Cold Case Files: It took 27 years to identify her, and nearly 49 years later, no one has been convicted for her death
Jeanette Ellen Coleman was 31 when fishermen found her in the Grand River, also called the Neosho, below Fort Gibson Dam on May 7, 1988.
For the next 27 years she had no public name. Investigators called her Daisy Doe because of a yellow daisy tattoo with four green leaves on her left shoulder.
A 28-pound concrete block was tied around her waist. The medical examiner ruled drowning. Officers later said the way she was held against the block suggested she had still been alive when she went into the water and had clung to the weight. She had been in the current about seven days.
She was a California native connected to Bakersfield. After her 2015 identification, Cherokee County investigators notified a sister who still lived there.
Oklahoma officers described her as the common-law wife of Charles Troy Coleman and the daughter of Will Stidham, a Bakersfield man Charles was tried for killing in 1975 and acquitted of in 1976. California accounts of that homicide named the victim’s daughter as Shirley Stidham, then about 17, an age that matches Jeanette being 31 in 1988.
Fingerprint files used the name Jeanette Ellen Coleman. Public reporting never fully settled whether Shirley and Jeanette were the same woman under different recorded names. Local investigators treated them as one life.
By February 1979, she was in Muskogee County with Charles. She was arrested in connection with the shotgun killings of John Seward, 68, and Roxie Seward, 62, during a burglary at a relative’s rural home. Charges against her were dropped.
She later testified at Charles’s trial. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals record shows she said he left their residence about 3:30 p.m. on February 9, 1979, with a shotgun and shells and returned about 4:15 p.m. That testimony helped put him on death row. It did not keep her safe nine years later.
Her last documented Oklahoma address in investigators’ files was Muskogee in 1979. After Charles went to prison, the public record of her life thins out until the river. In 2015, Undersheriff Jason Chennault said so much time had passed that finding people who still remembered her was hard.
While she was still Daisy Doe, investigators listed a green and yellow daisy tattoo on the left shoulder, three rings (one believed to be a wedding band, two set with turquoise and coral), pierced ears with no earrings, anklet socks, a bra, and a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt later traced to a Dollywood souvenir style. The tattoo was supposed to identify her quickly. It did not. The rings did not. The shirt led to Dollywood and then nowhere.
Cherokee County had not had a case like it: an unidentified homicide victim recovered from the river with a signature tattoo and a weight meant to hold her down. Jack Goss, then with the sheriff’s office, made the file a career case.
In 2003 it passed to Chennault. From 1988 through 1994, prints could not be matched with the technology then available. In the mid-1990s, America’s Most Wanted took the story. The show financed a 1994 court ordered exhumation from Potter’s Field at Tahlequah City Cemetery. Hundreds of leads came in. None produced a name.
At some point the Oklahoma medical examiner’s office separated and preserved her hands in cold storage. Chennault later said that was not an injury from the killing and that he was not sure why it had been done, only that it was uncommon and that it saved the case.
In early 2015, while Chennault and OSBI Special Agent Vicky Lyons were building a cold case presentation for other investigators in Oklahoma City, the medical examiner’s office realized the hands were still there. New rehydration techniques produced usable fingerprints.
They matched a 1979 Muskogee County arrest record for Jeanette Ellen Coleman. Identification came in mid March 2015. She would have been 57.
Charles Troy Coleman was the first name everyone reached for. He could not have put her in the river himself. He had been locked up since 1979 and was executed in 1990, two years after her body was found, and already on death row for years when she died.
Chennault said he could not have done it physically. He could have had someone do it, but he was in prison from 1979 until his execution. Investigators moved off him as the hands-on killer.
The working theory that replaced him came from Muskogee, not death row. Jeanette met men in a Muskogee bar. The encounter moved to the river near the dam. She was assaulted. A concrete block was tied to her. She went into the water alive.
James Ray Vogel, also called Jimmy Vogel, of Muskogee had been a suspect for years before anyone charged him. What changed was a delayed witness. In 2017, Chennault said that witness described a conversation in which Vogel said he and three other men picked up a woman they did not know from a Muskogee bar, assaulted her near the Grand River by Fort Gibson Dam, tied a cement block to her, and put her in the river. The witness had struggled with whether to come forward.
On August 17, 2017, an Oklahoma multicounty grand jury indicted Vogel for first-degree murder, alleged between January 1 and May 1, 1988; engaging in a pattern of criminal offenses; and perjury for false statements to the grand jury. Prosecutors said he acted in concert with another Muskogee area man, James West.
West was named in reporting and not charged. U.S. Marshals and Muskogee police took Vogel into custody. He was held without bond in the Cherokee County Detention Center. Officials said other people helped and the investigation remained open.
The case then stalled. In February 2021, Vogel’s attorney moved to dismiss for lack of prosecution. The motion was later withdrawn. A 2022 court setting was publicly noticed. In June 2023, The Oklahoman reported the murder indictment had been dropped after a key prosecution witness failed to appear at a preliminary hearing. As of the last detailed public reporting, no one has been convicted of killing Jeanette Ellen Coleman. Officials have continued to say more than one person was involved.
Charles Troy Coleman was born March 15, 1947, in Muskogee. He died at 12:35 a.m. on September 10, 1990, at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was 43. He was the first person executed in Oklahoma since James French’s electrocution in 1966, and the first person executed by lethal injection in the state.
Witnesses reported his last words as, “Just tell everybody I love them. I have a peace and quiet heart.” A minister read from Matthew. Coleman answered, “Praise God, praise God.”
On February 9, 1979, the Sewards walked in on a burglary at the home of John’s sister and brother-in-law, Delphia and B.L. Warren. John was found in the basement, killed by a shotgun wound to the back of the head. Roxie was also killed. Coleman was stopped later that day for speeding. Officers found the Sewards’ billfolds and meat taken from the Warrens’ home in his pickup.
He was convicted of first degree murder in John’s death on October 12, 1979, and sentenced to die. He was not separately tried for Roxie. Jeanette’s testimony about the shotgun and the afternoon timeline was part of the state’s case. His Muskogee murder trial had a change of venue into Cherokee County, the same county that would pull his wife from the river nine years later.
After the Seward arrest he escaped the Muskogee County Jail. In Luther, he overpowered a police officer, handcuffed him in a patrol car, and cut his throat. The officer survived. In the Tulsa area, he was accused of fatally shooting Russell Lewis and stealing his vehicle.
A conviction in that case was later overturned. He was captured in Arizona after abducting a sheriff’s deputy. Speaking in 2015, Chennault called him a serial killer and counted four known victims: one in California, two during the burglary, and one to steal a vehicle, with the possibility of more.
On August 24, 1975, Will Stidham, 44, was found beaten to death with a tire iron in his pickup in Bakersfield. His wallet was gone. Coleman was prosecuted and acquitted in July 1976. Prosecutors later said they still believed he did it.
After the acquittal, Charles and Jeanette left California for Oklahoma. Local investigators in 2015 said they believed Jeanette had helped conceal the California killing. Those California charges against her were dropped before the move. Charles was on death row when Jeanette died.
He had already been executed for two years when her hands finally gave her a name. The coincidence is ugly and, on the physical evidence, a dead end. He did not walk her to the dam. Whether anyone from his old Muskogee circle did is the question the 2017 indictment tried, and failed, to answer in court.
Daisy Doe was buried in Potter’s Field at Tahlequah City Cemetery. In 1994 her body was exhumed under a court order. America’s Most Wanted paid for the work. The purpose was identification, not a funeral under a real name.
Public reporting after the 2015 fingerprint hit does not document a second funeral, a marked stone, or a transfer of remains to Bakersfield. A sister was notified. Whether the family claimed what was left, or whether Jeanette Ellen Coleman still lies in the Tahlequah potter’s ground under a Doe interment, has not been clearly published.
What remains open is who tied the block, how many men were at the river, whether James West or the other unnamed men from the bar account will ever be charged, where Jeanette is buried now, and the nine missing years between the Seward trial and the dam.
Cherokee County called it the only case of its kind they had. That was true when she was a daisy tattoo. It is still true now that she has a name. The river gave her back. The courthouse has not.
Anyone with information can contact the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office at 918-456-2583, the OSBI at 1-800-522-8017 or tips@osbi.ok.gov, or the District 27 cold case line at 918-772-7568.
