Here's a cold-case story reported by AL.com's Carol Robinson. In 1995, a man named Chad Singleton died. We don't have any details on that, and it probably doesn't matter to this story. Sometime after that, an inmate serving time for cocaine possession in Raymond, Mississippi, escaped during a work assignment. That man's name was Patrick Grayson Spann, but we now know that he assumed the name of Chad Singleton. Spann, as Singleton, then lived on Overlook Road in Blountsville, Alabama, where he fathered two daughters. Witnesses say that in October 2004 he drove away from Overlook Road and didn't come back. In 2005 hunters found human remains along some railroad tracks off Highway 31 in Blount County. An ID on the body led authorities to a woman who said Singleton had disappeared the year before, but they weren't able to make a positive identification at the time. The case went cold. Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey reopened the case last year and hired Moxxy Forensic Investigations to help with genetic genealogical research. They matched the daughters of so-called Chad Singleton with a possible brother. And once that brother's DNA was matched up with a tooth from Singleton's remains, they knew Singleton was actually Spann. So the identification part is solved, but the death isn't. Authorities do not believe the death was of natural causes. Spann was 32 when he died, and he was found with a .22 revolver with five of the six loaded rounds spent. | 