able to name him as a suspect in three murders and several rapes dating back to 1990.
But at that point, Brashers was dead. He had taken his own life in 1999 during a standoff with police. At the time,police were investigating him for a stolen vehicle, but when he saw them at his door, he proceeded to hold his wife, daughter and two step daughters hostage, and ultimately took his own life.
CeCe Moore was able to have his body exhumed to collect DNA after she started making these connections. So she’s basically the only reason that Brashers was in any system and connected to any crime, almost 20 years after his death. And ultimately, how he was able to be tied to the Yogurt shop murders.
But some people still have questions. Was Brashers alone? There were two men seen in the shop when the last customer left, was it Brashers and someone else? Or were they totally unrelated to the crime? Brashers was also known to work alone, so it’s unlikely that he had anyone with him at the yogurt shop.
So we may never know exactly what happened that night but there is at least a little bit of closure for families that I’m sure thought they’d never see any. I read that one of the girl's sisters said she always thought she’d die not knowing who did this , so it’s amazing that she was able to get this closure in her life time.
And that’s part of the reason that I wanted to do this episode now. It’s the thanksgiving season here in the states and I always like to spend a little time thinking of things to be thankful for. One of those things is that really big leaps in technology made in the last few years are helping families like this find closure.
March 2013 in Cleveland was colder than it had been in past years. A man walking along a frozen sidewalk had himself bundled up to protect against the cold, when Something laying near the street caught his eye. He pulled his hood back to try to get a better look, and that’s when he threw his hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.
What he was staring at was a body. From what he could tell, it looked like a woman, and There was blood pooling around her, leaking out of stab wounds.
Police would quickly identify the woman as Aliza Sherman, a 53 year old fertility nurse, and, above all else, a mother. She had four children that she loved fiercely. Her daughter recalls how her mother always advocated for her to be strong and independent. She was admired by her community for her kindness and generosity, which made her murder all the more puzzling to police.
The attack that ended her life happened midday on March 24th, 2013 near the Eireview (Ir-E-view) Plaza in downtown Cleveland. The murder was carried out in broad daylight, and she was stabbed 10 times. The attack would have been brutal and public, and yet no one saw it happen. Or at least no one came forward as a witness.
Police figured The attacker fled through a nearby alley, so they must have been able to stay out of view, and no murder weapon was found near the crime scene.
However, video footage taken from a nearby business shows someone wearing a heavy black coat running away from the scene. It was impossible to identify exactly who the person was, but it was believed to be the attacker.
But who was it? was this a random stranger, or did someone who knew Aliza target her?
Well, when police started going through Aliza’s records, they got their first bombshell clue. Turns out, at the time of her death, she was in the middle of a very volatile divorce.
Going back to 2000, the police had been called to the Sherman’s house 22 times for reports of domestic disturbances. By 2013, the couple had decided to separate and it was not going very well.
On March 24th, the day of her murder, she was preparing for an upcoming court date. Aliza was actually on her way to her attorney’s office when she was killed by the unknown attacker.
Oftentimes, When a woman is murdered, the natural focus of the investigation is going to be on her husband or partner. And there was reason to think Aliza’s husband—Sanford Sherman—was involved.
The couple had a history of disputes during their marriage that didn’t stop once they decided to get a divorce. And quickly more started coming out that really did not look good for Sanford,
After Aliza's death, their daughter, Jennifer Sherman, filed a civil suit against her dad over how he handled Aliza’s estate. One of the claims she made was that Sanford had forged her mothers signature on a bunch of important documents like on a power of attorney that gave him access to withdraw funds from one of her accounts. And over the next 6 years, the account was completely drained by him.
When Sanford was asked by Jennifer why her mothers signature looked so different on that document from other documents she had signed, he said that on some days her motor skills were negatively affected by dehydration.
But when police started digging, they found emails that Aliza had sent to her divorce lawyer, Gregory Moore, where she complained about not remembering signing those documents, and felt like she wouldn’t have knowingly signed them.
During the civil trial that Jennifer brought, it was also revealed that Sanford had been engaged in an extra marital affair.
It was also revealed that Sanford one time entered a strip club under a fake identity, aggressively came onto one of the dancers, and then threatened to kill her and her father when she didn’t reciprocate.
And on top of that, the most wild piece to come to light was that Sanford had allegedly solicited advice from someone about the best way to commit a perfect murder.
Then, on January 12th 2012, a little over a year before her death, Aliza had written to her divorce attorney saying “I am really afraid he is going to have me killed.”
So obviously, the police start circling Sherman. But Even with all that information about him and his marriage (and divorce) with Aliza, the investigation stalled.
Police were never able to find any physical evidence present at the crime scene or on Aliza’s body that could place Sanford at her murder. Sanford seemed to get a lawyer immediately, and police never brought him in for formal questioning. Either they weren’t pursuing this investigation seriously, or there was something about the crime that made them think someone else had killed Aliza….
Almost an entire decade would pass without any movement on the case. But then in 2021,Attorney General Dave Yost and his team at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, or BCI, got called in to help. They had more bandwidth than the Cleveland police to take on difficult or cold cases. They also served as fresh eyes on something Cleveland authorities had already raked through over and over in the last 8 years. The BCI also had better and more tools, a bigger lab to process evidence, and more time to be able to put together a meticulous, minute-by-minute reconstruction of Aliza’s day using digital evidence.
And there was a lot for them to go through. To start, there were the texts where Aliza said she was meeting her divorce attorney at his office at 4:30pm on the day of her murder.
The authorities realized the last person she was set to see was Gregory, so they started revisiting more of the digital evidence surrounding him, and they found a few very strange inconsistencies. First, they noticed that Gregory’s phone was disconnected from its cellular network for about 3 hours around the time of the attack. The cell phone was still connected to data via hotspots but not to cellular data. This meant the device wasn’t pinging cell towers which would create what was essentially a map of the movements and location of the person using the device.
The phone was reconnected after the attack was believed to take place, and Gregory started making phone calls and sending texts to Aliza asking where she was, between 5:41pm and 6:43pm.
A few days later, Gregory got a new phone.
They also noticed that Gregory’s key card had been swiped at the entrance to his office that day at 3:51pm, but he never actually entered.
When police went to gather the footage from the building’s security camera that would have been taken before, during, and after the attack, they discovered something clearly suspicious. There were 21 minutes missing from the security footage from the time when Aliza must have been attacked. Only 21 minutes of footage taken during a very crucial timeframe had seemingly vanished.
More missing evidence included a voicemail that Aliza left for Gregory that day. The message had been deleted on March 25th, the day after her murder without first giving it to law enforcement.
But why would her divorce Lawyer, of all people, want Aliza dead? Well, the police found something in his records that might provide an answer.
In July of 2012, three separate employees at the old Cuyahoga (Kaya-hoga)County Domestic Relations Court in Ohio received calls that a bomb in the building was going to go off at 11:30am . The courthouse was evacuated, the trials scheduled for that day were all postponed, and panic ensued. Ultimately, it was discovered there was no bomb in the courthouse, and the calls were traced to Gregory Moore, who had a case he allegedly didn’t feel prepared for going to trial that day.
The point being, he had a track record of pulling elaborate stunts to push off trial dates for cases he didn’t believe he was ready for.
It’s now believed that Gregory intentionally lured Aliza to his office that day, knowing that he needed to come up with a way to stall the trial. When Aliza arrived at his office, she texted that she was there, and Gregory texted back that he’d be down in a moment.
But he didn’t arrive, so a few minutes later Aliza texted him again that it was cold out and she was going to wait in her car. Again, Gregory said he’d be down in a bit, but investigators don’t believe he was ever inside the building to begin with.
That’s when the attacker approached Aliza and began stabbing her.
Earlier this year, Moore was indicted on charges of Aggravated Murder, Conspiracy, Murder A and Murder B, and two counts of Kidnapping.
However, it’s still unknown if Gregory had a co-conspirator. Was it Gregory in the video running away from the scene, or was someone else involved. Some believe that the other man was Sherman, who helped orchestrate the whole thing, though I haven’t found any evidence that’s the case.
So, while not officially solved, an arrest has finally been made in Aliza’s murder case and A trial has been set for early 2026.
It was late morning on September 20th in 2006 in Douglas, Georgia when a 911 dispatcher answered a call. At first they couldn't make out what the man on the other end of the line was saying, he was so hysterical.
In between sobs, the man identified himself as Jon Worrell. His wife, he said, was dead. He had come back to the business they ran together, and indoor sports park, to see that she had been shot in what must have been a robbery gone wrong.
When the police arrived at the scene, they found him crumpled on the ground next to the body of his wife Doris. Even before an autopsy, it was clear to investigators that she had died by a gunshot wound to the head.
Doris was only 39 at the time of her death. She had previously worked as a teacher and interior designer before deciding to give up her career to stay at home and raise her and Jon’s three children. Doris was an active and beloved member of both her church and local civic organizations. People described her as gentle, artistic, and endlessly devoted to her kids.
As I said earlier, the spouse of a murdered woman is the obvious first suspect. So Jon Worrell took the police through his movements that day. It was 11:15am when he discovered his wife’s body. According to him, he had left to go to the hardware store at around 9:40 that morning. He hadn’t been at their business, which was closed at the time of the shooting, when Doris must have been killed, and his alibi was very quickly corroborated
There was one other person in the sports park that day, and that was Doris’s 18-year old Nanny, Paola Yarberry. Paola was cleaning a different area when she heard a gun go off, but she didn’t see the person who fired.
They ran a recreational facility open to the public called Jon’s Sports Park. Any local kid could come to spend weekends or summer vacation days go-carting, playing mini golf or use their indoor areas for soccer or basketball.
Security cameras covered almost every inch of the park. However, there were a few spots not covered by cameras. And one of those blindspots was the office where Doris was killed. Which meant the shooting wasn’t captured on camera.
And so police started wondering if this really was a robbery gone wrong. Or did someone who was very familiar with the inside of this building intentionally target Doris?
Police asked Jon who would have wanted Doris dead, did she have any enemies? It was hard to talk to him, though, because he was SO distraught over his wife’s death.
So they started to check to see if there were any disgruntled employees. Maybe someone who had been fired by the Worrells. Or someone that had been banned from the park….
That led to the arrests of two men: Glidden Rodriguez and Brandon Cage. Glidden had been an employee of Jon’s Sports Park but Cage had not. There were reports that one of them had been banned from the park, so police figured they did this in retaliation, and They were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. However, prosecutors ended up dropping the case. There just wasn’t enough evidence to pin it on the two young men.
Which led police back to square one in the investigation. Though, there was one witness they wanted to check back in with.
In 2007, while she was eating lunch with friends, police arrested Paola Yarberry, Doris’s nanny. They felt like she knew more about the crime than she had let on.
They also knew that she was an immigrant who the Worrell’s were helping get a green card, and they used her immigration status as leverage. Basically, tell us what you know, or you’re going back to Venezuela.
But she didn’t know anything, she insisted. She called Jon for help, but he had already relocated himself and his children to Florida, too sad to stay in the same neighborhood where his wife was murdered.
And so, without any support, Paola was forced to leave the country, and the case went cold.
Over the years, there were small movements, but nothing revelatory. Eventually, Jon moved his kids to Costa Rica. In 2022, police searched a nearby pond for the murder weapon. That search came up completely empty. No gun.
The business Jon and Doris owned struggled for a while before shutting down completely. There had been billboards put up pleading for anyone with information that could help solve the case to come forward. But those sat there as the years progressed until they’d become too faded by the sun to even read the helpline number.
The number of people calling the police for updates dwindled, but one of Doris’ sisters, Leanne Tuggle, refused to give up hope that they’d get justice. She worked tirelessly on her sister's case over the following 20 years, even when the police stopped.
And It was Leanne who informed police of a shocking development. Not a development in the case so much as a change within the Worrell family.
See, after Jon took the kids and relocated from Georgia to Florida, Leanne never heard from him again, no one in Doris’s family had, actually. They were shocked to learn when He moved all of them to Costa Rica.
Not necessarily because Costa Rica felt like a random place to move the family to, I mean Jon had no ties to the country, he wasn’t from there. But because Leanne knew of someone else that was living in Costa Rica…..the family's nanny, Paola. The two were lovers and Jon had moved the kids there to be with her
Now, Jon had moved to Costa Rica with Paola only 2 years after Doris’s death, but it wouldn’ be until years later that Police knew about it. Partly because of Leanne, but partly because they got a call from Paola herself.
Which brings us to this year, 2025, almost 20 years after the murder, Paola was ready to talk to the investigators. The same nanny who was only 18-years-old when she worked for the Worrells back in 2006 so calling them lovers doesn’t even feel right in this situation.
The story Paola told the police was one of marital turmoil between Jon and Doris. It wasn’t the happy image they tried to project to those around them. Jon confided in Paola, who again WAS 18 AT THE TIME, that he was scared he was going to lose the children if they got a divorce. That's when he told her he was looking for "someone" who could do something that couldn’t be undone. Something that would make his life much easier.
On May 20th, 2015—what would have been 2 days after Doris’ 57th birthday—Jon Worrell was arrested and charged for murder. His charges included: malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, and conspiracy to commit murder. Police and state prosecutors were now convinced that it was Jon behind her murder. They alleged that he hired someone to kill her, his wife and the mother of his children. Yes, Paola had been there to hear the gun shot, but she was terrified for her own life at that point, and decided to not say anything.The pieces had all come together, and it wasn’t looking good for Jon.
Jon was extradited to Coffee County, GA after his arrest. On June 10th, 2025—less than one month after the arrest—a Grand Jury indicted him. Two weeks later, Jon entered a “Not Guilty” plea. This pained Doris’ sister Leanne, but she said “I’m not surprised that’s the way he pled.” His bond was denied because he was deemed a flight risk. Years of relocation including one actual flight from the country will do that. Partly because of the case being picked apart on social media and partly because the case was such a huge deal in Coffee County where it was committed, his defense team is seeking a change in venue. They don’t think he’ll get a fair trial there. At this time, the trial is still pending.
Getting justice for a murdered family member or friend doesn’t get rid of the pain or grief of such a devastating and violent loss. It won’t get them back. That damage has already been done.
But hopefully there’s some ounce of solace in knowing that the person who ripped them away from you has been named. As technology and DNA forensics continue to develop it means more of these cold cases will be able to be solved. Cases that have been sitting still with zero developments for years and in some cases decades.