Story-
A forensic sculptor's 'educated guess' is the only clue to woman's identity in Deptford cold case
(from page 1)
One in an occasional series on unsolved area crimes
It has been more than two decades since two hunters chasing a rabbit into a thickly wooded field in Deptford made a grisly discovery: human skeletal remains.
Twenty-three years later the remains found in February 1990 have a face but not a name. A facial reconstruction crafted in 1991 under the delicate fingers of New Jersey State Police forensic anthropologist Donna Fontana portrays a young white female with prominent cheeks and a strong nose.
The only clues to the woman’s past life and her death were found in that desolate tract off Clements Bridge Road: skeletal remains, 14-carat gold earrings, a strand of imitation pearls and clothing apparently used to strangle her.
For detectives who have worked the case, the investigation has never gotten farther than her name.
“There’s not a lot you can do without an identity,” said Stacie Lick, the detective at the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office now assigned to the case of Jane Doe II.....
(From page 4)
But such successful cases aren’t easy. Many missing persons reports, especially from decades past, are not entered into national databases such as NamUs. And a facial reconstruction is only successful when it reaches the right audience.
Fontana created the reconstruction of the woman in Deptford a year after her remains were found. By then, Fontana had helped investigators piece together a profile of the victim: white female, between 16 and 20, between 5-4 and 5-8 in height.
A Courier-Post article from that time reported it took about eight weeks to collect the information and create the bust. Investigators at the time said they hoped the re-creation would “jog a few memories.”
“It kind of bothers me that we have a girl out there so young and we don’t know who she is,” prosecutor’s office investigator Robert J. Best said at the time.
Fontana and Lick have the same sentiment today.
Lick said the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was contacted about the case and digital re-creations of the woman’s face were created. The re-creations have resulted in calls from anxious relatives over the years. Lick said a man from Canada called last month believing Jane Doe II could be a match for his long missing sister.
Further examination determined otherwise.
“That’s the type of thing we do in this case,” Lick said of frequently testing the woman’s records against missing person’s cases.
The detective said it remains unclear whether the woman was from South Jersey or if the wooded area — now the site of a Lowe’s store — was selected by someone passing through on a nearby highway.
~Snip-
Web sleuths
Aside from Lick and a Deptford police detective, there are civilian sleuths bent on identifying the woman. The woman’s case is featured this week on
www.websleuths.com and a forum dedicated to the case is filled with posts from people comparing the woman’s features to that of missing persons on sites such as NamUs.gov.
A moderator on the Web forum theorized this week the woman’s features, especially her smile, were unique enough “that she shouldn’t be hard to recognize if we had the right missing person.”
The moderator had taken the time to analyze a Deptford High School year book from 1987 but found no faces that matched that of Jane Doe II.
A flier with the woman’s face still hangs on the wall at Fontana’s office. On a counter are facial reconstructions from three other unsolved cases. One is that of a woman found partially clothed in Logan in 2004.
Despite her professional success and awards, Fontana’s conversation often returns to those faces without names.
“These cases will haunt me until they get identified.”