Desta's Story

The Story You Should Know: Who Desta Was

Maybe you didn’t know Desta Dodson-Byrd personally, but in many ways, you did know her. Or someone just like her.

She was an extraordinarily average girl.  Born and raised in the Birmingham, Alabama area, she was the youngest child in a blended family. Growing up, she was a good student, never much of a trouble-maker, the kind of kid who makes her parents proud, the kind of kid you see every single day.

By the time she was a teenager, though, she’d blossomed into someone more noticeable: a petite, vivacious, brown-haired beauty with a big smile and expressive eyes. Desta had a beautiful wardrobe of stylish clothes she’d bought for herself while working at an upscale department store; she also had hordes of people in her life who thought of her as their best friend. As a result of this, she was a popular girl in school. She was one of those girls we all know: the beautiful one who was attractive inside and out, with hugs for everyone, a bright smile for every situation.

By the time she’d reached her late teens, Desta had become a huge fan of the 80’s rock band Def Leppard. She went to their concerts whenever she could, sometimes traveling with the band, and, having won several beauty pageants in high school, it surprised no one when she appeared in several of the group’s music videos. Desta was not a wild child, though. “She had her head on straight,” her father Ronnie Dodson told several journalists shortly after his daughter’s death. In fact, not long after graduating from Minor High School, she took a job with the Social Security Administration, a job she kept until the time of her murder. She was also known to have volunteered at the local animal shelter, and friends recount that, whenever they needed support, she was the one they called.

When Desta reached her 20’s, she was dating Jody Byrd, a young man she had known but not dated while they both attended Minor High School.  On the outside, they seemed like a perfect couple.  Some of Desta’s closest friends, however, saw signs of trouble. But Desta was in love, and thus after 5 years of courtship, she and Jody were eventually married. That was 1993.

Like many young brides, though, after her marriage, Desta began to lose contact with the friends who had once been such a huge part of her life. “They both were very private people,” her father remembered. “Their social life was centered around them,” Mr. Dodson said, recounting that Jody and Desta even rode to work together.

But, on February 25, 1999, Desta Dodson-Byrd's life story changed dramatically from the average, girl-next-door who had a smile for everyone to a senseless, unsolved murder.

The Story That Shouldn’t Be: Her Murder

A few hours after dark on a Thursday evening late in the winter of 1999, Jody Byrd found his wife’s body next to the driveway in the front yard of the home the young couple owned together. She had been shot once at close range above her left ear with a .22 caliber rifle that belonged to her husband. There were no signs of forced entry into the house, and Desta had not been sexually assaulted. Beyond that, investigators have been reluctant to share information on the murder.

It was known by many, however, that Desta had missed work that day and the day before, complaining of nausea. She was seen a few hours before her death with her beloved Siberian husky, Dakota, beside her, as she went through the drive-thru at a local pharmacy, picking up a prescription to help ease her symptoms. She had also spoken to her mother several times that day, but Jody, her husband, was the last person to talk to her. He is reported to have recalled receiving a phone call from Desta sometime around 6 pm that evening, about 90 minutes before he found her lifeless body.

Because her murder took place in rural Bibb County, a county with no homicide investigations bureau, the case was immediately turned over to the Alabama Bureau of Investigations (ABI). The first ABI agent to have the case, James Martin, told reporters a few months after the murder that the agency “had a suspect from day one. That suspect has not been eliminated, and the focus of the investigation will not be changed until then.” This statement left Desta’s family and friends hopeful.

But by the second anniversary of Desta’s murder, there was another ABI agent on the case, a veteran agent named Joe Brzezinski, who was not as optimistic. He told reporters that the agency was understaffed, overworked, spread too thin across a jurisdiction that was too large for the five agents it then staffed. He did hold out hope, saying that “chances are good, though, that this case will be solved.”

Since then, however, there seems to have been little or no further investigation into the murder of Desta Dodson-Byrd. Beyond the unanswered questions and even the unasked questions, her friends and family knew it would be a difficult case in that there were no obvious suspects, the young murder victim having been far too friendly to have had very many enemies in her life.

But she clearly had at least one enemy, someone who obviously wanted her dead. And thus far, almost 11 years later, as a result of a crime not investigated, a crime overlooked by the media, and a crime forgotten by the ABI, someone has gotten away with murder.