Boulder Jane Doe reinterred, still unidentified

[Starless]

http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=11338

BOULDER — The body of an unidentified 1954 homicide victim was reburied Tuesday in a small and private ceremony, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office revealed Thursday.

At the urging of local historian Silvia Pettem, the young woman’s body was exhumed in 2004, and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office relaunched the investigation into her unsolved homicide. Her badly beaten body was discovered in Boulder Canyon in 1954.

Pettem worked with sheriff’s Detective Steve Ainsworth for years to try to identify the remains so the body could be reburied with the woman’s real identity. A DNA profile was developed from the remains, and Pettem whittled down a list of potential identities to a young missing woman named Katherine Farrand Dyer.
The investigation, however, did not turn up any family members with whom to compare DNA and confirm the theory.

The woman’s remains were reburied Tuesday in Boulder’s historic Columbia Cemetery. The service was attended by sheriff’s office and parks department officials. Pettem provided flowers.
To learn more about the case, visit the Jane Doe Series archive on the Longmont Times-Call Web site.

[Starless]

Bumping this. Katherine Dyer was in Australia. See "Sizzling Hot News."

[Starless]

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009...live-and-well/

BOULDER, Colo. — A woman who was thought to be a long-unidentified homicide victim has turned up alive in Australia, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.
The development will allow the woman’s family to get in touch with her for the first time in more than 50 years, but it also means authorities do not have any clear leads on the identity of Boulder’s Jane Doe, a young woman whose beaten and partially decomposed body was found in Boulder Canyon in April 1954.
The body was never identified, and in 2004, Boulder historian, author and Camera columnist Silvia Pettem pushed for the cold case to be reopened.
She raised private money to have Jane Doe’s body exhumed and to have DNA testing and a facial reconstruction done. She also combed newspaper and police archives searching for young women who had gone missing in the months before the body was found by two college students.
Katharine Farrand Dyer was reported missing to Denver police in late March 1954, and she was considered the most likely candidate for Jane Doe.
But Dyer has now been found alive and well in Queensland, Australia, where she has been living since 1963, Pettem said. She uses the name Barbara Jones.
A woman who knows Jones, now 84, found an old address book belonging to her and a divorce certificate for Dyer. An Internet search led the woman to the Web site Pettem maintains for her research on the Jane Doe case.
Australian authorities have confirmed Barbara Jones is Dyer, police said. Using the address book, Pettem got in touch with Dyer’s brother and sister, who live in Virginia.
The sister said Dyer had personal reasons for leaving Denver abruptly in 1954, according to Pettem. Dyer briefly returned to Virginia, then moved to California, then Hawaii, and finally to Australia, where she remarried, had a daughter and became an Australian citizen.
Pettem said the woman’s family was shocked to discover that she had been considered a missing person and possible homicide victim.
Pettem had used documents to recreate Dyer’s life from 1948 to 1954, traveling to Flagstaff, Ariz., interviewing people who knew her there and finding an exact spot at the Grand Canyon were Dyer had her picture taken.
“Everyone wants to solve the case, and yet I was relieved to find out that this woman I had come to care about was still alive,” she said.
Pettem, who has a book coming out about the Jane Doe case, said she will continue to work with a team of researchers around the country to find young women who went missing in the early 1950s and rule out those for whom paper trails can be reconstructed after spring 1954.
Enough DNA was recovered from Jane Doe to put a complete profile into several missing-persons databases, and anyone who is related to a missing person from that time period can have his or her own DNA profile entered to look for a match.
Division Chief Phil West of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office called the development a case of “good news, bad news” and said there are now no viable candidates for Jane Doe.

[Starless]

http://www.nptelegraph.com/articles/...s/40000024.txt

The North Platte Telegraph

A woman suspected to have been the 1953 victim of serial killer Harvey Glatman has been found, alive and living in Queensland, Australia. The young murder victim known as Boulder Jane Doe remains unidentified as another promising lead fizzled.

On April 8, 1954, two University of Boulder students hiking above Boulder discovered the nude body of a young woman along the banks of Boulder Creek. It is unknown how long the woman, broken and mangled, lay in the shadows on the Rocky Mountains before she died of exposure.

Her killer was never found, her name never discovered.

When the town of Boulder came together to lay the young woman to rest in Columbia Cemetery, a spray of red gladiolas was nestled near the casket. Written on the card accompanying the flowers was, "To someone's daughter." The community raised enough money to purchase a headstone for the grave: "Jane Doe, April 1954, age about 20 years."

In 1996 Boulder author and historian Silvia Pettem was taking part in the first "Meet the Spirits" reenactment sponsored by the Boulder Historical Society and Historic Boulder, Inc. Pettem heard Jane Doe's story for the first time.


"The grave was marked 'age about 20 years,' which made an impression on me because my own daughters were 19 and 23 at the time," Pettem said. Pettem's book about her search to identify Jane Doe, titled, "Someone's Daughter, in search for justice for Jane Doe," will be released the first week in October.

After reading a clipping file of newspaper articles from 1954 on Jane's murder, Pettem asked the Boulder County Sheriff's Office to re-open the case. The case was re-opened in 2004 and the grave exhumed. A facial reconstruction was done.

When news of Pettem's search to identify Jane Doe spread she began to hear from family members searching for their lost daughters. Jennifer Kitt, North Platte, contacted Pettem, wondering if Jane Doe might be her great-aunt, Twylia May Embrey, who disappeared from North Platte in 1953.

Tests using DNA from Jane Doe and a member of Twylia's family ruled out the possibility that Kitt's relative had been murdered in Colorado. Pettem and Kitt continued to work together to determine Twylia's fate and identify Jane Doe.

Twylia May Embrey had died in Massachusetts in March 2006; never knowing the family she left behind had been searching for her. Kitt learned the fate of her great-aunt three weeks after she died.

Meanwhile, based on circumstantial evidence and a photo superimposition process comparing photos with Jane Doe's skull, Pettem had begun to think Jane Doe was Katherine Farrand Dyer. Searching through newspaper reports from the time, Pettem learned that a missing persons report had been filed on Dyer 10 days before Jane Doe's body was found.

Police records from the period were incomplete, and investigators were unable to determine whether Dyer was ever found. Pettem and her Internet-connected team of researchers had documented Dyer's life from 1948 until March 1954 when the paper trail stopped.

"During the past few years, the press has appealed to the public to locate a family member of Dyer's," Pettem said.

Diligent research and a little luck led to Dyer's location, a nursing home in Queensland, Australia.

While preparing the move to the nursing home, Dyer's caretaker found an old faded address book and a divorce degree belonging to "Katherine Farrand Dyer." Not recognizing the name, the caretaker did an Internet search that led to www.silviapettem.com and the archived articles from 1954 and recent articles speculating that Dyer may have been the Jane Doe murder victim.

With the information from the address book, Pettem contacted Dyer's brother and sister in Virginia. The family had lost contact with Dyer and had never heard of Boulder Jane Doe.

"Once they got over the shock of learning their family member had been a missing person as well as a suspected victim of a homicide, they were able to fill in some of the gaps." Pettem said.

According to family, Dyer left Denver in 1953 for personal reasons. After leaving Denver, she spent several months in Virginia. Leaving Virginia, Dyer moved to California, Hawaii, then in 1963, Australia, where she married and became an Australian citizen. She had one daughter, now deceased.

"Katherine's story, unusual as it may be, has similarities to Twylia May Embrey," Pettem said. "Finally located three weeks after she died, Twylia too had changed her name and started a new life far from home. The Jane Doe case brought closure to her family and I hope it will do so for Katherine's family as well."

Dyer's sister, now 79, had not seen Katherine since 1955. The women are in the process of re-establishing contact, Pettem said.

The Boulder County Sheriffs Office has declined to release Dyer's birth name or the other aliases she has used.

Discovering Dyer's location hasn't changed Pettem's determination to find Jane Doe's identity.

"Eliminating leads is part of the process," Pettem said. "Now the Sheriff's Office, the forensic experts, my fellow researchers and I can move on and refocus our investigation solely on Jane Doe. We are always looking for new leads.

Right now, the trail is cold.

"My fellow researchers [spread out around the country, connected by the Internet] and I are adding and subtracting to our spreadsheet of missing young women," Pettem said Tuesday. "We will keep doing it until we figure out who Jane Doe is."

[Starless]

http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-c...ws/ci_13590397

Boulder County investigators are testing DNA that could solve the mystery of the identity of Boulder's Jane Doe, a young woman whose beaten and partially decomposed body was found in Boulder Canyon in April 1954.
Silvia Pettem -- a Boulder historian, author and Camera columnist who pushed for the cold case to be reopened -- on Sunday said she was contacted a few weeks ago by a woman who thought Jane Doe might be her long-lost sister.
Pettem said the woman didn't come forward earlier because it appeared Jane Doe was Katharine Farrand Dyer, who was reported missing to Denver police in late March 1954.
But Dyer recently was found alive and well in Queensland, Australia, where she has been living since 1963 under the name Barbara Jones.
Pettem said the Boulder County Sheriff's Office is comparing DNA from the exhumed body of Jane Doe with that of the woman's missing sister, and results are expected soon.
"I'm as anxious as everyone else to learn the results," Pettem said.
Pettem, who convinced police to reopen the case in 2004, raised private money to have Jane Doe's body exhumed and to have DNA testing and a facial reconstruction done. She also combed newspaper and police archives searching for young women who had gone missing in the months before the body was found by two college students.
Enough DNA was recovered from Jane Doe to put a complete profile into several missing-persons databases, and anyone who is related to a missing person from that time period can have his or her own DNA profile compared to Doe's.

[Silvia Pettem]

Thanks, everyone, for caring for Boulder Jane Doe. For the latest, see http://www.silviapettem.com/Jane%20Doe.html

[Starless]

This is awsome !!!!!

http://www.dailycamera.com/books/ci_13619945

[Silvia Pettem]

Here's the rest of the story of Boulder Jane Doe – how she came to be identified as Dorothy Gay Howard.

http://www.silviapettem.com/JANE%20D...=1880&zoneid=2

Thanks for caring about this victim,
Silvia

[charlucy]

People Boulder Jane Doe has finally been identified last year as Dorothy Gay Howard, DNA from her younger sister was compared and it was a match, a niece or grandniece or spotted her case and remember an aunt who when missing in 1953

[Silvia Pettem]

Please go to www.boulderjanedoe.com for all information (including news reports from 1954 to 2010) on Jane Doe and her identification as Dorothy Gay Howard