Author Topic: PRINCESS BLUE: F, 15-19, found in Brazoria County, TX - 10 Sept 1990 - Robert E. Lee High School class ring  (Read 327 times)

Scorpio

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http://www.houstonpress.com/news/cold-case-6540443

Cold Case
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2007 AT 4 A.M.
BY CRAIG MALISOW



Photos of the rings appeared years after the body was found.
Sue Birdwell for the Texas Rangers

What was left of her was found in a mound of dead vegetation and trash. Her tombstone was a tire; that's where the skull lay. Beyond it, her skeleton.

The man had pulled over to relieve himself. Standing by a low-slung barbed-wire fence at the end of the road, he thought he spotted an old bottle. He wound up nearly stumbling into bones.

It was September 10, 1990, about 5 p.m. About 30 yards away, cars flew down Highway 288 — drivers like him, leaving their jobs in Houston, returning to the peace of rural Brazoria County.

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He had been on his way home to Alvin when the need hit outside Manvel, and he scanned the roadside for a private place. At County Road 101, a mostly unpaved and minor trail between two major exits, he had swung left, across the median, through northbound traffic, and driven to where 101 dead-ended on the east side of 288. Here he was surrounded by pasture ringed with tall trees, with nothing to disturb him except the dragonflies overhead, big as buzzards.

Once home, he told his wife about the bones. They decided to call the Brazoria County Sheriff's Office, which notified the Manvel Police Department, a small unit working out of a trailer behind City Hall. The case wound up in the hands of Chief Tommie Tolson.

At the scene, Tolson found no purse, wallet, clothing or hair around the skeleton, but there, on her finger bones, were the rings, and a bracelet around her wrist. Whoever she was, she liked to wear a lot of jewelry: a silver-colored ring with a turquoise horse or unicorn; a silver-colored band with a scroll design; two plain silver-colored bands; a gold-colored ring with six clear stones; a beaded pearl bracelet; and the biggest ring, a silver band crowned with a sapphire stone. He removed the jewelry and placed it in an evidence envelope.

Since Brazoria County has no medical examiner, the autopsy was conducted by Dr. Eduardo Bellas with the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office. The autopsy, performed the day after the bones were discovered, did not reveal much: an upper left front tooth that had been surgically removed; two fractured ribs; and a "defect" on a bone beneath her left knee. No traces of opiates were found in her bone marrow.


Bellas concluded she was Hispanic, estimated her age to be between 15 and 19, her height at 4'8" to 5'2". He could not determine the cause or manner of her death.

When the report was finalized a week later, the rings and bracelet got a brief mention: "Some property (jewelry) was recovered at the scene with the skeletal remains."

According to a brief Houston Chronicle article that ran three days later, Tolson characterized the girl as Hispanic or white. He said she had knee problems. He said she wore a silver ring with a turquoise unicorn on her right hand and a beaded bracelet on her right arm.

The article did not mention the biggest ring, the silver one with the sapphire stone. Along with the other jewelry, it would vanish from the public's eye until August 2006, when the case was reopened and investigators found an incredible clue in that evidence envelope. Surrounding the sapphire stone on the big ring were the words "Robert E. Lee H.S., Houston." Below, on the band itself, was the date 1975, and a portrait of the school's namesake. Before long, investigators would tell the media that the girl probably died six months to a year before the remains were found. This estimated time of death does not appear in the original medical examiner's report, and authorities have not made a subsequent forensic report available to the public.

With that crucial yet unexplained time frame in mind, investigators needed to figure out exactly how a ring belonging to a student from the class of 1975 wound up on the skeleton's finger.

Tolson was out of law enforcement by the time the existence of the ring was released to the public, but a new breed of detective instantly adopted the case. In the 16 years since the remains were discovered, true-crime buffs were chattering online, spending their free time researching missing and unidentified persons. And amateur sleuths across the country were drawn to this unidentified Texas girl, to her sapphire ring. It didn't take long before they gave her a name: Princess Blue. She died with a different name, but this was the one that would keep her case alive.

The new investigation was sparked in August 2006 by a phone call from California.

An online sleuth — a true-crime writer — called the Angleton Public Library seeking information about Princess Blue, known then only as Texas Department of Public Safety Case Number U0310014. The reference librarian who took the call found it strange. Why was this woman in California interested in a Brazoria County cold case? It just didn't sit right. So the librarian called the Brazoria County Sheriff's Office, and her suspicion was delivered to the desk of investigator Richard Rosser.

Rosser was curious, too. The woman had left her phone number with the librarian, but Rosser could only get her answering machine. He left his name and number and called authorities in California to see if they could check her out. But before any police knocked on her door, Rosser got a call back. The woman had been on vacation. No, she had nothing to do with the case. Just a natural interest.

"That kind of set it off," Rosser recalls. He pulled what little information was with the sheriff's office. At some point before this, the sheriff's Criminal Identification Division had trucked at least some of Princess Blue's remains to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth. There, the remains waited in line for an examination by forensic pathologists.

Meanwhile, the sheriff's office had no investigative notes to work with. Rosser called Manvel PD to see what they had. He was directed to Sergeant Jay Coffman, who had reviewed the case on and off since 2000. He was retired but, based on this renewed interest, would come back to work the case full-time.

The first order of business was to take a closer look at the class ring. A jeweler confirmed that it was a woman's ring, size 9.5. It had been upsized twice, from an original 7.5, and this would have wiped out any markings, like initials or school activities, that might have been inside the band.

Balfour, the ring's Austin-based manufacturer, did not have records from 1975. And that year's graduating class of Robert E. Lee High was about 650 students, meaning at least 300 girls. Students could choose from several colored stones that year. Rosser and Coffman faced the possibility of having to track down 300 female graduates to see who bought a blue stone, and how many of those women parted with their rings prior to 1990. Coffman and Rosser released the information about the ring to the media in late August or early September 2006.

That's when the online detectives really took notice. A handful of members of Websleuths.com created a new forum devoted to Princess Blue, and it attracted colleagues from other sites. They combed through missing-persons sites, trolling for possible matches. They bounced ideas off each other. They decided that one of the most important orders of business was to contact the members of the Robert E. Lee High class of 1975. They got that year's yearbook, created a spreadsheet and tracked down addresses and phone numbers. They wrote a form letter seeking information about the ring, divvied up the mailing and sent around 200 letters. They waited. And waited.