Twenty years ago, late on a stormy night, Ali Gilmore seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
She got home around 11 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006, after wrapping her shift at Publix, where she worked nights and weekends on top of her full-time job with the Florida Department of Health. Then four-months pregnant, she began to unwind after a long day.
But Gilmore, 30, didn’t show up for work the next day or the following Monday, prompting coworkers at DOH to go check on her.
They found her car parked in the driveway of her house on Loraine Court, in what was then the new Wilson Green subdivision. After getting no answer at the door, they called police.
Tallahassee Police Department Maj. Jeff Mahoney, then a homicide detective, arrived at her house not long after.
“I recall her bed being made, but pulled back like you were just laying in it, reading a prenatal book,” he said. “Her Publix uniform was there from working that night. So we know she got home.”
Detectives looked for signs of suspicious activity but found none.
“There was nothing obvious where we were like ‘this could be a homicide,’ ” he said. “There’s no blood anywhere. Her keys were missing, but her purse and everything was in the car. The house was locked, and so we believe she left voluntarily. That’s kind of the working theory.”
But the mystery remained about whom she left with and what exactly happened to her after that. Police have long considered her case a likely homicide. Now, it’s one that the Big Bend Cold Case Task Force is determined to solve.
The task force, which formed in 2023, is a joint initiative by TPD, the Leon County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the State Attorney’s Office.
“My hope is the way it is with every homicide family,” State Attorney Jack Campbell told the Democrat. “I want to be able to recover her so they can bury their child. And I want to be able to answer what’s happened. And then I want to get justice, obviously.”
Police home in on person of interest
Police looked at Ali Gilmore’s estranged husband, James Gilmore, as a potential suspect early in the investigation. But Mahoney said he isn’t believed to have been involved. Among other things, he had an alibi — he was staying at his brother’s house — and later passed a voice stress test.
“He’s always been cooperative,” he said.
Investigators instead turned their attention to another man, Dwight Aldridge, who had been seeing Gilmore and is believed by police to be the father of her unborn child.
“He was a person of interest and still is,” Mahoney said.
In 2021, on the 15th anniversary of Gilmore’s disappearance, TPD released new information about the case to WCTV, including more details about a phone call Gilmore got at 12:48 a.m. on Feb. 3, 2006.
For the first time, investigators said that Aldridge made the call. They allege he lied in an interview with investigators about where he and his cellphone were the night of her disappearance.
“His phone handset was in the area of her neighborhood at that time,” Mahoney said. “And then he was saying he was somewhere else, completely different from where that area is. It was a distance away from where he said he was, which is a lie. So obviously that’s a concern.”
Mahoney told the Demcrat that investigators can show that there was “some conversation” during the phone call.
Police also revealed another piece of evidence: Gilmore had circled a date in October as her conception date and written Aldridge’s initials beside it. Mahoney confided in family members that she believed Aldridge was the dad.
“The last person to see her or have contact with her is him,” Mahoney said. “He’s the father of her unborn child, and he’s no longer cooperative with us.”
Aldridge has never been charged with any crime related to Gilmore’s disappearance.
‘We need that one person to come forward’
In 1998, a day after Dwight Aldridge’s 17th birthday, he was arrested on armed robbery charges in Calhoun County and sentenced to five years in prison. He got out in May 2003, less than three years before Gilmore went missing.
After Gilmore’s disappearance, he enrolled at Florida State University and earned a degree in nursing. He was issued a nursing license in 2021, according to DOH records. His address of record was listed as both Tallahassee and Kissimmee, where he now resides.
And while Gilmore’s family knew she and Aldridge were dating, he didn’t describe it that way in a 2009 interview with the Democrat. Speaking publicly for the first time, he said, “Ali and I were friends.”
Aldridge declined to discuss specifics at the time. He said he didn’t recall the last time he spoke with her or what her state of mind was at the time.
“It’s been so long, I don’t remember,” said Aldridge, who did not return a call from the Democrat this week.
Police believe someone remembers, however, and that the case could be solved if they would just come forward.
“People know,” Mahoney said. “People talk. Family knows or an ex-girlfriend or girlfriend. Dwight was dating many different women at the time. Whether it’s a tight-knit family, a brother, a cousin, a mother or father, someone knows something about this case and that’s what we’re looking for.”
TPD Det. Mark Ray, who was a freshman in college when Gilmore disappeared, is now assigned to the cold case task force. He said missing persons cases are the toughest for both investigators and family members.
“Basically, a person just vanishes, and they have no answers, and we have no answers to give them,” he said. “So we need that one person to come forward that has information that will lead us either to her remains or give us the information that we need to move forward.”
Police Chief Lawrence Revell said the whole reason the cold case unit was put together was to address unsolved cases like Gilmore’s.
“It’s one of our longest missing persons cases,” he said. “So to be able to bring finality to that family, one way or the other, would certainly do a lot for them. That’s what we work for, bringing closure to families and bringing justice to families.”
How to help police solve the case
Anyone with information about Ali Gilmore’s disappearance is asked to call the Big Bend Cold Case Task Force at 850-410-7611, the Tallahassee Police Department at 850-891-4200, or the anonymous Big Bend Crime Solvers line at 850-574-TIPS (7477).
Contact Jeff Burlew at jburlew@tallahassee.com or 850-599-2180.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: ‘People know’: TPD seeks info 20 years after Ali Gilmore disappearance
Reporting by Jeff Burlew, Tallahassee Democrat / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
