http://icaremissingpersonscoldcases...-Female-February-6-2007-Sarasota-Coun?page=-1
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100...TEMAP?p=1&tc=pgSARASOTA COUNTY - Lt. Skip Wood stared at the spot where he first found her: an overgrown thicket shaded by an oak tree, silent except for the far-off groan of heavy machinery.
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Forensics investigators have maintained a notebook with information on the Jane Doe case. It includes this sketch, created by a FBI forensic artist, of the unidentified victim. After three years, the she has not been identified.
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SKETCH PROVIDED BY SARASOTA SHERIFF'S OFFICE
It was not the first time Wood had come back to this acre of woods in the middle of an industrial park in south Sarasota. Wood comes looking for signs of disturbance, for anything that reveals someone has returned to check on the remains of a body buried here.
The body is the only Jane Doe on record at the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. Saturday marks three years to the day the body was found. Who Jane Doe was, and who killed her and buried her here, are among the most troubling mysteries facing local law enforcement officers.
"It's exceptionally frustrating to us," said Wood, a 27-year crime scene investigator. "We revisit this case quite often."
As the investigation drags on, the likelihood of identifying the woman dims. Investigators are unsure where she is from or where she was killed, but believe that her killer must have been familiar with the deserted thicket of woods -- and must have known that it would have concealed the body for many months.
A gruesome discovery
Wood remembers when the call came in: Feb. 6, 2007. A 14-year-old boy had discovered a bone in the woods off Ashton Court. His mother, a nurse, recognized it as human and called police.
Wood and crime scene technician Maxine Miller chased off two raccoons when they arrived at the scene. They were in a patch of woods behind an old auto body shop, the dense underbrush so thick that briars stuck to their pants and dry leaves covered the ground
After sifting through layers of dirt, they uncovered the partially decomposed body of a woman in a 3-foot hole. The excavation began the next day and took 10 hours. What they found -- a woman lying on her side, a knee bent in the air, buried in a shallow grave -- is seared in Wood's memory.
The first step in solving the case is identifying Jane Doe. Someone, Wood reasons, must have known her.
"She's somebody's daughter or sister or co-worker," he said. "You figure somebody out there would realize they haven't seen her and would report her missing."
For now, the physical clues are limited.
She was fully clothed in a cotton multicolored shirt with an Italian label, a skirt with an unusual leather belt made of straps tied together, blue underwear and two pairs of socks.
"She was a tall person, about 5-feet-7, and she had long reddish hair with blond streaks," Miller said.
Jane Doe had no shoes, which led investigators to surmise that she was carried to the grave. Wood said it is clear whoever buried her already knew this isolated spot existed.
"This is not your normal homicide area," he said. "This is an area that someone has obviously taken great care to obfuscate the fact that there is a body here."
Clues leading nowhere
In the months that followed, detectives canvassed the area, including surrounding businesses. No one recalled seeing anything suspicious.
Medical Examiner Dr. Russell Vega sought clues from the body. He determined that she was between 30 and 40 years old, weighed roughly 150 pounds and had been in the ground for seven to 12 months, a long time for no one to have reported her missing.
Her body showed signs of trauma, skull fractures that were most likely caused before she was buried. Vega called in an expert on bone trauma from the University of Florida, Dr. Michael Warren. Warren found the fractures were consistent with blunt-force trauma. The case became a homicide.
Vega sought ways to identify the woman. The body was too decomposed to reveal fingerprints. But X-rays showed she had silicone breast implants and had extensive dental work.
But those clues led nowhere. The woman's breast implants were a popular model sold before medical companies serialized them. The surgery could have been done anytime between 1998 and 2007, in a number of states.
DNA samples and dental records were also taken from the woman, but without any records available for a comparison, tracking down a match is close to impossible.
Her skull was sent to the lab in Gainesville, to see if graduate students could discern the victim's ancestry. General race and background information can be used by artists to create a rendering of what the woman might have looked like when she was alive.
Months after the discovery, measurements of her facial features were taken at the lab and analyzed by a computer program, which determined Jane Doe was a white female of European ancestry. That helped artists with the FBI reconstruct an image of the woman's face and body.
For the first time, detectives had an idea of what their Jane Doe might have looked like. They created flyers with the new information and over the next year revisited the area surrounding the woods where she was found. They went back to businesses and employees showing her face everywhere. No one recognized her.
Still working the case
Jane Doe's clothes are being processed by the FBI for trace hairs and fibers. A rendering of what she is believed to have looked like and other information appear in three online missing-person databases. One is managed by the FBI, another by the medical examiners of Florida and the third by an organization called the Doe Network, maintained by volunteers.
Sarasota County Sheriff's Sgt. Kevin Pingel oversees the case and still receives requests almost daily from other agencies for more information. Detectives have traveled out of state to follow up on leads that seemed promising.
No matter how many dead ends they hit, the team working on this case refuses to give up. Miller and Wood pull out Jane Doe's file several times a month, scouring the photos and notes, looking for something they have missed.
"If I see something on TV about a missing person, I'm always interested in that," Miller said, "or I get on the Internet and look to see if there is someone out there looking for someone that might be our Jane Doe."
Jane Doe's remains now reside in the morgue at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she is the only unidentified body.
Investigators wonder if the only person who knows that Jane Doe is dead is the person who killed and buried her. Still, they remain hopeful that someone will step forward and crack this case.
"I think that we will eventually find out who she is, I do believe that," Miller said
Map of where body found:
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Herald-Tribune Staff Writer Anthony Cormier contributed to this story.
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