Court Documents: Murdered Fairhope Woman Was Shot

A missing Fairhope woman found murdered in Mobile was shot, according to court documents filed in the case.

Tammy Wedgeworth was reported missing on Jan. 1 and was last seen driving to Mobile, according to the Mobile Police Department. A week later, Mobile Police found her body in a ditch along Eliza Jordan Road. Her car was discovered a few miles away on Shaw Street.

The cause of death, disclosed in court filings rather than in the initial public statements, adds a formal detail to a case that has moved from a missing-person inquiry to a murder prosecution spanning two counties and multiple suspects.

The timeline of the case

Wedgeworth was last seen around 9 p.m. on Jan. 1 leaving her Fairhope home in a white Ford F-150 bound for Mobile.

When she did not return or make contact, family members turned to Fairhope police, who took the original missing-person report. At that stage, the case was a missing-persons inquiry — a search for a woman, a truck and an explanation, spread across the two communities connected by the Bayway and the Causeway that link Fairhope to Mobile.

The case changed hands in character when Mobile detectives joined the investigation. The transition reflects the geography: the truck was headed to Mobile, and whatever happened on the night of Jan. 1 happened across the bay, inside Mobile Police jurisdiction. Fairhope investigators passed the file to Mobile detectives, who began the work of tracing the vehicle and reconstructing Wedgeworth’s movements.

A week after she was reported missing, that work led to Eliza Jordan Road, a rural stretch in Mobile, where officers found her body in a ditch. The discovery converted the inquiry into a homicide investigation overnight, and the search for a missing woman became a search for her killer.

The truck on Shaw Street

Her white Ford F-150 — the vehicle she was driving when she left Fairhope — was discovered a few miles away on Shaw Street, where officers also recovered her credit card alongside the vehicle.

The location of the truck would prove significant. Shaw Street is the residential street where 33-year-old Kenneth Colburn lives, and Mobile Police arrested Colburn and charged him with murder, according to court documents.

The proximity of the truck’s discovery to the suspect’s home, the presence of her credit card at the scene and the location of the body miles away form the factual spine of the case presented in court filings — a chain of evidence assembled piece by piece over the week between the missing-person report and the arrest.

The credit card accusations

Colburn and a second person, 35-year-old Amanda Miller, are accused of using Wedgeworth’s credit cards, according to the documents.

The use of a victim’s credit cards after a violent crime is among the most consequential pieces of evidence investigators can obtain. Card transactions create time-stamped, location-tagged records — every swipe at a store or ATM generates a data trail that places the cardholder and the card together at a specific place and moment. In cases where the cardholder is a murder victim, those records become a clock and a map for the investigation.

Charges related to the fraudulent use of credit cards are typically filed separately from the murder charge, adding counts that carry their own penalties. Both Colburn and Miller face those accusations in addition to the charges stemming from Wedgeworth’s death and the investigation that followed.

Both held without bond

Both are being held without bond.

Holding a defendant without bond is reserved for the most serious charges. Under Alabama law, capital murder and certain other cases can be denied bond entirely, and judges can set bond so high — or attach conditions so strict — that release is practically impossible. In a murder case, the prosecution typically argues that the gravity of the charge, the potential sentence and the risk of flight justify detention until trial, and judges weigh those arguments against the defendant’s ties to the community and criminal history.

For Colburn, the murder charge places the case on the circuit court track in Mobile County, with the early hearings focused on whether the evidence supports the charge and whether the state will pursue the case to trial. Miller’s charges, tied to the credit card use, will proceed on their own track within the same court system.

How the two departments worked the case

The investigation’s structure — a Fairhope report, a Mobile body, a Mobile arrest — illustrates how violent crime on the Gulf Coast often crosses jurisdictional lines. The drive from Fairhope to Mobile takes minutes over the Bayway, and people, vehicles and evidence move between Baldwin and Mobile counties daily.

When they do, the agencies divide the work: the originating department takes the initial report and secures the home jurisdiction’s evidence, while detectives in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred run the homicide investigation. In this case, Fairhope police took the missing-person report and handed the inquiry across the bay, and Mobile detectives carried it to the arrest.

Officers also recovered her credit card alongside the vehicle, a detail that linked the Shaw Street scene directly to the victim and, combined with transaction records, to the two people now accused of using it.

Missing-person work in the first week

The week between the report and the discovery followed the standard architecture of a missing-adult investigation. Detectives canvassed the route between Fairhope and Mobile, sought surveillance video from businesses and residences along the way, pinged the missing woman’s phone records where legally available and circulated descriptions of the white Ford F-150 to patrol officers in both counties.

Missing-adult cases present investigators with a hard threshold: adults are free to leave, so police must develop evidence that something happened to them before the search can escalate. Signs that help make that case include a missed pattern of contact, unsecured accounts and belongings left behind. In Wedgeworth’s case, the evidence assembled during that first week was enough to convert the inquiry into something far more serious.

What the court documents show

The disclosure that Wedgeworth was shot came through court documents rather than press releases — a common pattern in Alabama homicide cases, where investigators hold back details that could compromise the prosecution and reveal them only in the filings that establish probable cause.

Those documents serve several audiences at once. For judges, they justify an arrest and the conditions of detention. For defense attorneys, they outline the state’s evidence. And for the public, they are usually the first authoritative account of what investigators believe happened — filtered through the careful, hedged language of sworn statements.

As the case moves forward, additional filings — indictments, motions, trial exhibits — will fill out the picture in public view. Until then, the documents already filed remain the core account: a woman reported missing New Year’s Day, found a week later shot to death off a rural Mobile road, her truck and credit card on a residential street, and two people accused of spending her money while investigators searched for her.

The human toll

Behind the procedural record is a loss felt in two communities. In Fairhope, where Wedgeworth made her home, the case has touched neighbors and friends who watched the search unfold in the first days of January. In Mobile, the discovery on Eliza Jordan Road and the arrest on Shaw Street brought the investigation into residential streets not accustomed to being crime scenes.

Missing-person cases that end this way carry a particular weight for the families involved, who spend the search period preparing for two outcomes at once. Family members of missing adults typically drive the early investigation — providing the last-seen details, the vehicle descriptions and the contact history that detectives use to orient the search. In this case, the information that Wedgeworth left her Fairhope home around 9 p.m. on Jan. 1 headed for Mobile came from that early work.

What happens next

The case now belongs to the Mobile County court system. Colburn, charged with murder and facing the credit card accusations alongside Miller, will move through the early stages of the criminal process: initial appearances, preliminary proceedings and, ultimately, decisions by prosecutors about how the case will be presented.

Both defendants’ detention without bond means the case proceeds without the release conditions — ankle monitors, travel restrictions — that attach in many other prosecutions. Timelines in murder cases run long, often more than a year from arrest to trial, and the pace is set by evidence review, motion practice and the court’s docket.

For now, the record stands as the court documents left it: a missing-person report from Fairhope, a body found on Eliza Jordan Road, a truck and a credit card on Shaw Street, and two defendants held without bond as the case against them takes shape.