For Alisha Jackson, the first weekend of September 1998 was bound to be a special one. She and her three sisters would celebrate their mother's birthday, and the 27-year-old planned a surprise announcement of her own: she was engaged to be married.

On Saturday, September 5, Alisha and her fiancé, Tyrone Davis, drove from Jackson, Mississippi, to Fernwood—about 85 miles south—to visit her mother, Thadoria Jackson.

The sprawling suburbs gradually gave way to small towns, roadside churches, and tranquil farmland. The couple headed toward Fernwood, a quiet hamlet in Pike County's woods, built by one of southern Mississippi's largest lumber companies in the 19th century.

That weekend, Alisha introduced Tyrone to her family, including her two older sisters, Sabrina and Sonjia, and her younger sister, Stacey. Alisha and Stacey shared a particularly close bond. Stacey, the youngest Jackson sister, attended Hinds Community College and often visited Alisha's North Jackson apartment after class.

The weekend unfolded wonderfully. Three generations of Jackson women celebrated Thadoria's birthday, and everyone congratulated Alisha and Tyrone on their engagement.

During the party, Alisha recounted a recent dream she'd had about her father, Larry Jackson, who had died five years earlier, on Valentine's Day.

“Alisha said tears rolled down his face, but he smiled at her,” recalled her sister Sabrina, years later. “She said, ‘I was going somewhere with my daddy.’ Our grandmother got real quiet. She said to Alisha, ‘Baby, if you have that dream again, don’t you go with him. Don’t ever go.’” 

Over the weekend, Alisha and Tyrone sat with Thadoria on her living room couch to discuss their wedding, planned for Saturday, March 6, 1999. That gave the couple exactly six months to plan, and they got to work right away on Thadoria’s living room couch. When they set out for Jackson that Sunday, Alisha and Tyrone looked forward to building their life together.

Two days later, on the night of Monday, September 7, 19-year-old Stacey drove to Alisha's apartment after class. Her college campus was just outside Jackson, and it was less than a 30-minute drive to Alisha’s apartment, 25B, at Pepper Mill Apartments. Stacey took out her key and entered the residence. She turned on the lights and immediately saw the body of her sister, Alisha, sitting against the wall in a horrifying manner. 

Alisha’s eyes were open, but she was clearly no longer alive. Stacey’s haunting screams got the attention of an off-duty Jackson police officer who happened to live at the complex.

He rushed over to see what had happened. Inside, he found Stacey holding Alisha, who had been stabbed repeatedly in the head, neck, and chest.

Stacey was understandably shocked by her sister’s death. Less than 48 hours earlier, the Jackson family had been celebrating a birthday and planning a wedding.

Five years later, with Alisha's murder still unsolved, Thadoria confessed that Stacey—who had dropped out of medical school after discovering her sister’s body—had never been the same.

“When she found that,” Thadoria said, “it did something to that child.”

When police arrived at Alisha's apartment that evening, they found no signs of forced entry. A medical examination revealed she had been stabbed 52 times with a knife from her own kitchen. The brutality of the attack suggested it was personal. 

“This is a vengeful type killing,” said Jackson Police Detective Brent Winstead. 

But the Jackson family couldn't imagine who would harbor such hatred for Alisha. Born in Independence, Louisiana, in 1971, she was deeply rooted in her faith and community. She led the usher board at North End Church of God in Christ in Jackson and belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star. When she wasn't working or at church, she stayed close to home in North Jackson with her sprawling family of sisters, nine uncles, six aunts, and a niece.

In high school, Alisha had been a cheerleader and basketball player before attending Southwest Mississippi Community College. At the time of her death, she worked as a Medicaid billing specialist for Uni-Care—a job centered on helping others, just like everything else in her life.

When she was discovered stabbed to death in her own apartment, then, the Jackson family had little to offer investigators. Sonjia recalled that in the weeks before Alisha’s death, a Pepper Mill manager mentioned that a woman had been seen “beating” on Alisha’s door. According to Sonjia, Alisha had also received threatening notes on her car at her workplace in Ridgeland, north of Jackson.

Police interviewed neighbors based on Sonjia's tips, but the leads went nowhere. Her fiancé, Tyrone, provided a verified alibi when he proved that he was at work that day. During the investigation, police learned that Sonjia had stayed with Alisha for about a week before the murder. 

During that time, she'd met several neighbors, including Jerry Livingston, who visited so frequently that Sonjia assumed he worked maintenance for the complex. He was just a resident, Alisha had assured her.

Jackson Police Detective Willie Mack interviewed Livingston and others, but nothing substantial emerged. Mack found it odd that Livingston had visited Alisha so often, especially given her engagement to Tyrone, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder.

The scene of the homicide was cleaned quickly. Thadoria later complained that the apartment complex sent repairmen the very next day to tear out carpet, replace drywall, and scrub the unit top to bottom for the next tenants. It was one of the first signs, according to Thadoria, that others viewed Alisha’s death as simply a statistic to be noted, archived, and forgotten.

While Mack investigated the case, Thadoria took her own approach to solving her daughter’s murder. Alisha’s mother was no stranger to the criminal justice system: she was a booking deputy at Pike County Sheriff’s Department, and witnessed firsthand suspected criminals come in and out of the jail system for years.

Two days after Alisha's death, she contacted Jackson Detective Winstead for an update. He had no progress to report, he said, as there were no witnesses or obvious physical evidence that could be traced back to an immediate suspect. Investigators did retrieve fingerprints from the scene, and a visible footprint, but it would take time to process the evidence.

Mack believed robbery wasn’t a motive in Alisha’s death, as nothing appeared to be missing. And with no sign of forced entry, it seemed that Alisha may have known her attacker. But that didn't narrow the field enough, and as 1998 closed, Alisha's death became one of 64 homicides in Jackson that year. 

Some were solved. Others, like Alisha's, remained open.

Every year, on Alisha's August 1 birthday, Thadoria and her daughters placed a memorial in local newspapers. Some years, a small poem ran alongside Alisha's photo. In others, her tribute appeared near one for Larry Jackson, her father, who died in 1993.

Thadoria had stayed strong for her daughters after her husband's sudden death on Valentine's Day 1993. But when Alisha died, that resolve shattered. Four years later, in 2002, Thadoria admitted she could barely function. She dragged herself through work most days and couldn't sleep without medication.

“I have been in counseling, everywhere,” Thadoria told newspapers. “I don’t have the strength to go to work, but I have to work. It’s hard on me losing that child, and the way she was done. My daughter was only 27 years old, and she had her whole life jerked from her.” 

That year, the Jackson family offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to arrests. Detective Mack still led the investigation, but remained stymied by a lack of evidence and leads. Thadoria maintained constant contact with Jackson police, believing her persistence would push them to work harder. Instead, she was reprimanded. A high-ranking Jackson Police official called Thadoria's supervisor in Pike County and asked her to stop calling—she was interfering with their case.

“I don’t think it’s open at all,” Thadoria said of Jackson Police’s case in June 2003. “I think they closed it.” 

In her view, her daughter's case had gone under the radar—both with Mississippi officials and the media at large. When Alisha was killed, she attempted to contact everyone she could think of that might be able to help, from state Attorney General Mike Moore to mayor Harvey Johnson, the first black mayor in Jackson’s history. She even reached out to then-President Bill Clinton, hoping to generate nationwide attention.

Nothing worked.

Back in Mississippi, Thadoria tried partnering with attorneys to bring attention to the case. None accepted her as a client. When she reached out to 20/20 and America's Most Wanted, neither helped. (Thadoria claimed Jackson Police didn't share information with America's Most Wanted, preventing them from featuring Alisha's case.) The first investigator on the case proved particularly discouraging.

“You better depend on God,” the detective allegedly told her, “because we’ll probably never find out who did it.”

Meanwhile, Thadoria found that cases with similar characteristics, though “higher-profile” victims, were gaining nationwide attention. In the years following Alisha's murder, the nation became captivated by Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, and Elizabeth Smart—cases that consumed the media's relentless attention and drew rewards of $250,000 to $500,000 or more, dwarfing the $10,000 the Jacksons offered.

Thadoria felt her daughter's case was being swept aside, perhaps due to the racial inequities that often plagued criminal justice systems and viewership-focused media cycles. But that didn’t stop Thadoria and her daughters from pursuing Alisha’s case. When Thadoria was told to stop calling Jackson Police, one of her daughters took over, calling weekly to monitor the case’s progress.

Over time, Alisha’s sisters regained some normalcy in their lives. Stacey, forever changed by the discovery of her sister’s lifeless body, re-enrolled in school, made the dean’s list, and expected to graduate in August 2003. 

For years, Thadoria went about her own new routine: visiting Alisha’s grave at the Burton Temple Church of God in Christ cemetery.

“For the past four years,” she said, “I have not missed a week.”

On March 15, 2006, more than seven years after Alisha was murdered, Thadoria received a phone call from the Jackson Police Department. A suspect in Alisha’s case was under arrest.

The next day, Assistant Police Chief Roy Sandefer confirmed that the suspect was 30-year-old Jerry Livingston, Alisha’s former neighbor at Pepper Mill Apartments in 1998. Police couldn't reveal much about the now-active investigation, but Detective Willie Mack, retired by then, admitted he'd interviewed Livingston multiple times during the initial investigation.

Livingston had always been one of his most obvious suspects, Mack said, but he could never gather enough evidence to warrant an arrest. Livingston had even admitted to being in Alisha's apartment sometime before she was murdered—but that wasn't enough to build a case.

“I didn’t want to make an arrest of that type and end up letting him go because there was not enough evidence there,” Mack said after Livingston was arrested. “If I was going to make an arrest on that case, I wanted it to stick.”

Authorities didn’t reveal what led to the 2006 arrest, but the Jacksons were eventually told that Livingston himself called 911 and confessed to the murder. The weight of what he had done so many years ago had led him to contact authorities.

Livingston was detained at the State Hospital in Whitfield for two years. Then, in October 2008, Livingston's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Alice Stamps, announced that her client was mentally incompetent to stand trial.

“I don’t expect it to come to trial anytime soon,” Stamps said. 

The legal standard for mental competency is straightforward: defendants must understand the charges against them and be able to participate in their own defense. They must recall details of the incident and grasp how legal proceedings work. Being declared incompetent is less about mental illness, specifically, and more about one’s capacity to navigate the legal system.

According to Stamps, Livingston had undergone two separate mental evaluations, and in each, was found to be incompetent to face murder charges. This was a stunning turn of events for the Jackson family, who had, for two years, believed that the person responsible for Alisha’s murder would finally face justice.

“I’m very upset,” Thadoria told reporters. “This is tearing my heart out. It makes me angry.” 

Despite their objections, there was little the family could do. If multiple doctors found Livingston mentally incapable of facing charges, there would be no trial.

In November 2009, Hinds County Circuit Judge Winston Kidd officially declared Livingston mentally incompetent. He would remain at the State Hospital at Whitfield and would not face charges for Alisha Jackson's murder. Judge Kidd did stipulate that if Livingston was found competent in the future, he could still stand trial.

Eleven years had passed since Alisha was murdered. For eight years, hers was a cold case with no leads or arrests. For three years, the Jackson family had known exactly who killed Alisha, and for the past year, they had waited to see if he would stand trial. They had done everything they could, and they had never stopped fighting.

“The system has failed us,” Thadoria said after the judge’s ruling. “I don’t feel good about it. He wasn’t crazy before he did it.”

In August 2009, two months before Livingston was officially ruled incompetent to stand trial, Thadoria published a memorial for Alisha in McComb's Enterprise-Journal:

Inside Thadoria’s home, signs of Alisha remained everywhere. She kept her daughter’s brown Coach purse, still full of makeup, checkbook, random scraps of paper. Alisha’s clothes hung beside Larry's saved wardrobe. 

When Thadoria went for walks, she wore Alisha's white tennis shoes—the last ones she saw her daughter ever wear. Photos throughout the house reminded the Jacksons of the light Alisha had brought to their lives for 27 years.

“If you had a bad day,” said Thadoria in 2003, five years after Alisha’s murder, “when you got around her you would be all right.” 

After September 7, 1998, when the bad days seemed to stretch endlessly into the future, Thadoria sought that comfort at her daughter’s grave, hoping the girl who could lift anyone’s spirits might lift hers one more time.

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