Law enforcement officials and archeologists gathered around a grave site on June 19 in Elgin as a backhoe carefully clawed at the ground. It raked away the dirt that had been the final resting place of "Jane Doe," an unidentified woman whose remains were buried at the unmarked grave site on June 21, 1979.
Bastrop County law enforcement officials are relaunching an investigation into the identity of the woman, whose badly decomposed body was discovered along U.S. 290east of Elgin by law enforcement officers 40 years ago. An autopsy on the body was performed by the Travis County Medical Examiner’s office at the time, but there was no finding on the cause of death nor on her identity.
Bastrop County Sheriff Maurice Cook, District Attorney Bryan Goertz and other county officials looked on last week as Dr. Harrell Gill-King, director of University of North Texas’ Center for Human Identification, extracted bone samples from the woman's decaying skeletal remains. The sample was taken to UNT’s federally-funded DNA lab, where Gill-King and the Forensic Anthropology Unit will build a genetic profile of the woman and enter it into a federal DNA database in hopes that it might match the genetic profile of a family member already in the system.
“We’re not looking to solve a crime here,” Goertz said, as he drove from the Elgin Cemetery on June 19. “We don’t even know that a homicide or a crime occurred. By the time she was discovered there was not enough soft tissue to where you could tell whether she’d been stabbed or raped or anything. All we’re trying to do is put a name and a face to an unknown body, and the best way we got to do that these days is through DNA.”
Now, county officials are waiting to see if the woman's genes closely resemble a sample already in the system, or a sample that may be entered into the system in the future.
“It’s sit-and-wait now. It’s the first step of a process,” Goertz said.
Gill-King declined to answer questions about this case or how forensic anthropology unravels the mysteries surrounding the deaths of unidentified bodies.
Dr. Daniel Wescott, director of Texas State’s Forensic Anthropology Center who is not involved in the case, said that genetic profiles of unidentified people are often entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which includes the genetic profiles of missing persons, convicted offenders and forensic samples collected from crime scenes. Once entered into CODIS, the unidentified woman’s genetic sample can be compared against the 18 million samples in the database.
“If there is no family reference sample or no DNA match, then there’s not much they can do,” Wescott said.
The gene sample collected from the skeletal remains can also be used to create a biological profile of the woman, which would estimate the woman’s ancestry, age and size. That information would be entered into NamUs, a federal missing persons database that collects cases from law enforcement, medical examiners, coroners and family members of missing persons. Officials would then compare that profile against the missing people in the NameUs database to begin building leads.
Details surround Jane Doe’s death are scarce. Investigators determined her sex based off the morphology of the skeleton’s pelvis, which they said was broken at the time they found her body.
In 1984, five years after the bones were discovered, Texas Rangers and Bastrop County sheriff investigators reopened the case after someone in their custody confessed to the woman’s murder, according to an inquest order executed earlier this month. That defendant divulged details of the body’s condition and location “to sufficiently convince law enforcement at the time that he was the party responsible for the death,” the district attorney office’s motion for inquest read.
The Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office have declined to reveal details of the case as well as the identity of the man who claims he killed the unidentified woman. Cook said that investigators aren’t suitably confident in the veracity of that confession, and that this renewed examination aims to verify the confession as well as connect the man who claims he killed the woman to her death.
“We can’t give too much information, because even though we may have a glimmer of who we think this might be, we can’t reveal that because we don’t know that,” Cook said. “We certainly don’t want the family to have some false hope, so we’re keeping all of that information close to our belts.”
Cook said the revived investigation was recently instigated by a request from an outside agency, which officials have declined to identify. Goertz said that the outside agency is speculating that Jane Doe’s death may be linked to the notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to hundreds of killings in the 1980s and died from natural causes in 2001 while on death row.
“I can’t imagine DNA will in any way, shape or form, 40 years later, open a criminal investigation,” Goertz said.
