Cheryl Ann Wick

Who was Cheryl Ann Wick?

Wick told differing stories about her past, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. She told her friend Andrea Cooksey that she used to be a stripper, was from out of town and had two kids raised by her mother with whom she didn't get along. To others, she had said she was in the witness protection programme and that her father was in the Mafia. Some people had heard that she was wanted for bank robberies on the East Coast. Police suspected that she had been involved in the November 12, 1988 unsolved murder of truck driver Dwayne McCorkendale. To a volunteer at the Salvation Army in El Dorado, she had shared a story about living on 1100 Cadiz Street in Dallas which was the location of a homeless shelter. She said that a daughter had been taken from her while there and that she had been unable to get the child back because she was using another name. Her earliest verified location is Dallas, Texas where she was arrested for prostitution. She also worked at a KFC there. After leaving Dallas, she traveled to Shreveport, Louisiana before going to El Dorado in early 1991. She also worked as a topless dancer, using the name Mercedes, in Little Rock, Arkansas prior to her death and was found to have lived with a family in Irving, Texas.

Wick met James McAlphin while in Dallas. They began a relationship sometime after which Wick would often find herself in the emergency room to treat injuries suffered at the hands of McAlphin. Before McAlphin, Wick had been involved with men known as Tyronne and J.D. In June 1991, Wick finally left McAlphin and moved in with a friend named Andrea Cooksey. McAlphin continued to reach out to her threatening her after the move out. On July 10, he managed to get her to come over to his room at the Whitehall Motel with an offer of money. A neighbor, Roy Charles Menon, witnessed part of the interaction between Wick and McAlphin that night when he stopped by to ask for the return of some cassette tapes he had lent out. Wick had indicated to Menon that he should talk to McAlphin and attempted to leave going out into the parking lot before McAlphin stopped her, hit her and dragged her back into the room as Menon left. From next door, Menon heard the two arguing back and forth before a gunshot ended the dispute. Witnesses then saw McAlphin flee, getting into his vehicle and speeding off.

McAlphin was soon arrested and charged with first degree murder and second degree battery. He denied killing Wick claiming she had shot herself committing suicide and that he had only hit her. The police dismissed his claim. McAlphin further refused to identify the decedent unless the police would do something for him. With McAlphin not being cooperative the police looked to Wicks' possessions to glean her identity. There they found a social security card and an identification card with her photo that identified her as Cheryl Ann Wick. The real Cheryl Ann Wick was found to be still alive. Wick theorized her social security and identification information had been stolen while she was working as a dancer for a Minneapolis company. The police were left dumbfounded with no clue as to the true identity of Mercedes/Wick.

McAlphin claimed to know the true identity of Mercedes and offered to reveal it in exchange for $4,000. To bolster his claim, he has shared select information. McAlphin has claimed that Mercedes had been on the streets since she was 16, when an African American man she fell in love with forced her into prostitution in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. According to McAlphin, by the time she was an adult she came to do it willingly. He further shared that Mercedes had avoided being trafficked to Mexico by developing a relationship with a pimp named Jeffrey "JJ" Davis of Dallas before running away with another pimp named Tyrone. McAlphin has also claimed that Mercedes grew up being friends with three girls who were abducted and trafficked in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Police have dismissed McAlphin as unreliable.

A second cousin of the victim living in Alabama was identified by a genealogist using genetic genealogy after uploading the unidentified woman's autosomal DNA to the GED match database. The cousin did not recognize the victim but stated she resembled members of the family.

El Dorado Jane Does' murderer served his sentence, but her true identity remains a mystery, despite a wealth of information being available.