EDIT -- I thought I had refreshed my browser before posting this, but I guess I didn't; I didn't see that webrocket and others beat me to it. Oh well. <shrug>
It's not my intent to discourage anyone from submitting potential matches to law enforcement. If it's more work for them, so what? – after all, we pay their salaries.
NAMUS lists Jennifer Wilson's DNA testing as being in progress but not yet complete; for Appleton, it says that the tests are complete. It also lists Simpson County Jane Doe (SCJD) as having mitochondrial DNA available, so it seems there's an easy comparison to be made in both cases. And in the odd chance that LE hasn't collected the proper samples already, Appleton has children, and Wilson's mother (at least as of a few years ago) was living, so there are sources for mtDNA tests right there.
(On a side note, SCJD does not list nucDNA as being recovered from SCJD. She was lying dead, out in the open, for at most a few weeks. And her remains are described as “partially” skeletonized, which I guess means there was some soft tissue left – well, obviously there was, there's a photo of her tattoo. Yet they didn't get chromosomal DNA from her. Does that strike anyone else as odd?)
I agree, there's a strong resemblance between those two photos of Appleton and SCJD. But when I look at other photos of her on her Charley Project page …
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/a/appleton_monica.html
… I see something else. Her smile. Such a lovely smile. Which puts me right back to the same concern I have about Jennifer Wilson.
If Monica Appleton (or Jennifer Wilson) is SCJD, how did her teeth get so bad over such a short period of time?
Please, follow along here, and if anything I say seems wrong or unreasonable please point it out to me, because this is the main thing I'm “stuck on” about SCJD and just can't get past. And for the record, I'm not a dentist, and I'm not claiming any specialized knowledge. (Are there any dentists who are members here?)
SCJD had lousy teeth. And they showed every sign of long-term neglect. Here's an abbreviated version of the information from NAMUS, just to show which teeth were still present, either intact or filled(“O”s); which were present and decayed (“X”s); and which were missing (“-”s):
(upper right) -X-X-O-OOXX-O-O- (upper left)
(lower right) -–O-OO----OOO--- (lower left)
That's right – all four of her most prominent lower teeth, the ones that would have showed when she opened her mouth, were missing. Her ability to chew food was limited, since she only had three pairs of opposing teeth left, none of which were molars – bicuspid pairs on both sides, and on the left side a canine pair with one decayed tooth.
And in case there's any doubt, here are photographs of SCJD's upper and lower jaw. (Yes, they're “dead person” pictures. But there's no soft tissue, only bone and teeth – no worse to look at than the skull in your old high school biology lab):
Upper jaw:
https://identifyus.org/en/medias/full/7254
Lower jaw:
https://identifyus.org/en/medias/full/7253
Take a look at those, and notice how many of the tooth sockets have completely healed. Those four front lower teeth? There aren't any sockets at all where they should be – they're completely healed over. And while there are a few open sockets here and there (some of her teeth were found separated from her jaws at the scene, and weren't replaced for these photos), look at how many places in both jaws where there should be teeth but don't even have sockets.
Now, I found three different sources on the Internet, dental web sites, all of which said “six months for a bone socket to heal after a tooth extraction.” So it seems to me that at the very latest, SCJD would have lost most of her teeth by April 2001. But that's when she lost the teeth altogether. If someone has healthy teeth but stops taking care of them, how long does it take to lose them? Months, at the very least, I'd think. If nothing else, modern fluoridated drinking water would slow down the process. Even with the fabled “meth mouth,” from what I gather, one has to be an intense and frequent user for it to happen that quickly.
And there's something else. How accurate sites like The Doe Network and Charley are is, I suppose, debatable … but Doe mentions “severe bilateral degeneration of TMJ” – that is, her jaw joints were severely worn out and/or misaligned.
http://doenetwork.org/cases/111ufky.html
Now, I've got mild TMJ on one side. Most of the time, it's just an annoyance. It's never been enough of a problem to be worth treating; I'm in my late forties and have had it for decades. But occasionally it hurts – and when it hurts, it hurts. I'd have to think that someone with severe TMJ problems on both sides would be in chronic pain. I'd also have to think that severe degeneration wouldn't develop quickly but would take years – meaning that pain would have been going on for years.
So I'm having a hard time believing that SCJD could be anyone who was living a reasonably normal life within a few years of 2001. Using Monica Appleton as an example to illustrate the point – Charley shows several pics of her, captioned “circa 1999,” and while she may have used drugs she looks healthy enough here – well fed, good skin, healthy hair, no bizarre facial expressions, etc. (And what sort of drug use isn't specified. For all we know, she might have only taken the occasional bong hit with friends – if that's the case, so what?) It sounds from that page like she was determined to do right by her children, which sounds to me like whatever else was going on in her life, she had her head on at least sorta straight. Even if her financial circumstances were less-than-ideal, there are free medical and dental clinics. So if she had that long-standing and painful TMJ, why did she never get it treated? Drug use aside, she looks as if she took reasonably good care of herself – what would cause her to suddenly change into a person who so markedly neglects herself? And if she was on the run, in hiding, believing that she needed to keep her wits around her, that would seem to be an odd time to take on a meth habit.
I can only think of two classes of possibilities for SCJD. On the one hand, she could be someone who had a very hard life for a long time – maybe a teenage runaway who became a crack-addicted streetwalker – and who in death showed signs of moderately sub-standard self-care over a very long term. The other class of possibilities would involve someone who was severely self-neglectful over a shorter term – and here the only explanation I can come up with is some sort of psychiatric problem. (As an example – the chess champion Bobby Fischer, a brilliant man who had some serious “problems,” refused dental care because he believed his enemies would implant tiny transmitters in his fillings to force thoughts into his brain; but even he brushed his teeth regularly.) Maybe a seemingly normal person might have a sudden severe breakdown, go into hiding, and experience this sort of deterioration … but could such a person keep enough presence of mind to even stay alive for very long?
Well, I've talked enough. And again, if any of you think I'm getting anything wrong, please set me straight.
