Boulder Sheriff's Detective Steve Ainsworth believes the suspect was none other than America's original serial killer, Harvey Glatman, whose killings made front page news in California, but who also lived some supposedly quiet years in Denver.

Most convincing, Ainsworth says, are records that show Glatman was arrested when he was 17, in 1944 [1945], for abducting a woman and driving [walking] her up Sunshine Canyon west of Boulder. He did not kill her.

But that fits the pattern of serial killers, Ainsworth said. They become bolder and bolder over time, moving from, say, kidnapping to murder, from the thrill of control to the thrill of the kill.

Ainsworth got help from Boulder historian Silvia Pettem, who obtained the files of a California detective who did the original work on the Glatman murders.

Glatman eventually was captured when he bungled his final rape and murder. He'd kidnapped a woman, put her in the back seat of a car, driven to the desert and had her take off her clothes. Somehow, she got his gun and was out of the car, half dressed, pointing the gun at him when a California Highway Patrol officer on a motorcycle drove by and made the arrest.

With that information, and the knowledge that Glatman had already abducted one woman in Boulder, Ainsworth pieced together a likely scenario.

"They probably were parked at Boulder Falls, he told her to take her clothes off. She somehow got away, and he went after her in the car." If he hit her with his car, sending her over the 29-foot embankment, that would explain why hikers found the woman the next day [13 days later], naked, with bruises on the left side of her body, Ainsworth said.

If Ainsworth is right, and Glatman was the killer, that still only solves half the 52-year-old mystery.

The question of the woman's identity remains. In the weeks, months and decades after the murder, no one came forward claiming to know the attractive young woman.

Ainsworth submitted a molar and a section of Jane Doe's femur bone to the FBI's Missing Persons Data Base in Quantico, Va., Two weeks ago, he heard that the FBI had extracted the DNA. Now the sample is waiting its turn to be run through the nationwide database.

Meanwhile, the TV show, America's Most Wanted, has done a segment on Jane Doe, featuring a reconstructed skull and face created by forensics experts. That segment still hasn't run. Ainsworth hopes the new evidence, together with the publicity from the TV show, finally will help solve the mystery of Boulder's never forgotten stranger.