There's no date of birth. Her age is listed as "about 20 years."

Even the exact date of her death isn't known. It's given only as "April 1954."

No one knows who she was or how she ended up in Boulder Canyon, where two University of Colorado students found her naked and battered body on April 8, 1954. Forty-five years later, she remains unidentified but not forgotten.

Occasionally someone leaves flowers on her grave at Boulder's Columbia Cemetery. And each October, she's featured in cemetery tours when local actors and actresses bring life to some of those buried there.

"Everybody wants to play her," said Kathryn Keller, a volunteer with Historic Boulder and head of the cemetery tours. "Part of the reason is it's an actor's dream. We don't know anything about her, so they can invent the part."

At some point over the years, the Boulder County Sheriff's Department file on the case disappeared. But newspaper clippings tell the story.

Two CU freshmen on a sightseeing trip up the canyon found the body of the young woman near Boulder Falls about 8 miles west of town.

She was lying face up on the rocks, about 25 feet from the road and close to the stream. She had shoulder-length strawberry blond hair and an appendectomy scar, but her body had been stripped of clothing, jewelry or anything that could identify her.

Investigators said the 5-foot-3, 100-pound victim apparently had been attacked elsewhere and her body then hurled or dragged down the rock-strewn embankment. Her skull was fractured. She also had fractures of the jaw, ribs and arm.

Animals had ravaged her face. She apparently had been dead close to a week.

Authorities thought she might have been as young as 17 but no older than her early 20s.

Among those who remember the woman is D.M. "Dock" Teegarden.

He was Boulder County's undersheriff at the time and now reviews old unsolved homicide cases for the sheriff's department as a volunteer. He was out of town picking up a prisoner when the body was found. He returned to Boulder a few days later.

He remembers "running around the hills, checking mine shafts and cabins" for clues in the case and circulating descriptions of the young slaying victim nationwide by Teletype.

"It was a heartbreaker," he said. "We followed lead after lead but nothing ever panned out."

Teegarden said he thinks the young woman might have been a runaway.

"As I recall, our theory was that she was not in any way local but came from someplace else and got a ride with a trucker who did her in," he said.

Because of where the body was dumped, he thinks the vehicle most likely was coming eastbound down the canyon toward Boulder on Colorado 119.

"There's no way now that anybody could stop in the canyon without anyone seeing him, but traffic back in those days was sparse," Teegarden said.

When the young woman couldn't be identified, Boulder residents who didn't want to see her buried in a pauper's grave paid for a cemetery plot and arranged for a funeral. A local mortuary provided a casket, and a monument company donated the headstone.

Teegarden said he doesn't think there's much chance she will ever be identified or her killer found.

"After this length of time, it looks pretty hopeless," Teegarden said.

"Most of the people who would have been connected in some way with this girl would be underground themselves."