Gary Craig

@gcraig1

DNA testing shows that a male genetic sample on the clothing of Tammy Jo Alexander does not match three men it was checked against.

Livingston County Sheriff's Investigator Brad Schneider said an FBI lab sent the results to the Sheriff's Office last month.

"We do have the DNA results back from the lab and we did not come up with a match," he said.

This was not a complete surprise. Law enforcement asked three men who had known Alexander to provide samples. There was not evidence linking them to the November 1979 homicide, and the three men each agreed to provide a DNA swab for comparison.

Police ID teen found dead in cornfield in '79

► START FROM THE BEGINNING: Finding Tammy Jo podcast

Schneider said tips still come in regularly about the fatal shooting of Alexander, a 16-year-old from Florida found dead in a Caledonia, Livingston County, cornfield on the chilly damp morning of Nov. 10, 1979.

What happened in the decades after is now widely known: The girl, shot twice, would remain unidentified for years, despite the untiring efforts by the Livingston County Sheriff's Office and, particularly, now-retired Sheriff John York, to give her a name and find her killer. An unusual convergence of events — involving Tammy Jo's closest teenage friend, a long-ago boyfriend, her sister, an online community of men and women dedicated to help locate missing people, and law enforcement in two states — led to her identification in January 2015.

Schneider said he regularly talks to investigators with the Hernando County, Florida, Sheriff's Office, which, along with the FBI, also has been part of the investigation.

"As a matter of fact, one (tip) was received this week," he said in a recent interview. "I got one ... last week. The FBI has received a couple as well.

" ... Within the last couple weeks we've received several tips that we're still working on," he said.

All tips are treated as possible leads, and researched until they either are targeted for more investigation or determined to be fruitless or unreliable.

Alexander was from a troubled family in Brooksville, Florida, which is in Hernando County. She occasionally ran away and hitchhiked, and it is possible that's how she traveled to New York.

Sister hoped 'Cali' escaped toxic life

Laurel Nowell, who once hitchhiked with Alexander, began looking for her high school friend several years ago and found no online trail for her. She also communicated with Alexander's high school boyfriend, Kevin Williams, who did not know what had happened to Alexander.

Nowell connected with Alexander's sister, Pamela Dyson, and they then approached the Hernando County Sheriff's Office, which could not locate a missing person report for Alexander, who was last seen in Florida in 1979. Dyson provided a DNA sample, and information about Alexander was posted on the Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.

NamUs includes information about missing persons or bodies that are found and unidentified. An online community, called Websleuths, has worked for years to try to identify missing persons. When the information about Alexander went online, one of its members, Carl Koppelman of California, believed that Tammy's appearance matched that of the young woman found in the Caledonia cornfield, whose image had been circulated internationally.

He reached out to law enforcement in Florida. A Hernando County Sheriff's Office Detective, George Loydgren, was assigned cold cases and was the contact for the missing person case of Tammy Jo Alexander. Once he saw the photo of the girl found dead in New York, "I thought right away it was her," Loydgren said.

Dyson's DNA sample showed a familial match with the body found in Caledonia.

Dyson still holds out hope that the investigation into her sister's death will end with the identification of a killer.

"Somebody has to know something, in just my personal opinion," she said. "We haven't reached the right person that has the piece of information that will lead to this case being solved."

"I always have hope. And I will never give up till the day I die hoping that they find who killed her."

GCRAIG@Gannett.com

Want to know more?

You can listen and subscribe to the "Finding Tammy Jo" podcast at findingtammyjo.com. The podcast is co-hosted by Gary Craig of the Democrat and Chronicle. Other crime and "cold case" podcasts from the USA TODAY Network can be found at coldcasepodcasts.tumblr.com.