Last week, the remains of an unidentified woman who died more than 50 years ago were re-interred in Boulder, Colo.  with authorities no closer to determining whether she was a San Antonio native, as one volunteer researcher believes.

Since her body was found April 8, 1954, on the banks of Boulder Creek, the woman has been called Jane Doe, as law enforcement and more recently, volunteer researchers have eliminated possible matches with other women reported missing at the time. Autopsy results put Jane Doe in her early 20s at the time of her death, with injuries consistent with being run over by a car.

Boulder historian Silvia Pettem first became interested in the case in 1996, when the Jane Doe inscription on a headstone caught her attention in an area cemetery. Throughout the following decade, Pettem and a nationwide team of genealogists and other researchers worked their way through a list of other young women who went missing before Jane Doe was discovered. Law enforcement, backed with private funding, reopened the case and exhumed the body; a facial reconstruction was done, but nothing conclusive was determined, and no supposed relatives came forward to provide DNA for comparison.

It's Pettem's opinion that Jane Doe was an elevator operator named Katharine E. Farrand Dyer, who wrote on her 1949 marriage affidavit that she had been born in 1926 in San Antonio. Since then, Pettem and others have checked Bexar County archives, San Antonio city directories, census and school records without finding any solid connections to a Farrand family here. Unfortunately, little is known about the Katharine Farrand who went missing in Denver a few weeks before Jane Doe was found.

Separated from her husband, Jimmie Dyer, at the time of her disappearance, Farrand was working in a furniture store and living alone in a room rented from the landlady who reported her missing. A few listings in Denver city directories and her marriage records are the only paper trail made by Farrand before she vanished. [Her full name  Katharine E. Farrand Dyer  also shows her as the spouse of Jimmie Dyer, who graduated from NAU in Flagstaff AZ in 1950.] Neither law-enforcement officials nor other researchers have been able to uncover any records of her since that time.

Pettem has appealed to the Express-News before, and a story about Jane Doe and her possible San Antonio origins was published Feb. 24, 2007. Coincidentally, just before the remains of Boulder's Jane Doe were reburied, Pettem had asked staff at the San Antonio Independent School District to check their records of the 1930s and '40s for Katharine Farrand's name. No such records were found, reports René Lynn of the district's public information office.

"I am still trying to think of another avenue to pursue," Pettem says.

Though Jane Doe is back in the Boulder cemetery, it's not too late to provide leads that might help identify the body and close this cold case. To offer information, contact the Boulder County Sheriff's Office, 1777 Sixth St., Boulder, Colo. 80302, (303) 441-3600, or send a message to Pettem at pettem@earthlink.net.