Law enforcement agencies face startling numbers and staggering odds to identify young ‘Jane Does Unclaimed UNNAMED

Knoxville News Sentinel (TN) - May 20, 2007
Author: ANSLEY HAMAN hamana@knews.com

JELLICO, Tenn. — Nameless and faceless, her decomposing body appeared in Detective Eddie Barton’s mind each time he drove along Stinking Creek Road. He’d tick off the details to himself: Black female younger than 40. No scars. No tattoos.

One gunshot wound to the head. Stab wounds. A discolored line about the width of a wedding band on one finger.

Found Oct. 25, 1998, by a man collecting soda cans.

That’s all Barton, now retired, knew about her. That’s all Campbell County Sheriff’s Department detectives know today.

But they haven’t forgotten the woman now buried in a Campbell County grave marked “Unknown.”

Referred to by investigators as “Jane Doe No. 2,” she is one of the untold number of unidentified and unclaimed bodies found by law enforcement agencies in Tennessee.

Some are murder victims. Some appear to be homeless. Most turn out to have been from out of town.

At least 15 of those men and women found over the past three decades in East Tennessee remain unidentified. The bodies are in graves, morgues and at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center.

All told, there may be more than 100 Tennessee cases.

“It’s very startling, if you do a graph of this: You’ve got lots and lots of young females,” said Lee Meadows Jantz, coordinator of the UT Forensic Anthropology Center, of data entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, or NCIC.

Young males are more frequently killed in acts of violence, such as street fighting. Those bodies are generally fresh and more easily identifiable, Jantz said.

Often victims of abduction, dead females are hidden or left to the elements, she said. Then they decompose and become difficult to identify. Older men, many of whom are transient, also appear in unidentified body lists.

Local agencies often fend for themselves in identifying the dead. Most area police departments don’t have a homicide squad or cold case unit. And there is little interagency communication, Barton said.

Though police officers work diligently for the first few months on a case, a lack of leads usually makes a Doe secondary to other investigations, authorities said.

Family members of a missing adult sometimes call to inquire about a possible match. Volunteer Web sleuths also try to make connections. Forensic anthropologists and artists volunteer their expertise.

But making the pieces fit takes time, said Oak Ridge Police Department Detective Sgt. Louis Leopper.

Years after his retirement, Barton still carries a folder filled with tips, exhausted leads and communications about his old, unidentified cases.

“These cases, they’re like a cancer kind of eating at you,” he said.

Following are stories of some of East Tennessee’s unclaimed dead.

Five Jane Does in Campbell County

It’s been almost a decade without any breaks in the case of Campbell County’s Jane Doe No. 2.

Where to start?

How about a name.

“You have to have an identity to have a starting point,” Barton said. “Unless you have somebody with a conscience walk in there.”

After she was found, Barton and his co-workers drafted fliers and sent them to other law enforcement agencies, organized a facial reconstruction, voluntarily entered her information into NCIC and listed the body on nonprofit Web sites that seek to match those known to be missing with unidentified bodies.

Family members of missing black women called. Web sleuths offered possible matches. Officers investigated the potential identities.

None matched.

No. 2’s file is not the only one Barton keeps.

Since the mid-1980s, at least five unidentified females have been found in the county of about 40,000 residents. Many were found along I-75 between Jellico and Caryville, an isolated stretch of road.

One, a young redhead, was found in the mid-1980s along a straightaway. The bones of a girl also were unearthed in 1985.

Barton keeps records on another woman once known as “Jane Doe No. 1.” More than 10 years ago she was found strangled, stabbed and dumped on an I-75 exit ramp

A nonprofit group, the Doe Network , put Campbell authorities in touch with their counterparts in El Paso, Texas. In March the woman was identified as Ada Elena Torres Smith.

Finding her identity broke the Smith case open again, said Capt. Don Farmer with the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office.

Farmer and Barton think the murders of Smith and Jane Doe No. 2 may be connected. They were found a little more than a mile apart near Stinking Creek Road in consecutive years.

‘Lady of the Lake’ About two miles downstream from Clark Center Park on Melton Hill Lake, two fishermen found a woman’s body floating beneath an undercut bank on March 6, 2000.

Leopper, of the Oak Ridge Police Department, calls the woman estimated to be in her 20s the “Lady of the Lake.”

She drowned.

Leopper believes it was murder.

He has a theory about how it happened.

He thinks the woman, who stood about 5 feet, 9 inches, may have frequented truck stops. Dental records showed she may have worn braces and had dental care.

Leopper believes she “was picked up or abducted by a local individual.”

She may have then been drowned in Melton Hill Lake. Police believe her body was underwater for a few weeks before the fishermen found her.

But there is no way to know for sure until someone comes forward with evidence or officers make a positive ID.

Her dental records and fingerprints may help give her a name, Leopper said. The details are in the NCIC database, but that does not ensure she will be matched with a missing adult. It takes time and narrow search criteria.

“Until you hit that right keystroke, you’ll never know who that person is,” Leopper said.

Mile marker 44

Detective Capt. John Huffine of the Greene County Sheriff’s Department is waiting for an NCIC entry to produce a fruitful lead on an unidentified body dumped more than 20 years ago along Interstate 81. She was left at mile marker 44.

TBI assisted with the 1985 case. The girl, estimated to be in her teens, was four to six weeks pregnant. Her hair was tinted red.

She died of head trauma.

Her naked body was found about the same time as the redhaired Campbell County Jane Doe. Some thought their cases might be connected, but the ties were never proven. Neither has been identified.

Huffine was a senior in high school when authorities began the investigation, but he’s worked during his tenure to spread the word about the case.

The girl’s dental record is in NCIC, her information is listed on nonprofit Web sites, and Huffine presented the case to the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, which connects participating local agencies.

“It’s not as frustrating as if it had been a local homicide,” Huffine said. “It’s a homicide that happened somewhere else.”

She may have been a runaway or someone estranged from her family, he said.

“Nobody’s reported her,” he said. “Otherwise, she would have been identified.”

She may have walked out beneath Gatlinburg’s Aerial Tramway, taken a seat beneath a tree and passed out. About a month later her decomposing body was found by someone taking a shortcut to a Cove Mountain chalet.

“It appears that she sat down next to a tree and just expired,” said Detective Tim Williams of the Gatlinburg Police Department.

Since Dec. 22, 1974, authorities have been chasing leads on the identity of the woman who stood 5 feet, 7 inches and weighed about 140 pounds.

There was no evidence of trauma, he said. Her sweater and coat were folded neatly next to her.

She wore dark blue, Mayer-Land-Marquis pants (size extra-large) and a white, shortsleeved shirt with a yellow flower print.

Officers never found a purse or a wallet that could have held a driver’s license or a library card with her name.

Though no fingerprints could be taken from her badly decomposed body, the department worked hard on the case at the time, keeping good records, Williams said.

“When this was new, there was a lot of effort put into it,” he said.

The department entered the details into NCIC and chased numerous leads.

“We go for years with nothing, and then we’ll get leads all at one time,” he said.

He’s had about four tips in the 10 years he’s been a detective.

“Prior to that, there were dozens of eliminations,” he said.

‘Shotgun female’

Around 2:30 a.m. June 1, 1987, a 12-gauge shotgun slug blew through the front door of a North Knox County home, ripping the face off a woman raising a ruckus on the porch.

Knox County Sheriff’s Office authorities speculated at the time that the unidentified woman and two male accomplices were attempting to trick and rob the resident on Jim Sterchi Road by faking a fight outside her front door.

The woman kicked the door, awakening the resident and a visitor. The resident called police and fired one shot from a shotgun when the woman attempted to open a screen door.

The two men were caught. But they were unable to identify the woman. They said they had picked her up at a Greene County rest stop just before the shooting.

Jantz, of the UT Forensic Anthropology Center, said she and her colleagues dubbed the dead woman “Shotgun Female.”

The case is archived in Sheriff’s Office records, and spokeswoman Martha Dooley said the department follows up on all leads on the woman’s identity.

A UT forensic anthropology student generated a computer reconstruction of the woman in the early 1990s.

Ansley Haman may be reached at 865-342-6341.