Cold case squad exhumes “Tolt Hill Jane Doe” for DNA testing

Published 2:57 pm Thursday, August 11, 2011

Her real name is a mystery. Forty-two years have passed since the Tolt Hill Jane Doe’s body was found on a dirt road in the Lower Snoqualmie Valley.

All police know about “Jane” was that she was a dark-haired caucasian woman in her early 20s, slender and short.

She was murdered some time that spring, and her unclothed body was casually left along the track of what would become 290th Avenue Northeast, then a dirt road with few neighbors. A passerby spotted her body on June 5, 1969.

How she died is a complete mystery, too. Her body was too decomposed for medical examiners to determine how she died, other than ruling out a gunshot wound. Police figured it had lain by the road for weeks, or even months.

There have never been any leads. The case has lain dormant for decades: “A real whodunnit,” in the words of King County Sheriff’s Spokesman Sgt. John Urguhart.

But this cold case may be getting warmer. This week, a King County judge ordered Jane Doe’s body exhumed from an indigent’s grave at Seattle’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, to allow for DNA testing to aid the King County Sheriff’s Cold Case Squad’s search for answers.

The Tolt Hill Jane Doe’s DNA will be entered into a database at the University of North Texas’ Center for Human Identification, where families with missing loved ones can submit samples to help discover answers. After university researchers do their processing work, “Jane’s” genetic fingerprint will be entered into a national system that helps families learn the fates of their loved ones.

Another victim?

In 2006, 37 years after Jane Doe’s murder, detectives found a piece of skull from another victim, likely a young woman, three blocks from where the first body was found. The skull fragment had been exposed to the elements for a long time, and was never identified.

The skull that was found was so weathered, it probably dates to the same era as Jane Doe. Detectives now wonder whether the two deaths are related.

These bodies were left in the Valley too early to be linked to the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway. But such skeletal finds happen not infrequently in East King County, from the Snohomish County line to the Pierce County border.

“It’s not unusual for homicide suspects to dump bodies where they’re not going to be found,” Urquhart said. The rural road near Carnation fit that bill.

DNA database

The sheriff’s office has nearly 200 homicides and missing-person cold cases that date back as far as the early 1950s. When “Jane” was found, DNA methods used today did not exist. But technological advances over the last 10 years make it easier for victims’ families to link with investigators all the way across the country.

“Back then, there was no way for us to connect her to a missing person report,” Urquhart said. “We now have ways to identify who this person was… We’ve reached the point where crime solving is catching up with science.”

Family members with missing relatives should first contact their local police department to ask about submitting samples of DNA; police determine if DNA collection is appropriate in a given case. As families take part and the database grows, there is the chance for a match—and answers.

“It’s presumptuous of police to say that closure is going to come to a victim’s family,” Urquhart said. But families “definitely want to know. There may still be family members out there that never knew what happened. Most people, they want to know how she died and who killed her.”

• To make a tip on the Tolt Hill Jane Doe, call the Cold Case unit at (206) 296-3311.