The Lost and the Found

https://identifyus.org/en/cases/10796

Case Information
Status Unidentified
Case number NH-75-887
Date found August 16, 1975 10:50
Date created November 27, 2012 13:10
Date last modified November 17, 2016 15:40
Investigating agency
date QA reviewed

Local Contact (ME/C or Other)
Agency State of CT Chf Med Examiners Ofc
Phone 860-679-3980
Case Manager
Name Michelle Clark
Phone 860-573-8583

Exclusions
The following people have been ruled out as being this decedent:
First Name Last Name Year of Birth State LKA
Denise Sheehy 1954 New York
Denise Sheehy 1954 New York
Deborah Spickler 1955 Connecticut

http://unidentified.wikia.com/wiki/New_Haven_County_Jane_Doe_(1975)

Unidentified Wiki

New Haven County Jane Doe (1975)

New Haven County Jane Doe was a young woman murdered in Connecticut in 1975.

The victim's unclothed body was found wrapped in a tarp in a drainage ditch. She was bound with antennae wire at the neck, waist and knees. Paint drops on the tarp have led investigators to believe that her killer may have had a connection with the paint trade.

The woman had died approximately four to five days before.

The victim had hazel eyes.
She had brown hair.
She may have had a mole under her chin.
She may have had a rhinoplasty on her nose.
She likely had braces at one time.

New Haven County Jane Doe



Sex Female
Race White
Location East Haven, Connecticut
Found August 16, 1975
Unidentified for 41 years
Postmortem interval Days
Body condition Recognizable face
Age approximation 18-28
Height approximation 5'5 - 5'6
Weight approximation 125 pounds
Cause of death Asphyxiation (homicide)

http://www.nhregister.com/article/NH/20120204/NEWS/302049947

Missing in Connecticut: Giving a name to the 'missing missing,' databases and DNA may help identify unnamed remains (video)

Dr. Henry Lee: Chief Emeritus of the Connecticut State Police, Founder and Chair Professor of the Forensic Science Program at the University of New Haven 1/19/12. Photo by Peter Hvizdak / New Haven Register January 19, 2012 ph2442 Connecticut
By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, Investigations Editor

POSTED: 02/04/12

The region's nameless dead have been found floating in the Connecticut River, hidden in ditches and dumped in forests and near highways. Around the state, human remains have been found by street sweepers, hunters, hikers and passers-by and unearthed by construction crews.

Police have worked for years trying to figure out who they are -- a young woman found murdered in East Haven still remains nameless after 37 years.

East Haven police Detective Sgt. Bruce Scobie said police would like to solve the mystery, know her name and capture her killer.

Scobie, a father himself, thinks about Jane Doe's parents and relatives.

"You wonder if this person had family somewhere at one time," Scobie said. "Are they out there wondering? Did they pass on, never knowing what happened to her? It is hard to believe no one ever missed her. There must be someone out there with a story of a friend or cousin who disappeared. Someday, I'd like to hear that a name has been put to her."

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center, the country's number of unidentified deceased was at 7,551 as of Jan. 1. However, it isn't mandatory for law enforcement to enter all cases into this database, according to a center spokeswoman.

FACEBOOK PAGE: Missing in CT

RELATED: Investigators hope circulating photos will help identify unknown remains

U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-5, who has proposed the federal "Help Find the Missing Act," or "Billy's Law," in honor of missing Waterbury man William Smolinski Jr., estimates there are 40,000 sets of unidentified remains nationwide. Murphy's proposal seeks to create an organized system to match remains to missing people, and an incentive grants program for law enforcement and medical examiners to report information to NCIC, the U.S. Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, and the National DNA Index System.

"Unless you put information about unidentified remains on NamUs, you are cutting out the most important investigators, the loved ones of the missing," Murphy said, as NamUs is open to the public. "The Internet is perfectly positioned to solve these cases, yet we aren't using it to its capacity."

On Friday, NamUs, which launched in 2007, listed 41 cases of unidentified remains found in Connecticut, going back to 1972. It listed 8,165 open unidentified remains cases for the country.

While various databases can help match the missing to the unidentified, investigators frequently aren't using all available databases. Older cases predate DNA extraction technology. In many area cases, the unidentified bodies were buried, so investigators don't have DNA to add to databases unless they exhume the bodies.

Of the 41 cases of unidentified remains listed on NamUs for Connecticut, only three show DNA samples have been submitted, with no DNA samples taken even for many cases in years when the technology was available, the site shows.

Under state law effective in October 2011, in cases involving remains where homicide is suspected, the office of the chief state medical examiner has to obtain tissue samples, bone and hair for DNA typing, and these samples must go to the Division of Scientific Services within the Department of Public Safety.

While several cases of unidentified remains from years ago have been added to NamUs in recent months, the NamUs list isn't complete. State Victim Advocate Michelle Cruz said plans are under way for statewide training for law enforcement on how to use NamUs.

East Haven's Jane Doe, for example, isn't on there yet, though police say they are considering including her.

A truck driver found her body Aug. 16, 1975, in a drainage ditch behind a department store on Frontage Road. The white woman was found wrapped in a canvas tarp with black wire around her neck, waist and knees. Her cause of death was asphyxiation by suffocation, according to police.

Police have circulated an artist's rendering of the brunette, who is believed to have been 18 to 28 years old. They have featured her case on The Doe Network. This has led to occasional leads, but none have led to Doe's identity.

Scobie said police are discussing exhuming her body from a Hamden cemetery to try to get DNA from her remains.

Police have Jane Doe's dental records, but she was found in an era that pre-dates the widespread use of DNA testing, Scobie said.

Scobie said having her DNA may not lead to any matches, because there may not be DNA available from women who went missing back then for comparison.

"Exhuming her body is something that has been discussed," Scobie said. "If the laboratory said there would be viable DNA, we would probably do it."

Also, while an artist did a rendering of Doe years ago, Scobie said computer technology has advanced so much that using her skull today could result in a more accurate image of what she looked like.

Henry C. Lee, forensics expert, professor and founder of the University of New Haven Forensic Research Training Center, said technology has changed tremendously in the years since the discovery of East Haven's Jane Doe. According to Lee, in older cases of unidentified remains, DNA samples weren't taken, but with today's technology, DNA can be extracted from hair and bone.

Lee also cautioned that getting DNA from the remains won't necessarily solve the East Haven mystery.

"It is so many years ago, it would be hard to track down family to get the known DNA (for comparison)," Lee said. "If we don't know where the victim came from, we don't have known DNA to compare with, and that becomes shooting in the dark, and makes the case very difficult."

Scobie said he doesn't believe Jane Doe was from the area, as he believes someone would have reported her missing, and she would have been recognized back then from publicity about the case. It is possible her parents are dead, he said.

"The theory is she was killed elsewhere and then brought to that location," Scobie said. "I personally don't think the crime occurred very far away. She was pretty well bound, tied and gagged. Someone took their time with her. I think it was a premeditated killing."

Doe possibly had a small mole on her chin, and she had pierced ears and wore small gold circular earrings, according to Scobie.

"There was an item used to gag her which leads me to believe the homicide was committed locally," he said.

Police don't want to be specific about the item used to gag the victim, because if police ever get a confession, only the killer could identify it, Scobie said.

Police believe she had been there up to five days before her discovery.

"Whoever put her there, did not want her found," Scobie said. "There are a lot of theories. I'm not sure a person who was just traveling through would take the time to conceal a body like that."

Over the years, leads about her possible identity have come through the Doe Network, but they have all been ruled out through dental or medical comparisons, according to Scobie.

According to Scobie, police have a suspect in Jane Doe's death, Glen Askeborn, who served prison time for a similar slaying in Maine. Askeborn, who dressed in women's clothes, used the name Samantha Glenner also, according to police.

According to the Maine Department of Corrections, Askeborn was released from prison in September 2009.

"The body in that (Maine) case was concealed and disposed of in a similar manner, and we went to interview (Askeborn) in a Maine prison," Scobie said. "He denied any knowledge of it. He lived in East Haven at the time of this (Jane Doe) incident, and there were a lot of similarities. Personally, I do think he was involved, but we have no direct evidence."

http://www.doenetwork.org/media/news70.html

Cold cases frustrate cops and families, but scientific advances may help

October 10, 2004
By: By Marissa Yaremich , Register Staff
New Haven Register

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of stories on unsolved deaths. These cold cases remain under investigation, waiting for a clue that could unlock the past and ease families’ grief.

She left this world in a pauper’s casket with no name and an unmarked grave — far less, some say, than she deserved.

While nearby family plots radiate with colorful blossoms and telltale tombstones, her barren plot rests in the shadows of Hamden’s State Street Cemetery alongside a rusty chain-link fence and a clump of crabgrass.

"I get calls all the time for (unidentified) people who died in the 1970s to put in a stone for them," said the cemetery’s caretaker, Randy Guevin. But no one, he said, ever calls to identify this woman, known to East Haven police as Jane Doe.

The woman’s strangled body was found by a truck driver on a rainy Aug. 16, 1975, floating in a drainage ditch behind the former Bradlees department store on Frontage Road. She was wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin and she was gagged and bound by black antenna wire around her neck, waist and knees. With little evidence to go on except her physical features and the facts of her discovery, authorities have spent the past three decades baffled by the mystery woman.

"Obviously, nobody ever missed her because they never took the time to report her missing," Police Sgt. Robert Flodquist said. Regardless, police said they are determined to put a name, aside from Jane Doe, at the top of the slim manila envelope containing her entire case history in hopes of piecing together her story and nabbing her killer.

"It’s a very difficult case," Flodquist said. "In most homicides, you know the victim and are (only) searching for the murderer." At the time of her death, however, police were unable immediately to pinpoint her identity because of the nonexistence of DNA testing and any fingerprint records belonging to her. The white, 20-something’s dental chart, which showed probable orthodontic care, also proved fruitless, since it did not match any of those contained in the dozens of missing person reports that poured in from police departments nationwide. The possibility that she had plastic surgery on her nose may also have thrown off anyone who knew her natural facial features. The absence of a driver’s license solidified her anonymity. As a result, police have spent the last 29 years "working backward" in an attempt to determine Jane Doe’s personality, hometown and acquaintances.

Her murderer left police with slim evidence at the scene. Police believe she was killed somewhere else and dumped on Frontage Road. No fingerprints. No footprints. Not even a single eyelash was left behind. Only dried white paint spots on the tarpaulin, Flodquist noted, might indicate the murderer had connections with the painting trade.

Police still ponder varied versions of how the 125-pound woman’s 5-foot 6-inch body wound up in a 2-foot-deep open culvert. "The odds are against us, but we have a lot of confidence and … hope we’ll be able to solve it," Flodquist said. Some police officers, including Flodquist, have speculated that the hazel-eyed brunette was a transient and possibly dumped in the shopping plaza by someone in a vehicle that could quickly flee on nearby Interstate 95. Other police sources said her bundled body may have been "stuffed inside a 30-inch drain pipe upstream of the drainage ditch," which heavy rains later washed down the small river. Still others wondered if she fell victim to a gangland killing.

Just two weeks before her body was found, authorities discovered a convicted bookkeeper floating in the Quinnipiac River, wrapped in a sleeping bag tied with chains and ropes. Despite all the possibilities, no leads ever verified the hypotheses. Only her cause of death remains certain. As indicated in an autopsy report, Jane Doe died of asphyxiation by suffocation at least five days before the truck driver’s chance encounter. Mostly, police have been at the mercy of others to provide any new leads, which Flodquist said have been sporadic at best.

According to Inspector Guy Nappi, who has been with the department for 37 years, the department’s most promising lead regarding the suspect’s potential identity surfaced a couple of years ago. A serial killer in a Maine jail who was known for killing women and roaming Vermont, Connecticut and New Hampshire sparked local authorities’ attention. "He alluded to being in the Greater New Haven area (around the time of Doe’s death), and he mentioned something about being in a shopping area," said Nappi. But police eventually considered it a dead end because he never admitted to murdering or harming anyone at that time. His conversation also "wasn’t too lucid," Nappi noted.

A sketch of the woman was submitted in the 1990s to The Doe Network Web site (www.doenetwork.org).

The site assists law enforcement in North America, Australia and Europe to solve cold cases by featuring photos and information regarding unidentified and missing persons. In late July, one Web surfer who viewed the local composite rejuvenated police hope, said Flodquist.

The unidentified tipster told police the woman resembled a Bell telephone co-worker of hers in the 1970s and provided an undisclosed name. However, police were unable to locate the named person’s family and have since lost hope it will result in some answers. Until they find otherwise, Guevin said Jane Doe will always have a home at the Hamden cemetery where her remains are cared for.

If anyone has information about this case, contact the East Haven detective division at 468-3827. All tips can remain anonymous.

https://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSvcid=705616&GRid=22452817&

Jane Doe

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Birth: unknown
Death: Aug. 16, 1975
East Haven
New Haven County
Connecticut, USA



Murder Victim
The woman's strangled body was found by a truck driver on a rainy Aug. 16, 1975, floating in a drainage ditch behind the former Bradlees department store on Frontage Road. She was wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin and she was gagged and bound by black antenna wire around her neck, waist and knees.The possibility that she had plastic surgery on her nose may also have thrown off anyone who knew her natural facial features. The absence of a driver's license solidified her anonymity. Police still ponder varied versions of how the 125-pound woman's 5-foot 6-inch body wound up in a 2-foot-deep open culvertJane Doe died of asphyxiation by suffocation at least five days before the truck driver's chance encounter.

Her unmarked plot is located on the south side, east of the south gate.

Burial:
State Street Cemetery
Hamden
New Haven County
Connecticut, USA