Identified! CA - Huntington Beach, WhtFem 457UFCA, 25-30, in field, Mar'68 - Anita Louise Piteau

[Irish_Eyes]

Oops. Actually that's not Owego, NY. Grrr....sorry

 

[EveDallas]

There might another way in which they might be able to identify her. but first I need to know a couple of things about the case. One did they ever compare fingerprints to determine if they match this Jane Doe's? Two the woman who thinks this might a woman name Rosie ever found out where she live and how she got to work? Did she walk, live near by or had a car or took the bus? and why no house keys ? Do anybody have any information on these questions? Plus this same woman can she ever recall anybody else who work at this bar or diner where she say she knew or met Rosie

 

[CarlK90245]

There might another way in which they might be able to identify her. but first I need to know a couple of things about the case. One did they ever compare fingerprints to determine if they match this Jane Doe's? Two the woman who thinks this might a woman name Rosie ever found out where she live and how she got to work? Did she walk, live near by or had a car or took the bus? and why no house keys ? Do anybody have any information on these questions? Plus this same woman can she ever recall anybody else who work at this bar or diner where she say she knew or met Rosie

I'm sure that they tried to chase all those angles down with no luck. If she didn't have an arrest record, AFIS would not get a fingerprint hit.

The bar is long closed, and they tried and were unable to locate any owners/former employees/patrons other than the woman who reported "rosie" as a possible.

There was a purse located near the woman's body, and some photos inside the purse. But from what I understand, LE determined that the purse was coincidentally there, and unrelated to her case. No other belongings were found with the body AFAIK.

 

[Wanting2Help]

Also, the person who thought they knew her as "Rosie" said she left a husband and a 2 year old son behind. Per the post above from Ambercat the ME said she did not have any signs of a previous pregnancy.

This makes me question:
1) wether the person really knew her or was it a mistaken identity?
2) If "Rosie" lied about having a son maybe she lied about where she was from and what her real name was

 

[carbuff]

Also, the person who thought they knew her as "Rosie" said she left a husband and a 2 year old son behind. Per the post above from Ambercat the ME said she did not have any signs of a previous pregnancy.

This makes me question:
1) wether the person really knew her or was it a mistaken identity?
2) If "Rosie" lied about having a son maybe she lied about where she was from and what her real name was

While it's quite possible "Rosie" didn't tell the truth, the child could have been adopted, or could have been her husband's by a previous relationship.

 

[Ambercat]

In an old Los Angeles Times article, dated April 16, 1972, entitled "John Doe: He Can Leave a Path That's Hard to Follow" primarily about an UID found on New Years Day 1972 in Anaheim https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7647, there is some information about this UID from Huntington Beach as well.

Paraphrasing because I can't copy and paste from their format -- About a year after the unidentified woman was found, she was tentatively identified by a former friend (who had been out of state when the woman was found) as Teresa Marie Tibbett, 29, of Long Beach, also known as Mattie Meeker, who had disappeared "some time ago." Although the friend's description of the woman and a piece of jewelry she had been wearing were "fairly close" to the unidentified victim, detectives at the time refused to formally identify her because of "the lack of additional identification."

http://search.proquest.com/docview/157005486/13EB84B18C836885D6C/2?accountid=46298 I was able to log in with my library card from the Long Beach Public Library and wasted a lot of time looking at old LA Times articles.

I wonder if Teresa Tibbett aka Mattie Meeker was ever located? I tried to search for other articles about her in the LA Times, but this was the only one that showed up.

 

[Wanting2Help]

In an old Los Angeles Times article, dated April 16, 1972, entitled "John Doe: He Can Leave a Path That's Hard to Follow" primarily about an UID found on New Years Day 1972 in Anaheim https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7647, there is some information about this UID from Huntington Beach as well.

Paraphrasing because I can't copy and paste from their format -- About a year after the unidentified woman was found, she was tentatively identified by a former friend (who had been out of state when the woman was found) as Teresa Marie Tibbett, 29, of Long Beach, also known as Mattie Meeker, who had disappeared "some time ago." Although the friend's description of the woman and a piece of jewelry she had been wearing were "fairly close" to the unidentified victim, detectives at the time refused to formally identify her because of "the lack of additional identification."

http://search.proquest.com/docview/157005486/13EB84B18C836885D6C/2?accountid=46298 I was able to log in with my library card from the Long Beach Public Library and wasted a lot of time looking at old LA Times articles.

I wonder if Teresa Tibbett aka Mattie Meeker was ever located? I tried to search for other articles about her in the LA Times, but this was the only one that showed up.

I wonder if the detectives working the case now have this info?

 

[Slurry]

Darlene Polizzi, New Jersey? http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/p/polizzi_darlene.html. Could she have fled, and her husband found her in CA?

 

[PricklyPear]

Decided to pick at this a little, and I wondered what you guys think of the following couple of possibilities:

Emily Richards - matches on everything but the height, but it doesn't say where she's from, just that she was known to have married in Los Angeles County in 1966. She's probably not from too far away, though; if she was from New York I think it would have been noted. Still a possibility, though.
https://www.findthemissing.org/en/cases/27557/2051

Mary Jean McLaughlin - a little too tall. The file claims her eyes are blue, but they look very dark in the images included in her Namus file. She looks a lot like the sketch in my opinion, though. But she's also not from New York.
https://www.findthemissing.org/en/cases/2486/2058

 

[ellroy1958]

Found an article from the Long Beach newspaper, The Independent, January 17, 1969 (page 20) re: her burial, plus with a different drawing of her.

Second copy of article (darkened):

 

[ellroy1958]

The way the New York Post reported it in 2011, it sounds like there were virtually no doubts re: the person who saw the sketch on television and contacted the police about an old acquaintance named "Rosie" who worked at the Circus Room in Long Beach in 1967/68. From the article:

An old pal came forward this week after seeing on TV a police sketch of the woman she knew as Rosie. She broke down when shown gruesome autopsy photos.

“That’s her,” she sobbed, according to police.
http://nypost.com/2011/01/14/nypd-aids-calif-in-68-slay-case/

 

[ellroy1958]

Trying to get a firmer idea on what the Circus room was, and where it was. Various descriptions online have it being a bar, a restaurant, a seedy "dive" in a place called "Blood Alley," etc.

What I am finding thus far:

It goes back to at least the 1950s when it was located at 111 American Avenue.

The Independent Press Telegram, Oct. 25, 1953

American Avenue was re-named Long Beach Boulevard in 1958...
https://longbeachhistory.wordpress....lot-of-my-writing-though-i-did-supplement-it/

... but the address numbers stayed the same, so its location became 111 Long Beach Boulevard. A social columnist working for the the The Independent in the early 1960s by the name of Tedd Thomey, who wrote a column called "Stepping Out," wrote about it, and made it seem like it was (at least at one point) a nice restaurant.
May 1, 1961:


May 19, 1961:


111 Long Beach Boulevard appears to have been on the West side of the street (odd-numbered addresses), between East First and East Alta Way. It's a parking lot today...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/1...2!3m1!1s0x80dd313be1fd2a75:0xf38b21f412965465

 

[carbuff]

I don't think this has been posted: LE press release from 2011 about the person who recognized "Rosie." http://www.huntingtonbeachca.gov/go...d/news/68-006079 Press Release 01-11-2011.pdf

Unfortunately besides the many Italian women named Rosie, Rosie is also a common nickname for women whose given name is not Rose or anything close to it.

 

[ellroy1958]

Trying to get a mental image of where this happened and what area/intersection looked like. By way of written description:

"The victim was located in an empty field near Yorktown Avenue and Newland Street in Huntington Beach, CA.

"Police theorize that she got in a car with a man somewhere locally and the pair drove to a large field used for farming. The man parked the car and the pair talked while the man smoked, dropping a cigarette butt onto the dirt. Then he decided to rape her, and when she resisted, he punched her in the face.

"After the attack, Jane Doe was pulled from the car and her throat was slit on the freshly plowed soil. She was dragged to a nearby drainage ditch and abandoned around midnight as the rain started to fall."
http://doenetwork.org/cases/457ufca.html

An article (attached post #70) said that at 4pm, March 14, 1968 "Three boys on their way home from school found her sprawled face down and dead in shallow drainage ditch separating two fields near Yorktown Avenue and Newland Street..."

A 1968 topographical map shows that there were actually two schools in close proximity to Yorktown and Newland the boys could have walked from.


The map makes it appear the intersection was shaped like a backwards "L", but it might be showing only those roads that at by 1968 had been paved and not the roads that might still have still been rural dirt roads. Aerial view photos from 1972 and even 1963 show it as a 4-way intersection. The 1963 aerial view already shows house construction in the northwest section of the intersection, but even by 1972 three of the four corners were still undeveloped.


Have spent time zooming in on these images but have not found with certainty something that could be a ditch "separating two fields."

To get the images, I plugged in the address of one of the schools into the "Historic Aerials" website:
8787 Dolphin Dr Huntington Beach, CA 92646
http://historicaerials.com/

(Thanks to Bessie for bringing that website to my attention!)

 

[Ambercat]

I was able to finally change the Los Angeles Times article from April 16, 1972 about the unidentified murder victim from Huntington Beach (where she is IDed as Teresa Marie Tippett) and two other Orange County UIDs (https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7695 and https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7647 neither have their own thread at WS).

http://i1353.photobucket.com/albums/q664/amberbluecat/latimes_apr161972p1_zpshb5g2fg5.jpg
http://i1353.photobucket.com/albums/q664/amberbluecat/latimes_apr161972p2_zpsefzhrmar.jpg

 

[ellroy1958]

Thank you, Ambercat, for the 1972 article. It's interesting the scenario it proposes. Doenetwork.org makes it sound like she was assaulted and murdered right there in the field:

"Police theorize that she got in a car with a man somewhere locally and the pair drove to a large field used for farming. The man parked the car and the pair talked while the man smoked, dropping a cigarette butt onto the dirt. Then he decided to rape her, and when she resisted, he punched her in the face.

"After the attack, Jane Doe was pulled from the car and her throat was slit on the freshly plowed soil. She was dragged to a nearby drainage ditch and abandoned around midnight as the rain started to fall."

The 1972 LA Times article, however, makes it sounds like she was assaulted and murdered off-site, and her body was merely left in the field.

"Investigation disclosed that the victim... had been slain elsewhere, then dragged into the field and dumped into an irrigation ditch."

 

[ellroy1958]

Trying to narrow down even more closely where she was found, an article in the LA Times (April 15, 1968) had some additional information, describing her as lying face down in a drainage ditch separating two plowed fields "about 150 yards south of Yorktown Ave...." The article also seems to suggest that a dirt road might have run parallel to the ditch, saying "Tire tracks indicated a car had driven down the dirt road slightly past the location of the body and turned around to return to the street."


That would potentially put the location of the crime scene between two fields on the southeast portion of the Yorktown / Newland intersection, just west of the William T. Newland Elementary School, the school from which the three boys who found her were most likely walking home. The ditch / road might potentially be seen in this 1972 aerial view photo (also indicated with red line).

 

[Jake479]

latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-me-cold-case-20161117-story.html

 

[SpicySun]

http://ktla.com/2016/11/17/police-r...ge-county-cold-case-48-years-after-her-death/ *graphic photos*

 

[carbuff]

Trying to narrow down even more closely where she was found, an article in the LA Times (April 15, 1968) had some additional information, describing her as lying face down in a drainage ditch separating two plowed fields "about 150 yards south of Yorktown Ave...." The article also seems to suggest that a dirt road might have run parallel to the ditch, saying "Tire tracks indicated a car had driven down the dirt road slightly past the location of the body and turned around to return to the street."
View attachment 75229

That would potentially put the location of the crime scene between two fields on the southeast portion of the Yorktown / Newland intersection, just west of the William T. Newland Elementary School, the school from which the three boys who found her were most likely walking home. The ditch / road might potentially be seen in this 1972 aerial view photo (also indicated with red line).
View attachment 75230View attachment 75231View attachment 75232View attachment 75233

I forgot to ask when you first posted this: did you draw any conclusions from the location?