It was a headline plastered on every major news outlet — “The Golden State Killer Arrested.”
In 2018, with the use of genetic genealogy, Joseph DeAngelo was apprehended for a series of murders committed in the 1970s and ‘80s.
That was around the same time Jacob Cockcroft began to think about another case — one close to home.
“So, I started seeing stuff about the Golden State Killer and genetic genealogy,” Jacob told Dateline. “I thought, ‘Hey, well, maybe that’s applicable to our case.’”
In 1992, Jacob’s grandmother, Hazelle Fenty, was found dead in a Daytona Beach, Florida, church.
She had been murdered.
“I kind of got obsessed with true crime and now, looking back, I go, ‘Oh, of course. That’s why I’m so interested in it -- because of her case,’” Jacob said.
Hazelle’s case has been unsolved for more than 30 years. Jacob is hoping, like the families of the Golden State Killer’s victims did, that there will one day be justice for his grandmother.
Hazelle was originally from Daytona Beach, Florida, where she raised her three children, Fleta, Paul, and David.
David Cockcroft is Jacob’s father. He’s the youngest of Hazelle’s kids.
“She was actually married three times. Her first marriage, he died of throat cancer, and he was the father of Fleta and Paul. Then she married a guy named James Cockcroft, who was my paternal grandfather, and they had my dad. And then she divorced him, married a guy named Walter Fenty,” Jacob said.
According to Jacob, Hazelle was very independent. “When her first husband died, she had two young kids. She tried to go to college, but she just couldn’t do it because of the kids. And so she started working as an accountant or bookkeeper for some business in Daytona Beach. And she wound up making a living doing that,” he said. “She was also very religious and involved with the church.”
Hazelle raised her children and her youngest, David, eventually married and moved away from Daytona. He and his wife settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Jacob was raised.
Jacob has vague memories of visiting his grandmother. “I remember going to her house on several occasions, taking trips down there, and staying with her,” he recalled. “She was a big collector. She collected these old antique dolls called Kewpie Dolls.”
For Jacob, those trips to Daytona to visit Grandma lasted 14 years. It ended in 1992.
“I was in our home in my room listening to music and I remember hearing a commotion downstairs and just going downstairs and seeing my father on the phone pacing back and forth,” Jacob remembered. “Everybody was kind of confused, not really knowing what was going on.”
On the other end of the line was Jacob’s uncle Sandy telling his father their mother had been murdered.
December 4, 1992
December 4, 1992, was no ordinary day for Hazelle Fenty. It was her 76th birthday. “My father said that she had called him earlier in the day and they had talked, and he’d wished her happy birthday and she was in pretty good spirits,” Jacob told Dateline.
By that point, Hazelle and her husband Walter had split, and she was living alone in Daytona.
She attended Indigo Lakes Baptist Church in Daytona, where she was an ordained deacon and worked as a secretary. According to Jacob, that afternoon, Hazelle “went over to the pastor’s house, John Nichols' house, and had lunch with him and his wife.” Then Hazelle and the pastor went back to the church to do some work.
Jacob says that according to police reports, the pastor left the church around 4:15 p.m., while Hazelle stayed behind making copies.
That evening, the pastor got a concerning call from Hazelle’s eldest son, Sandy. She hadn’t shown up to her birthday dinner. “They call the pastor at 7:00 p.m. and --. The pastor lives very close to the church. He lives like five minutes away by car, and so he agrees to go check on her,” Jacob said.
The pastor pulled into the church and noticed the lights were on in the nursery, a place they shouldn’t have been on. “And that’s where her body was, in the nursery,” Jacob said.
Pastor Nichols has since passed away.
Dateline spoke with Detective Jimmie Flynt of the Daytona Beach Police Department, who confirmed Jacob’s retelling of the events. “When the police arrived, they found her lying on her stomach. There was blood on the floor around the head area,” Flynt said. “She was wearing her blouse, bra, and a T-shirt, and her pants and underwear had been removed. Her shoes were still on.”
The detective says Hazelle’s throat had been slit and she had been sexually assaulted. “Nothing had been disturbed as far as her purse, so we don’t believe robbery was the motive,” he noted.
Authorities believe Hazelle’s murder was a crime of opportunity. “We believe the motive was the sexual assault,” Det. Flynt said.
Jacob Cockcroft finds that one of the most disturbing parts of the case. “Sexual homicides of the elderly is a really rare phenomenon and so it makes it a really kind of bizarre case,” he said. “It’s incredibly violent.”
According to a 1997 report from the U.S. Department of Justice, serious violent crime rates for individuals aged 18 to 21 were 17 times higher than for those aged 65 or older.
Detective Flynt says that at the time of the initial investigation, there was one person of interest who attended the church but, “nothing could be proven to the fact that he actually did this, and he also had a pretty strong alibi.”
“At the time of the killing, there were several rewards offered. There was a lot of press coverage and, you know, we still weren’t getting a whole lot of information,” Flynt said.
The Daytona Beach Police Department has put Hazelle’s case in their Cold Case Playing Cards program — an initiative in which unsolved cases are featured on playing cards provided to prison inmates in the hope of generating leads. Hazelle’s case is featured as the nine of diamonds.
Despite numerous efforts, Hazelle’s case eventually went cold.
A hopeful future
Following his grandmother’s murder, Jacob says there was a cloud of confusion and grief over their family. “Nobody had a vendetta against her. She was this old lady who donated her time to the church and crocheted and collected Kewpie dolls,” he said. “Like, she didn’t have any issues with anybody.”
He recalls the pain of laying his grandmother to rest. “I remember being at the funeral and, and [my father] sitting next to me and crying very hard,” he said. “He never showed very much emotion usually, so it definitely sticks out in my memory.”
Throughout his childhood, Jacob says his grandmother’s death was rarely talked about. “It was just painful, so we just kind of just kind of -- kind of buried it,” he said. “I mean, I wondered, but I didn’t know very much about the case.”
That is, until he decided to do his own digging in 2018 and connected with Detective Flynt. “When I got in touch with Detective Flynt, he told me that they had this small amount of DNA and they were in the process of trying to see if they could get it tested,” Jacob said. “And so, I’ve been talking with him back and forth through that process, as they have sent it off to the lab, waited for the results.”
Detective Flynt confirmed to Dateline that several pieces of evidence were collected at the scene and, in recent years, DNA was sent off to the lab. He said nothing came of the results, but he’s hopeful new technology will provide them with a solid suspect. “As DNA technology changes from year to year we’re hoping that’ll be one of the things that help solve this case,” he said.
The detective also confirmed there are currently two persons of interest in the case.
Jacob is also hopeful new technology will help solve his grandmother’s case, the grandmother who, throughout this process, he’s learned so much about. “I’ve learned so much about her and her life and I had no idea that she was so independent, strong, resourceful,” he said. “She was just a really neat person.”
He believes Hazelle’s case will be solved one day. “I want it to be solved soon. I want it to be solved while my father’s still alive, while my uncle is still alive,” he said. “I think it will be solved. The question is when, I think, if nothing else.”
Anyone with information about Hazelle Fenty’s case is asked to call the Daytona Beach Police Detective Jimmie Flynt at 386-671-5123 or email [email protected] or [email protected].