An international documentary crew came to Mobile to tell the story of a Gulf Coast cold case solved after more than four decades — the 1976 murder of Mary Ann Perez.
The case was featured on “Evidence of Evil,” a series on the CBS Reality network available on Sky in the United Kingdom and across several European countries. Producer David Harvey said the program focuses almost exclusively on crimes cracked through modern forensic techniques.
41 Years of Silence, Then an Identification
Perez was killed near New Orleans in March 1976. Husband-and-wife serial killers caught in Kansas later admitted to her murder but could not remember where they had disposed of the body, leaving her family without certainty for decades.
The break came when Detective J.T. Thornton of the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office re-examined skeletal remains found off Old Pascagoula Road in November 1976. Thornton connected the remains to Perez, tracked them down in Oklahoma where they had been stored and forgotten for 40 years, collected DNA samples from the Perez family, and ordered testing through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in Texas.
‘No Case Need Go Unsolved’
Harvey said the long silence surrounding the case made it a natural fit for the show, and praised the broader lesson of the identification.
“It shows with modern techniques, no case need go unsolved, particularly if there are samples, bones, traces left behind,” he said. The episode was slated to air first in the UK, with plans to sell it to a U.S. cable network for a 2020 airing.