By John Howell

One year after Jessica Chambers was killed by a person or persons who burned her alive, authorities are painstakingly piecing together a case that will ultimately bring those responsible to justice, Sheriff Dennis Darby said.

“This investigation has gotten kind of dropped from the news, but for us, it goes on 24/7,” Darby said Thursday. “This is never going cold.”

“Us” includes the multiple agencies that were allied followed the grisly murder, including the F.B.I., the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department and perhaps others, the sheriff said, along with the Panola County Sheriff’s Department.

Shreds of minute pieces of physical evidence and electronic data have been cobbled together and point to a suspect or suspects, but investigators are proceeding cautiously because of the “difficulty in compiling a complex case that will satisfy a prosecutor,” he said.

Firefighters found Chambers, 19, badly burned and barely alive when they responded to what had been called in as a car fire on Herron Road near Courtland December 6, 2014.

The heinous murder attracted national media attention and fanned flames of internet and social media rumors for months.

The investigation triggered the most extensive coordination of investigative assets ever to concentrate on a crime in Panola County. From its start Darby and District Attorney John Champion cited a dearth of “street talk” that informants usually overhear about crimes and pass along to law enforcement.

And though it still stands, even the large reward offer —$54,000 — has thus far failed to generate useful leads.

Darby often refers to the case of Holly Bobo, abducted in Parsons, Tenn. in 2011 with no trace until three years later when authorities got a tip in 2014 that led them to the discovery of her body and arrests of men they charged with her kidnapping and murder.

“You don’t wake up any day and not think of this,” Darby said of the law enforcement officials investigating Chambers’ homicide.