https://www.al.com/pr/2007/09/the_jane_doe_file.htmlThe 'Jane Doe' fileUpdated Mar 29, 2019; Posted Sep 14, 2007
By Paul Cloos, Press-Register
The woman was shot in the head, her body partially covered by a garbage bag and thrown into a murky creek in south Mobile County in 1976. Her hands were chopped off, leaving no fingerprints to help identify her.
She had no teeth because they had fallen out or been removed over the years, long before she was killed. Another form of identification eliminated.
For more than 30 years, those two things have crippled investigators' attempts to identify the woman and track down her killer or killers.
(Photo courtesy Mobile County Sheriff's Office)
A case file at the Mobile County Sheriff's Office holds evidence related to the 1976 death of a woman whose body was found dumped in a creek. The woman remains unidentified.
Duncan Crow, one of the Press-Register reporters covering the story at the time, said recently that seeing the woman's body pulled from the creek was an unsettling experience.
Crow, who was 19, said it upset him even more when Mobile County deputies told him that the corpse was missing its hands.
"It was disturbing, for obvious reasons," he recalled. "You don't think about stuff like that, normal people don't."
Now an assistant state attorney general and assistant counsel with the Alabama Department of Revenue, Crow said he had been a naive teenager who assumed the victim would be quickly identified and the person who killed her captured.
"As you get older, and I've been practicing law for 22 years, you just start to understand that crimes like that don't always get solved," he said.
Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran, however, said recently that he believes the killer or killers still can be found if investigators one day are able to identify the woman.
"In a case like that, the person purposely abused the body to prevent identification," the sheriff said. "Once the body is identified, the prime suspect would stand out. The biggest key in that case is the identification of the body."
Technological advances, such as DNA testing, which were not available in 1976, could be used to help solve the case, Cochran said.
And there is always a possibility that someone could come forward and confess to the crime or be identified by an acquaintance as the killer, he said.
The woman's handless body was found about 4:30 p.m. May 18, 1976, floating in Sessions Creek at the Potter Tract Road bridge, about a mile south of Grand Bay.
She was discovered by a boy who had gone to the creek to shoot at fish. The body was floating in the slow-moving creek almost beneath the bridge in about 3 feet of murky water.
According to news accounts at the time, the woman had been shot once in the head with what appeared to be a small-caliber gun. The bullet went into the back of her head and exited in front.
It was determined that the woman was white and in her mid-50s. She was about 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. She had dark brown hair cut to about 4 inches long.
She was found on a Tuesday, and authorities determined that she most likely had been killed two days earlier.
Sheriff's Office investigators said at the time that the victim was fully clothed, but that her feet were bare. Investigators said she wore a yellow pullover blouse and green slacks and the strap of her brassiere was cut in the back.
There was a small pool of blood on the bridge, and a tiny piece of plastic bag, possibly from the bag over the upper part of her body, was found near the blood, according to news reports.
Several people, most of them from the Jackson County, Miss., area, tried unsuccessfully to identify the woman, but she continues to be listed only as Jane Doe, investigators said.
After studying old reports of the slaying, Cochran, who retired as Mobile's police chief prior to being elected sheriff, said he believes the killer did not live in Mobile County at the time because so many people from Mississippi came forward to try to identify the woman.
Regardless of where the killer lived, Cochran said, the killer or killers were familiar with the county and knew of a remote area to dump the body.
Crow said that he would like to see the crime solved.
"Maybe somebody saw something, saw something on the bridge that day. They will remember something they didn't remember at the time," he said. "Anything can happen, I guess."