DAUGHTER

June 8, 2004. In the early morning light of what promises to be a warm summer day, I slip through a small iron gate on the north side of Columbia Cemetery in Boulder, Colorado. I am one of the first to arrive on this eventful day, and I savor the walk through the long shadows that filter through a canopy of shade trees and light up the soft green grass, still wet from a recent rain. Within a few minutes, law-enforcement officials, forensic specialists, mortuary and city park employees, and a three-man crew from the television program America’s Most Wanted park their cars along Pleasant Street on the north side of the city’s oldest graveyard. A shiny black hearse pulls up nearby. Already parked under a large ash tree is a big yellow John Deere backhoe. As I survey this burst of activity, I feel both hopeful and anxious, not quite sure what to expect. Never before in the history of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office has anyone exhumed a human body from a cemetery.

Lieutenant Phil West, six foot six with graying hair and a mustache, assembles the fifteen of us around the grave of an unidentified young woman found murdered in a mountain canyon west of the city in April 1954. Even dressed in blue jeans and a casual polo shirt, the lieutenant projects a commanding presence. When he bows his head and says: “Let’s have a moment of silence for Jane Doe,” we follow his lead.

It is hard to believe that we are standing in the exact same spot where, half a century earlier, a compassionate Boulder community buried the same young woman. I glance at a newspaper photograph I recently found in the Boulder Daily Camera archives that shows a group of mourners gathered around her casket at her grave, the men dressed in suits and the ladies wearing pillbox hats and crisp white gloves. They called her “the Mystery Girl” and “Someone’s Daughter.” Now the crowd assembled today, myself included, has become her extended family.

As I reflect on the events that led up to this day, the quiet is suddenly broken by the deep throttling sound of the backhoe. The operator slowly lowers the bucket, and we all huddle—riveted—around the grave with our cameras. Eight minutes later, after the backhoe has removed about a foot of dirt, a blue-jeans-clad groundsman calls a halt. Any further machine digging, he says, might damage the contents of Jane Doe’s grave or the graves on either side. Two other mortuary employees, holding long metal rods, begin prodding the grave to try to locate the top of the coffin. One of the men picks up a shovel and gently lifts some dirt. The backhoe operator digs some more, loading the dirt into a dump truck. After another foot of earth is removed, the hand-diggers climb back into the grave.

Looking away for a moment, I see the young female hearse driver standing in the background. She is ready to take the coffin to a morgue, where the victim’s remains are scheduled to be examined by forensic specialists who have flown in from Arizona and Georgia. The driver’s presence makes me uneasy, as Lieutenant West had already told me that in order to protect the integrity of a possible future homicide investigation, I, a layperson, cannot be present for the opening of the coffin. I am deeply disappointed, but I console myself with the knowledge that progress is being made. Moreover, I know that if I had not presented Jane Doe’s case to the sheriff in the first place, the exhumation would not be occurring at all.

I anxiously wonder how long the hand-digging will take. Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, nearly an hour after the first scrape of the backhoe, a groundsman lifts a shovelful of dirt containing a few slivers of wood and a tuft of wavy light-brown hair. At first there is a hushed silence, but this is quickly broken by one of the forensic specialists, who asks to see the old newspaper photograph in order to make sure that the men are digging in the right place. Another of these visiting experts, a man in his seventies, takes a brush and a trowel and lowers himself into the now three-foot-deep grave. He sifts through the dirt and finds more wood fragments and hair. Then he uncovers a bone and pieces of a once-zippered black-rubber body bag.

Seeing the perplexed look on my face, the third forensic specialist—a large man in blue scrubs—leans over to me and explains that the wooden coffin had simply disintegrated underground.

I am almost afraid to look into the grave for fear that Lieutenant West will ask me to leave. But before I have a chance to ask if I can stay, a sheriff’s cadet pulls out a roll of crime-scene tape and cordons off a large circle around Jane Doe’s grave. All of us remain inside the controlled area. Photographers and reporters, tipped off by the Daily Camera librarian who happened to pass by the cemetery on her way to work, emerge seemingly from nowhere. They are quickly pushed back, so that no one but our core group can look down into the grave. As the hearse drives away empty, I feel exhilarated and realize that an unexpected twist of fate has allowed me to be included after all. I stare at Jane Doe’s skeletal remains embedded in the soft reddish-brown dirt and know I have reached back in time.