Woman found slain in 1993 is identified through genetic genealogy
Story by Tom Jackman • 47m ago
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In December 1993, a land surveyor was working in a heavily wooded area of Centreville, Va., then being converted into a Fairfax County subdivision, when he found a woman’s skeletal remains among the trees. The medical examiner determined she had been stabbed to death and had been dead for anywhere from one to six years.
he Fairfax homicide unit worked the case for years, just trying to figure out who the woman was. In 1999, an officer crafted a three-dimensional likeness of her face and showed it to the media, in hopes that someone would recognize her. A composite drawing was released. News conferences near the site of what is now Sharpsburg Drive were held over the years, trying to drum up leads. Nothing.
Hoping to Solve a Skeleton's Mystery
But the rapidly evolving science of genetic genealogy has provided an answer: Sharon Kay Abbott Lane, a mother of two who was raised in northwest Indiana, and lived for a time in Big Stone Gap, Va., was the homicide victim. She would have been 34 years old in 1993, when her body was found.
The Fairfax police again turned to Othram, a forensic lab based out of The Woodlands, Tex., to identify a woman who had been nameless for nearly three decades. Earlier this year, Othram identified
a McLean woman found shot to death in 2001 as Patricia Gildawie, and also a woman who had taken her own life in an Annandale cemetery, Joyce Meyer Sommers, in 1996.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, Kimberly Lane said, her mother called her out of the blue. Kimberly was between 8 and 10 years old. “She gave me a phone number where I could reach her,” Kimberly Lane said, and mentioned living in Fairfax. “Asked me if I loved her. I carried that phone number in a pocketbook for years, ended up losing it, never had contact with her. I always thought I’d hear from her in my adult years, but we didn’t.”
After Fairfax police provided Othram with DNA samples from the unidentified woman, the lab was able to conduct advanced genome sequencing and work with public source DNA databases to locate a cousin, and police then found a brother of the woman, Fairfax cold case Detective Jon Long said. The brother said that Sharon Lane had a daughter named Kimberly and a son named Michael in Virginia. Long and Detective Melissa Wallace began calling Kimberly Lanes in Virginia and eventually found the right one. Kimberly Lane supplied her DNA and confirmed the identify of her long-missing mother.
Genealogy tests give answers to family of woman missing for 47 years
“I heard stories from my dad,” Kimberly Lane said. “She was really young, really wild, into some drugs, around the wrong people. He felt like he couldn’t leave us with her.” Kimberly Lane has a memory of trying to feed her crying baby brother some cereal when they were left alone in an apartment in Indiana. Her parents were separated by then, and her father was summoned to Indiana to take custody of the children, who then grew up in Big Stone Gap in southwest Virginia.
“I’ve always wondered what happened,” said Michael Lane, who said he has no memories of his mother. “I kind of always had a bad feeling in my gut. I would rather know this than not. It does give some closure. The timing is a bit of a shock. You kind of forget about it.”
Michael Lane said he had tried to contact his mother’s family over the years, but they also had little contact with Sharon Lane. He said he once tracked down his mother’s grandfather, who told him Sharon had called him collect from jail in Falls Church, Va., asking for money, which the grandfather refused.
Michael Lane said he also located one of his mother’s sisters, who said she had received a phone call in the middle of the night around 1991 with someone screaming, “Your sister’s dead, your sister’s dead!” He said he didn’t think his mother’s family filed a missing persons report.
“I thought maybe she’d started a new family somewhere,” said Michael Lane, who still lives in Big Stone Gap. “It kind of flips me out that she was still in Virginia. I’m sure she got mixed up with the wrong people.” Lane’s ex-husband, who also had no contact with her, declined to be interviewed.
Fairfax has between 10 and 20 homicides per year in a population of more than 1 million, so each one is worked aggressively and Lane was one of the older unsolved cases. Retired Lt. Bruce Guth, who ran the homicide unit from 1994 to 2009, said Lane’s case “was worked on by a lot of detectives who were frustrated we couldn’t ID her.”
“That case was one of those that sticks to one’s soul because I felt if we could ID her, then we could solve the murder,” Guth said. “I’m super excited that she’s been identified.”
Sharon Lane’s clothes were largely deteriorated, but she had jewelry, a red hair pick and a yellow barrette, and a Life Savers wrapper. Police said she was slender, stood between 5 feet and 5 feet 3 inches tall and had fairly thick dark-blonde to light-brown hair, and her teeth were in an advanced state of decay.
“We’re looking for anybody that knew her back then,” Long said. He said Sharon Lane’s siblings were also estranged from her. “Any information would be very helpful, because we’re starting with nothing. We’re really hoping to get some good phone calls.”
Anyone with information about Sharon Abbott Lane is asked to call 866-411-8477 or go to
fairfaxcrimesolvers.org. A reward of up to $1,000 is available for information leading to a conviction in the case.