An interesting article with many details about Ventura County Jane Doe
She Has a Name
To investigators clustered at the scene in shirtsleeves on that warm Friday afternoon in July 1980, she looked young, probably in her 20s. She was sprawled on a dirt slope near a parking lot above the Westlake High School football field in Thousand Oaks, a safe, upscale suburb 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Her face, tilted to the sun, was a perfect heart shape. Her dark hair, lighter at the tips, was matted with blood, as were her white T-shirt and red corduroy pants. Open-toed, high-heeled shoes had been tossed into the brush. Blood smears suggested that the woman had been killed elsewhere, dumped from a car, and dragged to her public resting place.
Later that afternoon, an autopsy at the Ventura County morgue showed that she was between five foot two and five foot three, weighed 100 to 110 pounds, and was four or five months pregnant with a male fetus, not her first child, according to a further medical exam. Though her red-lacquered fingernails were intact, her cut and bruised arms signified a struggle. Hemorrhaging around her neck indicated that she had been strangled until unconscious, though not to the point of death, which had been caused by multiple knife wounds in her chest and abdomen.
School maintenance workers had found the body and alerted the authorities. Until an ambulance and a fire truck made their noisy arrivals, a scattering of parents attending a varsity football practice that morning had remained oblivious. They told detectives they knew nothing. A motorcycle hidden in some parking lot bushes seemed suspicious, but had simply been flung there by a man who’d run out of gas. When the news spread, a motorist reported that he and his wife had noticed someone matching the victim’s description hitchhiking near the freeway the previous night. He had daughters, and he worried. This information led nowhere, and no one claimed the woman.
Still unidentified, a month later she was buried at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park in Camarillo. Without leads, detectives stored her bloodied clothes. And so, in 1980, the case of Westlake, a.k.a. Jane Doe Ventura County, went cold…
…In January 2013, CODIS had identified the DNA of Wilson C. Chouest Jr. on Westlake’s clothing. It turned out that Chouest (pronounced “shoe-west”) was already locked up at California State Prison, Corcoran for a rape, a kidnapping, and a robbery he’d committed in August and September 1980—after Jane Doe Westlake’s July murder…
…By October 2018, the DDP was ready to start researching Westlake’s identity. The genealogy websites GEDmatch and FamilyTree provided lists of people who shared her DNA, and from those, volunteers traced a line of ancestry to the Mexican state of Zacatecas and her third- or fourth-great-grandparents, Ponciano Montellano and Feliciana Rojas, who had seven children.
Lines from the Montellano family reached into Monterrey, in Mexico’s state of Nuevo León, and into New Mexico. But close matches to Westlake, a.k.a. Jane Doe Ventura County, a.k.a. Lyra Jade, proved elusive…
