Call it one woman's quest to give another a name.

Ever since spotting the small gravestone inscribed "Jane Doe" in a Boulder, Colo., cemetery 10 years ago, historian Silvia Pettem has made it her business to identify the woman whose naked, beaten body was found off a steep embankment in 1954. Her killer was never found although some law enforcement officials speculated it might have been the notorious serial killer Harvey Glatman. In 1945, he had been arrested for kidnapping a woman in the area. Glatman was later executed after bungling a kidnapping and confessing to three murders.

Now, after countless dead-ends, missing documents, a stint on "America's Most Wanted," and a reopened investigation into the case, Pettem and others believe the woman is from San Antonio.

But finding her family to affirm it through matching DNA has proved even more difficult than patching together the mysterious journey of Katharine Farrand's life.

"I'm beginning to think I might have to give up," Pettem said recently from her downtown hotel. In town this week to present the case at the annual meeting for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Pettem had learned both discouraging and inspiring details at the Bexar County court house that day. "I just kind of thought about her while I was walking back and thought, 'if she was here, why is she being so elusive?'"

Pettem sighed, "I'm in it too deep right now."

After noting the nondescript gravestone, Pettem, whose two daughters were in their early 20s at the time, said she thought, "this could have been my daughter." A decade of research later, she keeps circling back to Farrand because "nobody has come up with anyone else who's as likely a candidate," she said.

Scouring newspaper clippings and microfiche from the time, in 1996 she compiled a list of about 40 missing women matching the victim's description and, along with genealogists and researchers across the country, began tracing their whereabouts.

Over the course of the last few years, the researchers have been able to eliminate all except for Farrand. Marriage certificates for some were found. Others appeared in death records. One had turned herself in to police and admitted she'd feigned her disappearance because she couldn't pay her rent.

According to newspaper reports at the time, no young women had been reported missing from Boulder. But in nearby Denver, two missing-persons reports matched the woman's description. Farrand, then a 27-year-old elevator operator in the city, was one of them.

Also 5-feet-6 and 110 pounds with blond hair she frequently tinted red, Farrand disappeared March 26 from the room she rented in Denver. The other woman, who was 30 pounds heavier than the victim, ultimately was discounted.

The investigation has been difficult from the beginning. In 1970, after the incumbent sheriff lost re-election, the Boulder County Sheriff's Department coincidentally lost all its files, according to the city's daily newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera.

Silvia Pettem believes Jane Doe is a San Antonio woman who moved to Colorado and got married, but has yet to find any family members to prove this.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Pettem also requested the case file from the FBI who had kept a thumbprint and hair sample from the body. But the file, she was told, was destroyed in 1993.

Pettem tried another tack; with the help of Boulder nonprofit organizations, money was raised to pay for the exhumation of the body.

In 2004, officials with the Sheriff's Department and the Vidocq Society, a group of nationally renowned forensic experts, spent two days digging up the casket and, because it had disintegrated, gingerly used Popsicle sticks and brushes to ferret out the bones.

Her skull was reconstructed, a facial likeness sculpted, and DNA scraped out of the bones.

There have been false hits. A Nebraska woman who ran away from home as a teenager was thought a likely candidate but her relatives' DNA didn't match the victim's.

All roads seemingly lead back to Farrand.

The first records for her emerge in 1948, where she is listed as a Denver resident in its city directory. In 1949, Farrand married 24-year-old Jimmy Dyer, who was a student at the University of Northern Arizona. According to a man listed on the marriage certificate, the couple – strangers to him – approached him in Prescott, Ariz., asking him to be their witness.

On the certificate, Farrand listed her hometown as "San Antonio, Texas."

But no Katharine Farrand is documented at the Bexar County Courthouse, neither in marriage, divorce, birth or death records.

The only Farrand found in records from that time, is Danny Farrand, a 23-year-old private first class who was killed at Randolph Air Force Base in 1950 when struck by the propeller of a B-29 bomber, according to a San Antonio Evening News article from the time.

In Denver, after separating from her husband, Farrand also briefly stayed with an African-American couple with family in San Antonio. They are no longer alive.

Farrand's former husband is dead.

The landlady who reported her missing also is dead, and her family doesn't recall a Farrand.

"There's an awful lot of unanswered questions," Pettem said.

Still, while the frequent roadblocks are discouraging, any tiny gain keeps her searching for more, and she has no plan of aborting her decade-long "obsession" just yet.

"I wake up in the night and think, 'gosh, where is this woman?'" she said.

For law enforcement authorities with more solvable cold cases on their hands, it also is difficult. With no family, there's no DNA, leaving her with no identity.

"I don't know what else we can do," said Frederick Bornhofen, chairman of the Vidocq Society. "As time goes on, people get other interests."

So, for now, Farrand remains missing and Pettem perplexed. The gravesite, also, is still marked Jane Doe.

1926-1954
Oct. 14, 1926: Katharine Farrand is born in San Antonio, according to her marriage affidavit.

1948: A listing for a Katharine E. Farrand appears in the Denver city directory.

Sept. 25, 1949: Farrand marries Jimmie Dyer, in Prescott, Ariz. The couples are listed together each year in Denver city directories from 1951 through 1953.

March 26, 1954: Farrand disappears from her Denver home. The 27-year-old is now separated from her husband and working as an elevator operator at American Furniture Co.

April 8, 1954: Two Colorado University students discover the body of a nude, battered woman on the banks of Boulder Creek, just outside Boulder, Colo. She was in her 20s, thin, with strawberry blond hair. Denver police find two case files of missing women whose descriptions resembled the body. One of them is Farrand.

April 22, 1954: Boulder residents paid for the woman's funeral and a small gravestone, on which they inscribed 'Jane Doe.'

1970: According to Boulder's newspaper, the Daily Camera, all records in the Boulder County Sheriff's Department were lost after the incumbent sheriff lost re-election.

1996: Boulder historian Silvia Pettem finds out about Jane Doe at a gravesite re-enactment, becomes intrigued and starts researching her case.

June 2004: Due to Pettem's efforts, the Boulder County Sheriff's Department and forensics experts with the Vidocq Society exhume Jane Doe's skeletal remains. Her skull is reassembled and DNA is collected from her bones. A sculptor begins working on a likeness of her face.

2006: A Boulder County sheriff's detective says the 1954 murder may be tied to serial killer Harvey Glatman, who was executed after confessing to murdering three women. Glatman grew up in Colorado.

The 'Jane Doe' case appears on 'America's Most Wanted' but nets few credible leads.

Feb. 23, 2007: Pettem and the Vidocq Society present their work in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Sources: Silvia Pettem, and newspaper articles from the Boulder Daily Camera, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post and Boulder County Sheriff's Department news releases.

See also, Holly's Fight to Stop Violence.