“My wife is injured. I need someone here, please.” It was just after 11 p.m. on May 2, 2017, when 37-year-old Jason Crawford called 911 from outside his Coleman, Alabama, home to report that his wife, Tiffany, had been shot in the head.
In an exclusive interview with Saturday’s “48 Hours Report,” “The Mysterious Death of Taffyny Crawford,” which airs Saturday, March 25 at 10/9c on CBS and streams on Paramount Channel+, Jason Crawford told CBS Morning Report: David Bignaud remembers that night vividly. “I felt like it was taking longer and longer for anyone to get there,” he said.
Teviny Crawford/Facebook
Chief Detective Joseph Parrish told Begnaud that when he first listened to the recording of the 911 call, Crawford’s tone caught his ear. “It was very cold,” Parrish said. “It didn’t seem like someone was worried about his wife.” But Parrish says he was more concerned about the fact that Jason refused to answer a question asked by the 911 operator over and over again.
“I asked you ‘who shot her’ and you didn’t answer. Why not?” Bigwood Crawford asked. Crawford replied, “Yeah, I felt like if I said it, it would be true.” Crawford says he couldn’t bring himself to tell a 911 operator that his wife of 32 years, Tiffany, had shot herself.
Body camera footage shows what Cullman County Sheriff deputies found when they arrived on the scene. Tiffany Crawford fell into the driver’s seat of her truck. There was a pink gun in her left hand. Jason Crawford says his wife kept the gun in the driver’s side door of her car for protection. A deputy can be heard in the body cam footage asking Jason, “What happened tonight?” “Uh, I—we were arguing” Crawford replies, “I wouldn’t let her in the house…and the last thing I remember…I was going into the house, and I heard a shot, a scream and then another shot.”Tiffany was shot twice in the head. That night, at least one female sheriff’s deputy believed she had committed suicide.
Cullman County Sheriff Matt Gentry He told Bignow that the morning after the shooting, he decided to turn the case over to the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation. Gentry sensed a potential conflict of interest because Jason’s mother, Rhonda Crawford, worked for him as office manager. “I could have told our men to work, but I want full transparency,” Gentry told Peigno. That’s when State Detective Joe Parish was assigned to the case and began examining the evidence.
With the gun out for testing, the first thing Parrish wanted to see was the truck in which Tiffiny was shot. But on the night of her death, the car was photographed and given to Jason and his family. The next morning—with the sheriff’s permission—the van was cleaned by two family members. “It was weird that they cleaned it up so quickly after something like that,” Parish told Bigno.
There was something else that struck Parrish as strange. Tiffany Crawford was shot once in the left side of her chin and a second time in the left temple. The gun was found in her left hand, but Tiffany was right-handed. Two shots to the head are rare in suicide attempts, Parrish says, but two shots using a non-dominant hand to pull the trigger seemed nearly impossible to an investigator long ago.
A week after the shooting, Parrish brought Jason Crawford in for questioning. For the first time, Crawford spoke in detail about a discovery he made on the night his wife died. He tells Parrish that Tiffiny was having an affair, and that’s what they were arguing about. “I said, ‘You wrecked our house.’ I was like, ‘You’re not a part of this anymore,'” Crawford told Parrish. They argued for about an hour, Crawford says, and then he went inside to get Tiffiney her work uniform so she could leave. According to Crawford, no sooner had he entered their home “he heard a shot, a scream, and another shot.”
When the gun was finally tested for DNA, only trace amounts were detected. Two samples were identified as male but could not be matched to any individual. The third specimen was so small that there is no way of knowing whether it belonged to a male or a female. For Parrish, it looked as if the revolver had been wiped clean and then placed in Tiffany’s hand.
A backlog at the state ballistics lab would delay the autopsy report of Taveney Crawford by a year, but state medical examiner Dr. Valerie Green told Bignow she had doubts about Jason Crawford’s story from the start. “I think the thing that made me think there could be something else going on in this case was that gunshot wound on the left side of Mrs. Crawford’s head,” she said.
Green says that based on the absence of gunpowder particles and abrasions around the wound on Tiveney’s left temple, she concluded that the shot had to be fired from at least 10 inches away. “This suggests that she, you know, sticks her arm out over 10 inches and tries to shoot herself… without saying that’s impossible. But this is not likely. “It wasn’t particularly likely,” says Green, “because Crawford reports that when he found Tiffiny in her truck, the door was locked.” That was worrying to me,” says Green. For you to be able to hold up a gun and shoot yourself in the head… It would be hard to do, and that’s a small space.”
On March 8, 2018, Green released her findings and declared Tiffiny’s murder a homicide. More than two months later, the Cullman County District Attorney’s office presented their case to a grand jury. Jason Crawford has been accused and charged with the murder of his wife. In an interview with Begnaud, Assistant District Attorney Jeff Roberts said, “I couldn’t see who did it. He’s the only one who had a motive to do it, for one thing.”
“We don’t believe Jason is guilty of this at all,” Crawford’s attorney, Robert Totten, told Benaud. Totten says the state’s case was entirely circumstantial and that investigators found no physical evidence that Crawford killed his wife. “They didn’t see blood or anything on him. They didn’t find anything to indicate that he had recently fired a firearm.” Totten says it was clear to him that Taffyny Crawford had committed suicide because her marriage was ending. “I think she gave up… I think she just broke down and decided to end it.”
Jason Crawford would spend the next four years in bond, awaiting trial. He says that everyone, including his mother-in-law, supported him. “Of all my circle of people who, like my family and friends and other things, never questioned it… they never questioned that I would not kill my wife.”
The trial began in November 2022. Juror #19 Megan Brooke told Bignow that when the jury finally got to the case, they deliberated for several hours without a verdict. Then they requested access to a 911 recording.
About 30 minutes later, they announced that they had come to a decision. “So calling 911 sealed the deal,” Bigno asked LeBroc, “That was it,” she flatly said.
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