Cold Case Files: Did allegations against law enforcement official lead to disappearance of Franklin County man?

Jaylan Brandell Alston

Jaylan Brandell Alston left his home in Ozark one morning in early September 2017 and drove west to the farm he owned on the outskirts of Franklin County.

He was 54 years old, stood between five feet nine and five feet eleven, and carried about 180 to 190 pounds. His hair had gone gray in front and thinned across the crown. He wore a small beard. Green eyes looked out from a face shaped by years of outdoor work. Tattoos marked his back, and a scar ran along his left forearm.

People in the area knew him as Jay.

He parked the van somewhere on the property.

That is the last confirmed detail. When searchers reached the farm later, the van remained where he had stopped it. His hat and a handful of other personal items sat on the roof. Nothing inside or around the vehicle suggested a struggle.

No blood, no disturbed ground, no sign that he had planned to leave. He simply was not there.

No one has seen or heard from him since September 1.

His brother reported the absence more than a week afterward. Franklin County authorities entered Alston into the state crime information system and sent out a be-on-the-lookout notice. Investigators from the sheriff’s office took the lead. They canvassed the farm and surrounding rural roads.

They checked hospitals and jails. They spoke with family and anyone who might have crossed paths with him that day. The search produced no answers. T

Alston lived quietly. He tended the farm, handled the routines that come with land ownership in the Arkansas River Valley. He had a wife, children, siblings, and parents.

One brother made the call to authorities when days passed without contact. The family waited through the initial flurry of activity, then through the slower months that followed. No ransom demand arrived. No one claimed to have seen him hitchhiking or boarding a bus.

His bank accounts and phone records stayed silent.

Four months before the disappearance, Alston had stepped briefly into a different kind of public record. In the spring of 2017 state police investigated a Johnson County sheriff’s lieutenant named Jeff Wood. The inquiry centered on allegations that Wood had engaged in a sexual encounter with a woman named Carrie Box and then helped dispose of a cellphone video that captured part of it.

Box told investigators she had recorded the encounter secretly. She later gave the phone to Alston after he advised her that keeping the footage was wrong. Alston, in turn, contacted Wood and told him the device was hidden in a cemetery in Coal Hill.

Wood retrieved it and threw it into a body of water. Alston described these steps in an interview with State Police Special Agent Phillip Pierce. Wood resigned on April 28 after a suspension. Prosecutors reviewed the file and declined charges, citing insufficient evidence to prove the underlying allegation beyond reasonable doubt.

The matter ended there for law enforcement.

Aston’s name appeared in the public release of that investigation on May 6, 2017. He was a witness, not a suspect or target. Nothing in the official record ties the two events beyond the calendar. Y

et the timing has lingered in local conversations. A man who had given a statement against a deputy later stepped onto his own land and did not step back.

The farm itself offered few clues. Trees and fields stretched in every direction, the kind of terrain where a person could walk for hours without being noticed. Cadaver dogs and ground searches in the weeks after the disappearance turned up nothing.

In July 2019 human remains surfaced in a yard north of Ozark, a short drive from the farm. Franklin County deputies and a cadaver dog team recovered additional bones. The material went to the state crime lab. No identification linked it to Alston, and the case file stayed open.

Eight and a half years have passed. Alston would be 62 now. His physical description remains posted on national missing persons registries. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office still lists the file as active.

No new witnesses have come forward. The van, the hat on the roof, and the untouched personal items form the only fixed points in an otherwise empty timeline

.The land Alston worked still sits west of Ozark. Someone else manages it now. Family members continue to mark the date each year. They have buried other relatives in the time since he vanished. His mother died without learning what became of her son. A brother died as well.

The questions they carried remain unchanged. Somewhere in the hills and hollows of Franklin County the record stops on September 1, 2017. E

verything after that is silence.

Anyone with information about Jaylan Brandell Alston is asked to contact the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office at 248 Airport Road, P.O. Box 233, Ozark, Arkansas 72949, or by phone at (479) 667-4127.

The agency case number is 17-00679. Tips can also be directed to the Arkansas Crime Information Center through the Never Forgotten missing persons database.