Twylia, then 18, quit her job sometime in late 1952 or early 1953 at a Chinese cafe near the North Platte train depot,. Her boss said she probably headed for sunny California.

Now, after a half-century of on-and-off again searches and thinking Twylia May probably met a bad end, her family may be close to getting some answers.

Sheriffs investigators in Boulder, Colo., have reopened the long-forgotten murder of an unidentified, blond-haired woman whose battered, nude body was found along Boulder Creek in April 1954. She was buried in a pauper's grave in front of a tombstone inscribed "Jane Doe, Age about 20 years" after an avalanche of stories in Colorado newspapers failed to lead to her identity.

Investigators followed a couple of early leads. But they didn't pan out, and the case grew so cold that investigators inadvertently threw away the investigative files during the 1960s.

Now, a Nancy Drew-like story is unfolding that might link Jane Doe and Twylia.
Two years ago, a Boulder historian and author, Silvia Pettem, stepped forward, her curiosity piqued about the "Jane Doe" buried in a Boulder cemetery.
Told by investigators that the likelihood of solving the 51-year-old case were slim, Pettem promised to raise enough cash to exhume the body and reopen the investigation.

More than $3,000 in contributions poured in after Pettem, who writes a history column for the Boulder Camera newspaper, detailed the sad tale of the mystery woman.
Embrey's family learned of the Jane Doe case last month, and now believe, based on the description of the body and time frame, that it could be Twylia.

"I want to believe that she's alive. But the further I've looked into this ... it looks more than likely it's her," said Jennifer Kitt, of North Platte, a 29-year-old great-niece of Twylia's, and the latest in a string of relatives who have researched her disappearance.

While Pettem also has a gut feeling that Jane Doe is Twylia, one of the missing girl's surviving sisters and a Boulder County, Colo., detective both express doubts.
Margie Danbom, 72, of Curtis, Neb., and one of four surviving siblings of Twylia, said the 5-foot-3, 100-pound body exhumed last June sounds too small and frail to be her sister, whom she described as "big-boned."

Danbom said she didn't know of her sister ever having an appendectomy, as did Jane Doe, and the "strawberry-blond" hair on murder victim sounds too light to be her sister's.

"I'm almost played out," she said. "We hope that it is her, so that we know whatever happened. But we gave up hope a long time ago."

Lt. Phil West of the Boulder County Sheriff's Office said that information about Twylia May Embrey was not their best lead, but one of two generated since the Jane Doe case was reopened. He said that investigators have sent leg bones to a crime lab in hopes of extracting a DNA sample. Investigators have reconstructed the skull of Jane Doe, and are hoping to reconstruct a face on the bones so it can be compared with photographs of Twylia and other potential matches.

Then - and it may take several weeks - it will be determined if expensive DNA matches will be attempted with living family members. "Unsolved Mysteries" [America's Most Wanted] is waiting for that reconstruction to run a program on the Jane Doe case, West said.

He cautioned that there's an outside chance that DNA cannot be extracted from the bones. Groundwater contaminated the bones found in a collapsed casket.
"We're pretty confident that whoever Jane Doe was, she wasn't from our area," West said, due to the extensive newspaper coverage of the Jane Doe case in 1954.
"Maybe North Platte was far enough away," he said. "But we have nothing positive to relate her to the case, other than the circumstances."

Twylia May Embrey would have turned 70 on Oct. 15.

Her oldest sister, Mildred Garner, 83, of Wellfleet, Neb., said the sadness of her unexplained disappearance has hung over her family for decades. "My parents went to the Little Lemon [North Platte] Cafe one day and they said she was gone," Garner said.
At the time, the seven remaining kids were forbidden from bringing up Twylia May's name in front of their father, Charles, a poor farmer prone to fits of rage.

But after selling his farm, the guilt-ridden father drove across California, thinking he would come across Twylia, Garner said. He never did.

Subsequent searches by other relatives, most recently Kitt, discovered that there had been no activity on Twylia's Social Security card since her disappearance. Family members said they assumed she was dead, and probably had been murdered.
Kitt, a home day-care operator, took up the search to provide some peace for Garner, her grandmother. She also dispelled a family rumor that Twylia May had been detained as an underaged runaway in San Diego.

Now, Kitt is just as emotionally involved. While she hopes that Twylia, somehow, is still alive, Kitt realizes that the fragile skull being probed in a laboratory might just be her long-lost great aunt. "If it is, our family will make peace with that and live with that, and bring her home where she belongs," Kitt said.