re-post.
Brad Hunter
January 23, 2021
CRIME HUNTER: Canadian Jane Doe slain in 1968 remains a mystery | Toronto Sun
Cops believe this Jane Doe was a Canadian woman murdered in 1968 in North Carolina.
''April 27, 1968 was one of those warm spring days in North Carolina. A fine day for a walk through the countryside in Wake County, south of Raleigh, in the western end of the state.
That was also the beginning of an enduring mystery that remains essentially unsolved to this day. The victim has never been identified but from the beginning, cops believed she had traveled down from Canada to meet a tobacco-picking paramour.
Which could mean she was from southwestern Ontario in the tobacco-growing regions of Tillsonburg, Delhi and Simcoe.
According to Jo Ann Hunter, it must have happened quickly. Her mother and sister were going to a church on the road to drop something off and they saw the woman. Fifteen minutes later on their return trip, she was gone.
“She (Hunter’s mother) says she kept remembering that she would look back,” Hunter told reporters in 2005. “When they came back, they didn’t see the woman. They saw a fire burning in the field.”
At the time, they thought it was a farmer burning rubbish. They were wrong. Woke County Jane Doe was found burned to death the next day.
“It was a horrendous crime,” Chief Ronnie Stewart, of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, said in 2005.
Robert Reagan was a local tobacco picker who had done the back-breaking work in Canada as well.
Detectives believed that the unknown woman had traveled from Canada to meet Reagan and then he killed her. At the time of the murder, he was brought in but never charged.
He was violent womanizer and boozehound, cops said.
Reagan confessed that he and a buddy had seen the woman walking but claimed he had nothing to do with it.
“That evidence tended to show with certainty that the victim was killed by Robert Reagan, a resident of the community at the time,” Stewart alleged to WRAL.com.
In 2005, the local district attorney said there was more than enough evidence to charge Reagan with the slaying. There was just one problem: He was dead. Thirteen years at that point.
For their part, his family denied Reagan — who died in 1992 — was the killer. Because of his violent tendencies, that made him an easy target for cops.''
“I would like the public to know that there are two sides to this story,” his daughter, Jewel Madsen, said. “We’ve been shown no evidence, no proof. If he was alive today, he would have a trial. All the evidence would be put forward for us to make a rational decision.”
Investigators believe the mystery woman died a day before she was found and was white with possibility some Native heritage. She was about 5-foot-3, weighed around 130 pounds, had black hair, small ears, and a surgical scar below the left side of her naval with an A positive blood type.
The woman’s dental, DNA and fingerprints are available. Her remains have since been misplaced.
“I believe someone’s missing this victim. They think she probably left on her own free will to start another life,” Scott Broadwell, of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, said in 2005.
Can you help solve this mystery? Is someone you love missing from long ago?
CONTACT: the Wake County Sheriff’s Office at 1-919-856-6800.''
