In the autumn of 2022, a long and troubling silence fell over the family of Zachary Steed Coats. Zachary, a 31-year-old White man from Wildomar, California, had not been heard from in several months. His concerned family, unable to reach him, eventually reported him missing and requested that authorities in Alabama perform a welfare check at a residence.
On the morning of October 21, 2022, Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at a home in the 3000 block of Raceway Parkway in
Mount Olive. When no one came to the door, deputies surveyed the property and made a disturbing find: an area of earth that looked like a freshly dug grave. A trained cadaver dog was brought to the scene and quickly alerted to the presence of human remains. Deputies secured a search warrant, and upon excavating the site, they unearthed a body. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office later confirmed the victim was Zachary Coats.
The case was immediately classified as a homicide. As the investigation unfolded, authorities determined that Zachary had been shot to death on September 30, 2022, weeks before his body was found. The discovery in the backyard led to the arrest of the woman living at the home, 39-year-old Christal Elaine Skelton. She was charged with abuse of a corpse and held in the Jefferson County Jail on a $300,000 bond.
The investigation did not end there. On November 4, 2022, deputies served a second arrest warrant, taking 62-year-old William Vaughan McKnight into custody. He faced the more severe charges of murder and abuse of a corpse. McKnight was booked into the Jefferson County Jail with his bond set at $400,000. Meanwhile, Christal Skelton had been released two days earlier, on November 2, after posting her bond. As of November 2022, the case was proceeding through the legal system, with one suspect charged with murder and the other facing charges related to the concealment of Zachary's body.
