Doe ID: Ada Fritz

DNA: ID

AbJack Entertainment

Society & Culture, True Crime

4.8 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 97 Doe ID: Ada Fritz

In May, 1976, a group of boys fishing along Sessions Creek in Grand Bay, Alabama when they found what appeared to be a mannequin in the water. Closer examination told them that it was the dead body of an older woman, and they ran to get help. Police retrieved the dead woman from the water and found that she had been shot in the head. She carried no ID, and her hands and dentures were missing. Police were not able to match her to any specific women that were missing and she was cremated and her ashes place into a mass grave. That might have been the end of ever finding out who the dead woman was had it not been for a crucial piece of luck and old evidence from the case that was re-examined. Police eventually were able to get a DNA profile from the dead woman, and genealogy determined that she was Ada Fritz who seemed to drop from sight not long before her body was found. While police couldn't prove who killed her, they had a good guess. They believed that a Mississippi man named Henderson James Williams was responsible. In 1994 he had been convicted of killing his mother, whose body was found in water off Hall Road in Grand Bay. The details of both crimes were very similar. Although police have yet to prove Henderson Williams is responsible for Ada's death, they were happy to give her her name back. It's Ada Fritz, and this is her story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to DNAID.
0:03.0	Brought to you by Abject Entertainment.
0:05.3	Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network,
0:09.7	including The Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac Speaking,
0:16.4	Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Citizen Detective, and Campus Killings.
0:21.9	All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now, wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:27.4	Subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. The
0:40.3	The May 18, 1976, Grand Bay, Mobile County, Alabama. A group of teenage boys were fishing in the creek
1:16.0	just below a low trestle bridge that carried two-lane potter-tracked road over Sessions Creek.
1:22.6	Peering down, one of them noticed some trash bags, mostly submerged in the shallow, rocky,
1:28.2	weedy water.
1:35.5	I'm reading here from reporter Shelby Myers reporting on Fox 10 News Mobile's website, quote,
1:42.5	Fox 10 News tracked down a man who was just 14 years old in 1976. He said he and a group of fishing buddies discovered the Jane Doe. The man said,
1:46.4	The guys came by the house and they wanted to go fishing and we always went down to that
1:50.0	little creek down Potter-tracked road. We thought someone had thrown garbage over the bridge,
1:54.7	but then one of the guys said, well, there's legs sticking out of that thing. So we thought,
1:59.8	okay, somebody's thrown a mannequin into the creek.
2:02.8	Then the other guy got a stick, a long limb, and pulled it over to the bank, and that's when we see
2:08.0	it was a real person. The man didn't want to be identified, but said May 18, 1976, was a surreal day.
2:16.7	We didn't tear the bag open. We didn't touch it. We just basically
2:20.1	got the heck out of there and went and told our parents, he said. Even though I was 14 years old,
2:25.4	for a few nights, I still couldn't sleep in my own room. It freaked me out that I had to sleep on the
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