In 1993, basketball star Michael Jordan had it all. He won three NBA championships with his team, the Chicago Bulls, and started starring in ads for big brands like Nike and Gatorade. He finally climbed his way to the top but fell back down after the murder of one of the people closest to him: his father, James Raymond Jordan Sr.

Jordan told ESPN that he and his father “were very close.” The two had an unbreakable bond and shared a father-son relationship most dream of having. As expected, the news of his father's death hit him hard. At first, no one suspected foul play. But when the Jordan family could not make contact with him, Jordan decided to have his private investigative team do some digging about his father's whereabouts. WRAL says only after Jordan Sr.’s car, “was found vandalized and stripped in the woods” near Fayetteville, North Carolina, did the Jordan family officially report him missing. As investigators now know, Jordan Sr. had been returning from a funeral in Charlotte and took a nap in his car. Two best friends, Larry Demery, and Daniel Green, had been planning to rob a nearby motel until they saw an expensive sports car and made the impulsive decision to rob Jordan Sr. instead. Washington Post claims that while conducting the armed robbery, Jordan Sr. woke up, scaring them, prompting one of them to shoot him in the chest, while the other searched the car. They soon realized their colossal mistake when finding and taking the NBA ring off Jordan Sr., which led them to assume they killed Michael Jordan’s father. Panicked, the men drove Jordan Sr. to South Carolina, where they dumped his body off of a bridge. 

11 days later, a body appeared in South Carolina after officials responded to a 911 call made by a fisherman, who claimed he “found a body draped over a tree limb” with a gunshot wound to the chest.  According to WRAL, the body had been beyond recognizable, making it hard to identify the man they called John Doe. Having never established a connection between the body and Jordan Sr., officials had the body cremated, all except the jaws and hands which “were preserved for later identification.” The pieces all started to fall into place after the police found the vandalized car and discovered that the car had been bought in Chicago by a man named Michael Jordan. They identified Jordan Sr. by his dental records and the “fingerprint on the right thumb” which “matched the right thumbprint of Mr. Jordan, whose prints were already on file with authorities,” as said by WRAL. 

Both Demery and Green went to trial, making headlines across the nation. The story of the men planning to rob a motel and diverting their attention to the NBA star's father shocked millions, especially because the supposed best friends told two different stories as to what happened, both blaming each other. As a result, both Demery and Green “were convicted of 1st-degree murder and armed robbery and each got life sentences.” As of today, both Demery and Green currently still serve their life sentences  in jail, while Green still tries to get parole.