Dave Kellett was a detective with the Yakima Police Department when he met
Robert Keppel at a 2003 seminar for investigators in Ellensburg. Keppel was known for his dogged pursuit of serial killers, in particular Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.
Kellett emailed Keppel in 2004 about a cold case of a young woman found murdered in an abandoned van in downtown Yakima on July 25, 1977. She had been hit on the head three times with a heavy object, stabbed, strangled, sexually mutilated and left face-down on her hands and knees in the back of the van parked at 309 S. Front St.
Authorities estimated she was between 18 and 28 years old and thought her nude body had been there about three weeks. She had never been identified. Kellett emailed Keppel with details about the case, including specifics about the mutilation, in hopes Keppel might recognize something.
Kellett is among multiple Yakima city police investigators who have worked to identify the young woman. She is one of
three Jane Doe cases in Yakima County in the online database of the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, commonly known as NamUs.
Authorities exhumed her from Tahoma Cemetery on July 28, 2004, so DNA could be extracted to develop profiles for the FBI’s National DNA Index System and its National Crime Information Center, an electronic clearinghouse of crime data accessible to criminal justice agencies nationwide. The NCIC includes records on missing and unidentified persons, and Doe is among them, but there’s never been a potential match.
Since Doe was exhumed and reburied at Tahoma 2½ months later, DNA technology has advanced. Genetic genealogy — an investigative technique combining DNA extraction and traditional genealogical research to establish relationships among individuals — helped catch the Golden State Killer. It continues to help identify killers, as well as Jane and John Does who’ve been lost to their families for decades.
Creating a thorough DNA profile and submitting it to a genetic genealogy database for potential connections with relatives would cost around $6,000, said Jim Curtice, Yakima County coroner. He is among several current and retired city, county and federal investigators who want to obtain funding for genetic genealogy in the Downtown Doe case.
All of them want to see Yakima County’s Jane Does identified so the women can be returned to their families and receive proper, respectful burials. The young woman found downtown is the oldest of the three cases — remains in the other cases were discovered in
February 1988 and
December 2008 — and time is getting short as relatives who knew her are aging and possibly dying.
“If she was 22 years old in 1977, she could potentially have a parent or siblings still alive. A parent would probably be 90 but siblings could be in their 60s and 70s,” Kellett said. “There’s going to be a loss of anyone who would care pretty soon.
“There is a time element to this. If this gets solved 30 years from now, she might have a niece or nephew. But someone who knew her, and would care about her” would likely be gone by then, he added.
Authorities know Doe’s attacker might be dead. They don’t expect to find her killer. “All we want is for the person to be identified right now. That’s our goal,” Kellett said.
More at link:
The body of a young woman was found in an abandoned van in downtown Yakima on July 25, 1977. She had been bludgeoned, stabbed, strangled and sexually mutilated. Investigators now
www.yakimaherald.com
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