Identified! KY - Harlan Co., WhtFem UP5880, 16-22, off Little Shepherd Trail, Jun'69 - Sonja Adams

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Pine Mountain has long been a "dumping ground" for Michigan and Ohio. The same has been said for Carr Creek Lake in Knott and Perry counties.
 
carbuff said:
I don't see any Caroline or Carolyn missing in that time frame. I did find a Caroline Street in Wheeling, which I think is across the river from Cincinnati?
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Wheeling's pretty far east of Cincy.
 
I found this article about the unidentified in the U.S. The focus is on "Mountain Jane Doe" but it also talks about NamUs and some specific cases where identification took a long time. It's lengthy but very interesting and also depressing. It's so frustrating to read that the wrong body had been unearthed last year.

"Left for dead: How America fails the missing and unidentified"

https://www.revealnews.org/article/leftfordead/

On the day before Thanksgiving last year, Todd Matthews, a onetime factory worker from Livingston, Tennessee, stood in the frigid morning air near the grave, waiting for the Kentucky State Police and a local coroner to arrive with shovels and pickaxes.

Matthews first earned public attention in 1998 for using the Internet to help identify another slain Kentucky woman who went unnamed for three decades.

“We have every reason in the world to be here today,” he said. “It just took 45 years to get here.”
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Harlan County Coroner Philip Bianchi knew something was wrong.

The second-generation funeral home director had spotted an item that shouldn’t have been there when the body came out of the ground. Embalmers know it as a trocar button, used to seal the injection site when special fluids are pumped into a body in preparation for funeral services. Mountain Jane Doe had not been embalmed – she was too badly decomposed and she had been autopsied.

There were other worrisome clues. He had expected a body bag, or least the remnants of one, but none appeared. And once the remains were taken back to his funeral home, before being shipped to Texas, he found what appeared to be part of a clip-on tie and a man’s sock.

It wasn’t long before Bianchi realized that the team had dug up the wrong body.
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Darla Jackson, the local historian and mortuary owner, was crestfallen when she learned what had happened. It had been 15 years since she first learned about the case from an aunt, which was one of the reasons why she had stood in the biting air that November day as the bones came up.

Jackson had thought Mountain Jane Doe finally was going to gain back her real name; despite the setback, she has not given up hope.

“She’s in the cemetery and she’s in that area,” she said, “so now we just have to find her.”
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What a sad story...but hopeful too. All over, there are people who care.
 
I grew up in Cincinnati area. You could drive to the beach taking a road pretty close to there also. Crittenden is considered a suburb of Cincinnati now...back then it took maybe an hour to get there, but Harlan was a days drive. Many people in the area had family in the mountains. There weren't many hotels or restaurants when you travelled that way, but back then it was not unusual for people to sleep in their cars if they wanted to save money. But you are also dealing with a culture that puts family ahead of anything else. The ones that do know most likely wont tell.
 
Bumping. There's a documentary about this Jane Doe that was posted into three parts on youtube. There's interviews from some of the locals, the author of Harlan County Haunts, and details about the exhumation (and how the wrong body was unearthed).
The link to Part 1:
[video=youtube;C0vNQXsvrRU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vNQXsvrRU[/video]

You can find the other parts in the series on the production team's website - https://www.revealnews.org/article/coming-soon-see-our-documentary-series-the-dead-unknown/
 
I was glancing through the More Harlan County Haunts and noticed a story about a boy being outside the Pine Mt. Settlement School working in the garden and heard screams coming from the mountain, said it wasn't an animal it sounded like a woman, but he didn't seek to find out what it was and that two weeks later this Jane Doe was found on pine mountain, and he has since felt guilty. Just thought that kind of interesting and makes you wonder.
 
Saw this article in my newsfeed today. After the failed attempt of exhuming her body in 2014 (where they failed to locate her because of a misplaced grave marker), they tried again last November and are pretty confident they have her.

Snipped
She was thought to be about 20 years old with a medium build and reddish-blond hair when she was found stabbed to death in June 1969 on a trail near Harlan. Many locals refer to her as Little Shepherd Trail Girl.

Bianchi said the university will extract DNA and compare it with a family that believes she may be a lost relative. He expects to learn the results this summer.
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https://www.revealnews.org/article/...es-close-in-on-identity-of-mountain-jane-doe/
 
Here she is:

attachment.php


DNA testing indicates Sonja Kaye Blair-Adams, originally from Letcher County, was the woman found and buried in Harlan County in the summer of 1969, police said in a release Wednesday.
Blair-Adams's name remained a mystery for years. Buried with a grave marker that simply said "unidentified girl", she came to be known in the area as "Mountain Jane Doe."
Karen Stipes, the victim's daughter, contacted Kentucky State Police and local officials to let them know the 1969 Jane Doe may be her mother.
In Nov. 2014, WYMT was in Harlan when officials tried to exhume Blair-Adams's body. It was later discovered they were digging in the wrong place and had exhumed the wrong body. Officials were able to locate the correct body and send it to the University of Kentucky for DNA testing.
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What a beautiful lady. May she RIP.
 

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Wow, another one I never thought would be identified. Rest in peace, Sonja, I'm glad you can go home.

P.S. Mods, you have the name wrong in the thread title. Her last name is Blair-Adams, hyphenated.
 
RIP Sonja. Glad you got your name back.
Wow. That's like three so far in the past couple of weeks, and I'm waiting to hear more on a fourth. Cynthia Day, Christine Thornton and now this case, all recently identified. The fourth one is Highland County OH JD found in 1980.
 
Alleykins said:
RIP Sonja. Glad you got your name back.
Wow. That's like three so far in the past couple of weeks, and I'm waiting to hear more on a fourth. Cynthia Day, Christine Thornton and now this case, all recently identified. The fourth one is Highland County OH JD found in 1980.
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And "Lori Ruff," too.
 
Alleykins said:
Whoa. They ID'd her, too, finally? I will have to check it out. Incredible.
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Yeah, they announced yesterday she had been identified and released the name today. It wasn't anybody reported as missing.
 
carbuff said:
Yeah, they announced yesterday she had been identified and released the name today. It wasn't anybody reported as missing.
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I went over to her thread before they locked it down and started another one, but my head was pingponging all over the place trying to keep up. Glad both families finally have closure/answers.
It's been a bonus month for identifying people, here's hoping it keeps going!
 
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