No one knows how long the body – mangled and broken, lay in the shadows of the mountains before she died of exposure. Her body was discovered by two college students along the banks of Boulder Creek below Boulder Falls. Aside from an appendectomy scar and remarkably good teeth, there was little that would identify the woman, who was estimated to be about 20 years old, 5’3” to 5’4”, weighing 100-110 pounds with light brown, almost blond hair.

For 54 years, someone’s daughter was missing.

On April 22, 1954, the day Boulder Jane Doe was buried, a newspaper headline read, “Will this grave mark an unsolved mystery?”

New forensic evidence may finally give the young murder victim a name, decades after her burial in an anonymous grave in Boulder.

The case garnered national attention in recent years, thanks in part, to the efforts of a former North Platte woman to locate a missing relative.

In 2005, Jennifer Kitt read a two-part series that ran in The North Platte Telegraph about a young woman murdered in Boulder in 1954. Kitt was trying to find out the fate of her great-aunt, Twylia May Embrey, who disappeared from North Platte in 1953.

Kitt contacted Boulder historian Silvia Pettem, who had persuaded Boulder police to in 2004 to re-open the case of the murdered woman. DNA testing ruled out Boulder Jane Doe as Twylia May, but Pettem and Kitt continued to work together to find out Twylia’s fate and identify Boulder Jane Doe. Twilia May died in Massachusetts in March 2006, never knowing that the family she left behind a half century before had been looking for her. Kitt learned of Embrey’s death one month later.

“Boulder Jane Doe may not have a name, but she gave our family some closure,” Kitt said at the time.

Now, Pettem believes Boulder Jane Doe was Katharine E. Farrand Dyer.

“For the past two years, I have believed that circumstantial evidence pointed to Katharine Dyer as Jane Doe,” Pettem said. “This new promising forensic evidence validates my opinion.”

The new evidence was a photo superimposition process comparing Dyer’s photos with a cast of the victim’s skull.

At the time of Boulder Jane Doe’s murder, investigators could not put a name to the battered face, nor, despite an extensive investigation and hundreds of tips from across the country, were they able to identify her killer. According to a press release from Boulder County last week, police suspected the killer was Harvey Glatman. Forensic tests done in 2006 showed that Jane Doe’s injuries were consistent with being struck by a car; specifically, a 1951 Dodge Coronet.

When Glatman was arrested in California in 1958 after being caught in the act of kidnapping, he was driving a 1951 Dodge Coronet with Colorado plates. Glatman was one of the country’s first signature serial killers, whose crimes all had at least one identical feature. For Glatman, it was to bind his victims with rope, torture them, and take pictures of the murders. He was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in September 1959.

Boulder police were unaware that Glatman had lived in Denver during the time of Jane Doe’s murder. He was arrested in Denver in 1945, for breaking into women’s apartments, where he would tie them up, molest them and take pictures as souvenirs.

Boulder County Sheriff Detective Steve Ainsworth, who investigates cold cases, said he believes Glatman abducted Jane Doe, tied her up and drove her to Boulder Canyon.

“It was so remote in those days,” Ainsworth said. “He forced her to remove her clothes and to climb in the back seat. I believe she made a break for it, and while attempting to escape, made it about 300 yards before Glatman struck her with the car, knocking her down into the canyon.”

Dyer was reported missing by her landlady from her Denver boarding house on March 26, 1954, 13 days before the discovery of Jane Doe’s body.

Pettem discovered the missing persons report on Dyer after an exhaustive search of period newspaper files. Dyer was separated from her husband, Jimmy, and living alone in a boarding house in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. She was described as 5’6”, weighing 110 pounds; with blond hair she frequently tinted red. She was employed as an elevator operator for the American Furniture Company in downtown Denver. While Dyer would have been considered a likely candidate for Boulder Jane Doe at the time, what fragmentary police reports that still exist do not mention her.

Pettem and a team of researchers traced Dyer’s life back from her disappearance, through her residence in Denver from 1948 to 1954, and her marriage in Prescott, Ariz. in 1949. Marriage records give her birthday as October 14, 1926 in San Antonio, Texas. However, there is no record of her birth, nor any record of a social security number,

Pettem obtained a photo of Dyer, taken by her ex-husband around 1949. That photo, and a casting of Jane Doe’s re-assembled skull were submitted to Dr. Todd Fenton, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University. Fenton told investigators he could not exclude Jane Doe as a possible match.

“The fact that Dr. Fenton could not rule out Katharine Dyer as Jane Doe makes that murder victim’s identification, in my opinion, more likely to be Katharine,” Pettem said. “With DNA from a family member, we can made a positive identification. Anyone who recognizes her photo is asked to contact the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office so that when the victim’s remains are reburied, she can have her own name on her gravestone at last.”

Information about Pettem’s 10-year quest to identify Boulder Jane Doe is available at her Web site, www.boulderjanedoe.com [SINCE REPLACED BY THIS SITE, www.silviapettem.com] Anyone with any information regarding Katharine E. Farrand Dyer, contact Det. Steve Ainsworth at Boulder County Sheriff’s Office at (303) 459-0193.