http://khqa.com/news/local/the-search-for-jane-doe-of-the-mississippiThe search for Jane Doe of the Mississippiby Rajah Maples
HANNIBAL JANE DOE: HF, 39-40, found in the Mississippi River - 15 September 2013 Cf85ce02-3cff-4380-b8fb-b19ff6d0faaa-Jane20Doe
An anthropologist helped create this sketch of what Jane Doe would've looked like when she was alive.
Fri, 06 Feb 2015 03:30:00 GMT —
Authorities pulled a young woman's body from the Mississippi River south of Hannibal in September 2013.
Almost two years later, investigators still don't know who she is or how she died.
She's now referred to as "Jane Doe".
An anthropologist helped create a sketch of what she would've looked like when she was alive.
She appeared to be in her 30s and had dark brown or black hair. She was about 5-foot-3-inches tall and weighed 135 pounds.
Authorities believe she was Hispanic.
"She was actually hung up on the banks of the river along some rocks," Marion County Sheriff Jimmy Shinn said. "The river apparently went down, and that's where the body was hung up on. That's where the fishermen had located her."
Marion County Sheriff Jimmy Shinn said the mysterious case of Jane Doe is frustrating because authorities don't know who she is and they don't know who killed her.
"One of the challenges for the investigators was of course trying to figure out whether the body was dumped there, whether it floated there, exactly where it came from," he said.
To learn more, investigators dropped a dummy off the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge to watch the water flow and to see where the dummy would end up in the waterway. Unfortunately, Shinn said the dummy did not float to the area where Jane Doe's body was found.
KHQA spoke with two women who swear they saw the victim alive at the Mark Twain Cave the Sunday before her body was found.
The women didn't want to be identified or go on camera, but they believe the man Jane Doe was with that day had something to do with her death.
They described him as a tall white man with sun blonde hair and a deep tan.
The witnesses said he was with the victim and another woman in the Mark Twain Cave gift shop. They told KHQA the three did not act like anything was wrong and went through the cave. The victim even bought two rings from this gift shop.
"We pulled surveillance tapes from there, which were to no prevail for us," Sheriff said. "We pulled credit card receipts from there. We've literally been all over this country, trailing credit card receipts, things of that nature, follow-up interviews with people that were at the Mark Twain Cave during this time period."
Shinn said authorities aren't sure if the woman was an American citizen or an illegal immigrant. He said her DNA has been entered into every national database in the country along with her fingerprints and dental records.
"We are not even able to do a victimology report on her because we can't get her identified," Sheriff Shinn said. "We don't know her family, friends, her social status, where she worked anything like that that would possibly give us leads or connections. Hopefully in the case, one day we get a family member, close friend, something like that, they come along and say, 'hey, this may be my friend or family member.'"
The Missouri State Highway Patrol is the lead investigator in the case of Jane Doe since her body was found in a waterway, however, KHQA's calls to the patrol about this case were not returned.
The woman's body was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hannibal.
If you have any information about the woman, her identity or who she was with in the days leading up to her death, please call the Missouri Highway Patrol at 573-526-6178.