As a middle-aged writer and historian, I had no contacts with law-enforcement or the forensic community, but I worked (and still do) as a history columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera. My job gave me access to the newspaper’s archives, and I began to collect articles and photos that dealt with the “mystery girl.” A coroner’s inquest had declared her death a homicide, and compassionate citizens donated funds for a Christian burial, complete with the stone that still marks her grave today.

Then the case was forgotten for half a century.

In the fall of 2003, I contacted the Boulder County Sheriff and asked if he would exhume Jane Doe’s remains and use modern forensics to give her back her name. The Sheriff couldn’t justify spending his limited funds on a cold case, but he supported my decision to approach the community. Again, local residents opened their hearts and wallets, but the money collected wasn’t quite enough.

I kept searching, and then I stumbled upon the website of the Department of Justice where a referral gave me the phone number of the Vidocq Society. Frederick Bornhofen answered my call, and in the spring of 2004 I put him in contact with the Sheriff’s Office—setting into motion an unforgettable five-year joint adventure.

The revisited case has had many twists and turns, with a startling and recent development—Katharine Farrand Dyer, the most likely Jane Doe candidate has been found alive in Australia! The focus, however, remains on Jane Doe. Thanks to the pro bono assistance and expertise of Vidocq Society Members, we know much more about her than did our predecessors in 1954.

Dr. Richard Froede, Dr. Walter Birkby, and Dr. Robert Goldberg all flew to Boulder in June 2004 for the exhumation of Jane Doe. Her casket had disintegrated underground, so the process resembled an archeological dig and lasted for two long days.

The victim’s skull had been crushed into more than 100 pieces. After the bones were given time to dry out, the Sheriff’s Office sent them to Dr. Birkby, in Tucson, who painstakingly reassembled her skull. Photo-superimposition and DNA comparison ruled out two likely Jane Doe candidates —Twy l i a Ma y Embrey and Marion Joan McDowell.

Frank Bender then sculpted a bust of Jane Doe which he unveiled at a June 2005 press conference in Boulder. The following year, in July 2006, the bust was shown to a national television audience on the show America’s Most Wanted. There were, however, no credible leads.

In 2007, Drs. Froede and Birkby, along with Frederick Bornhofen and myself, publicized the case with a poster session at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in San Antonio. By this time, VSM Richard H. Walton had used Jane Doe as a text book example in his book, Cold Case Homicides: Practical Investigative
Techniques. Walton, as well as VSM Richard Walter, also worked behind the scenes.

At the Denver AAFS conference, in 2009, I collaborated again with Vidocq Society Members by giving a Power-Point presentation on the case to the Last Word Society.

Meanwhile, I had been working with a team of dedicated genealogists who were spread out across the country, but connected by the internet. Jane Doe’s case file (as well as others of the era) had not survived, but we reconstructed one from original newspaper articles and managed to put together a spreadsheet of missing young women.

While continuing to work with law-enforcement and the forensic experts, we whittled down our list and explored the possibility that her killer was Harvey Glatman, executed in 1959 for the murders of two women in California.

In September 2008, the Sheriff’s Office reburied the victim in her former grave—in a new casket in a concrete vault, with her reassembled skull carefully cushioned in a box. Tucked into several more boxes of remains were Dr. Birkby’s meticulous notes that identified every bone.

Passersby may think that nothing has changed, but those who have followed Jane Doe’s story know that, under the ground, the victim’s tenderly cared-for remains reflect the latest advances in forensic science, as well as the love of an extended family.

Meanwhile, the Jane Doe investigation brought closure to a survivor of a Glatman assault in 1945, as well as to the family of Twylia May Embrey, a woman we found just three weeks after she died. She—as did Katharine Farrand Dyer—had changed her name and lived a double life for more than half a century.

Vidocq Society Member Richard H. Walton summed up the quest, in part, in his foreword to Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe, to be released by Taylor Trade Publishing in September or October. Walton wrote:

"This effort was rewarding by far. Boulder Jane Doe acquired a legacy as well as a new and extended family. After all was said and done, she did not die nor will she rest in obscurity... Pettem, sheriff’s detectives, members of Vidocq, and others all came to take this unknown waif into their hearts as they sought to close the book on this crime. In the end, they ultimately acknowledged the victim’s life and brought answers to others they encountered along the way who suffered from their own cases of assault and missing persons. Thus, from bad came good."

"It is this ending, perhaps, that marks the success of their efforts and restores the victim’s dignity. Even in those homicides that we solve, we do not always learn all the answers. In this case, perhaps we never will. But we learned a lot and have laid the foundation for the future. What will the future hold? Only time will tell."

For more information on Someone’s Daughter, contact the author at www.silviapettem.com, or enter Silvia Pettem’s name at www.amazon.com or www.rlpgtrade.com/Catalog.