"Jane Doe" - 15 - 21 yo (2008) - Fond du Lac County WI

After three years searching for the identity of a woman found frozen and partially submerged in an icy creek, Wisconsin investigators held a memorial service for her unclaimed body.

On a cold, windy day earlier this week in Waupun, Wisc., the woman known only as "Jane Doe" was laid to rest in a wooden coffin at the Cattaraugus Cemetery.

The small ceremony, attended by detectives, staff from the medical examiner's office, and curious citizens, brought some closure to a case that haunts the community.

The partially decomposed body of the woman, believed to be 5-feet-1 and between 15 to 21 years old, was discovered by deer hunters in a remote area about halfway between Fond du Lac and Milwaukee on Nov. 23, 2008.

Fond du Lac County Lt. Cameron McGee, who is also a hunter, told ABCNews.com he was sitting in his deer stand when he got the call. Upon arriving at the rural, wooded area he thought, "This doesn't look good."

"We were able to determine it's a female. It certainly had all the appearances of a homicide," he said. "You could just tell she was dumped."

The medical examiner's office believes the woman had most likely died three months prior, in August.  She was found wearing Angels brand jeans and a sleeveless black top accented with hot pink.

"We traced back the clothing, where it was manufactured from and sold," said McGee. "It was coming out of something like a dollar store, which they've got all over the place."

A sketch artist collaborated with a forensic anthropologist to create a composite of the woman, who could have been Caucasian, but also may be of Hispanic, Asian or Native American descent.

"I have to believe there's probably a reasonable likeness, but unfortunately we won't know that until we identify her," said McGee.

The county paid for her casket, McGee said, and local groups donated flowers.

Charles Sosinski, 57, a detective who retired last year after working with Fond du Lac County Sheriff's office for 37 years, attended Monday's funeral. He had worked on the case from the very beginning.

"I guess the thing that's most troubling in this case is that there's more than likely a family out there who doesn't know where their loved one is," he said. "She's still a human being. She's important and someone's missing her … I have children too. If that was my child … it's important. There's some emotion that goes into it."

Sosinski said the woman probably isn't from Wisconsin "because we've had considerable coverage in our state."

Even after following up on more than 200 leads, no family member has come forward to claim the body. But detectives hope somebody will now.

"We're looking for someone who had a crisis of conscience," said McGee, who described the funeral as "frustrating."

"We buried someone's daughter," he said. "And that sucks. It's bad to not know who that person is."

Fond du Lac County Sheriff Mylan Fink asked his department's head chaplain, Don Deike, to give the eulogy, no easy task when the woman being buried is unknown.

"It was more challenging than I had originally thought," Fink said. "But what we decided to do was speak to those who were there in respect to honoring human life."

During the eight minute speech, Deike told the attendees about the importance of preparing for the moment "when we ourselves meet our maker."

"We should really take the opportunity to do kindness unto others," he said.

Afterward, some of the attendees approached him, including one man who said he had been a member of the hunting party that had discovered the body.

"He basically came out of respect for the Jane Doe," Deike said.

But even though Jane Doe has been buried, the case hasn't.

"The case does not get laid to rest ever," said McGee. "We will always be looking at it, we will always be following up on leads."

For Sosinski, one of the two retired detectives who attended the eulogy,

the funeral didn't offer a resolution, but somehow, it helped.

"Had I not gone I think that would have bothered me," said Sosinski. "Trying to explain that or put it into words why you need to be there is difficult. But it was important. I think it was the right thing to do for me."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/jane-doe-buried-years-body-discovered/story?id=15120619#.TuONqVZnCEM

Unidentified murder victim a 'total nightmare' case for detectives

Aug. 5, 2013
Written by Adam Rodewald, Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team

VIDEO REPORT

Three hunters found the girl’s body on a vacant farm Nov. 23, 2008, upside down in the ice halfway between Fond du Lac and Milwaukee. Law enforcement officials chiseled the body out of the ice while others sifted through the muddy, frigid water with screens looking for clues. Snow began to fall as the sun set on the first day of the rest of the case.

Investigators have remained in the dark ever since.

They don’t know her name. They don’t know how she wound up dead in the water. They don’t know her killer or where she came from.

“It’s just mind boggling looking into the hours and staff trying just to identify her,” Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s detective Gerry Kane said. “Can you imagine trying to solve the homicide? You don’t know if she was killed here or in another jurisdiction. You don’t know anything. It makes you feel your wheels are spinning, and you’re not going anywhere.”

The mystery surrounding Fond du Lac County’s Jane Doe continues to nag at the lead investigator. A computer image of Jane Doe’s face hangs above Kane’s desk at the sheriff’s office.

Kane believes his last chance at identifying the girl lies with widespread media exposure to rekindle public interest and generate new tips.

Cases with unidentified homicide victims are few and far between, but they’re also among the most dreaded kind for any detective. They can last for decades, draining entire police departments of staff time and resources.

There are eight knownunsolved cases with unidentified victims in Wisconsin, according to a list compiled by the Wisconsin Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children and Adults.

“These cases are total nightmares,” said Joe Giacalone, national cold case expert and retired New York City Police Department Detective Sergeant.

“As an investigator, this is one of those cases you don’t want. It takes so many hours. You're trying to find out who your victim is before you can even find your killer. It’s an investigation within your investigation,” he said.

Back in November 2008, six detectives in the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Department chased leads to Milwaukee, Chicago and Ohio. Today only Kane remains on the case. He’s had no major leads to follow in more than two years.
Dump site

Fond du Lac County investigators said they’ll never forget their first encounter with the unidentifiedgirl they call Jane Doe.

Kane was eating a Sunday morning breakfast with his family. Lt. Cameron McGee, the investigation supervisor, was sitting in a tree stand in Clark County. The call came in at 8 a.m. Prime deer hunting time.

Work had already begun by the time the two men arrived at the death scene. The decomposed body jutted from a frozen creek in the woods behind Skyline Drive in the town of Ashford. Sheriff Mike Fink called it a classic “dump site,” a remote area near the Mayville/Kewaskum exit off of U.S.41 up the road from a porn shop.

Kane, who stands 5 feet, 8 inches and hates wasting time, was assigned lead detective. It was his first time in charge of a homicide case. He hounded after leads, ordered one of his detectives to get a warrant to work on the adjacent private farmland and sent others to search the area for physical evidence.

But as officers removed the body and searched for clues in the water, snow began to fall and the water began to refreeze around them. Exhaustion set in as the sun began to set. They had nothing to show for the day but a partial corpse and some clothes — a black strapless top with pink across the top and a pink trim and a bow that tied on the back.

The girl had no visible wounds, scars, tattoos or markings. If she had any, water and time had washed them away. Investigators could not easily discern the apparent homicide victim’s race.

She had brown hair and wore Angels brand blue jeans but had no socks or shoes. An elastic hair band wrapped around her wrist.

“It was an honest attempt, but the weather and time did not cooperate with the investigation,” Kane said.

So in the dark, in the cold, he climbed in his car and made the long drive home.
The clues

With no other clues about the girl’s identity, detectives centered their investigation around the clothes. They organized a press conference and distributed a description of the items to the media from Green Bay down to Milwaukee. Tips started to trickle in, mothers wondering if this could be their daughter.

Detectives followed every tip. They checked all reports of missing girls, missing vehicles, wanted persons. Kane took posters, written in Spanish, to the area’s farmers, hoping they’d share them with migrant workers.

Hours turned into days, and days turned into weeks and then months. No breakthroughs surfaced.

“We decided she’s not local, or else someone would have come forward with information by now,” Kane said.

While Kane and his detectives followed up on leads, the county medical examiner and forensic scientists looked to the body for clues.

Forensic entomologists found insects inside her body, a sign she had died while temperatures were still warm. They placed her time of death two to four months before she was found, or between July and September of 2008.

Based on her bones, investigators believe she was between 15 and 20 years old. She was probably short, somewhere between 4 feet, 10 inches and 5 feet, 4 inches tall and between 110 and 135 pounds.

They studied her skull and her teeth. She seemed to have a noticeable overbite and sealants on four upper molars, four fillings on her lower molars and no current cavities — a sign she had been cared for.

Investigators sent her femur bone to the Center for Human Identification at the University of Northern Texas to build a DNA profile placed in a national database along with her dental records, where they are cross-referenced with missing persons from coast to coast.

This information helped forensic artists come up with an image of the girl. For the first time the girl from the water had a face.
'This is it'

The computer-generated image produced was specific enough to give the girl some identity, but it was still so generic it generated hundreds of tips.

“It became a sort of nightmare with so many leads coming in,” Kane said.

He started keeping track of key leads in a spreadsheet. To date, the list contains names of 150 missing girls from all across the country who have been identified by investigators as potential matches to Jane Doe. The work became monotonous, frustrating, disheartening.

On March 3, 2010, McGee found the profile of a missing girl through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s violent criminal apprehension program database. Known as ViCAP, this massive repository of violent crime cases stores and analyzes information about homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons and other violent crimes involving unidentified human remains.

The girl’s name was Brittany Nicole Peart. She was last seen on July 25, 2008. She was 21 years old at the time she stormed out of her home in Elkton, Md., following a disagreement with her mother. She packed an overnight bag and took off about 1 a.m.

Police found Peart’s 2003 Pontiac Sunbird one week later with her bag inside and the keys in the center console, according to news reports. A private detective hired by the family believed she had relocated to “a major city where she can blend in.”

McGee said the tip revived the investigation. It looked all the more probable that Peart could be his departments’ Jane Doe because she had a “bad news boyfriend” with ties to Wisconsin. If they had been driving through the state, the young couple could have gone past the farm where hunters had found the body.

“There was certainly an air of excitement rapidly building,” McGee said. “Then it was just done.”

Peart’s family supplied a DNA sample. It didn’t match. In less than 48 hours of the tip coming in, investigators closed it out.

“It was done that fast,” McGee said. “It was kind of a disappointment, too.”

Peart was ultimately found dead in Maryland in December 2011, according to news reports.

But as quick as one lead disappeared, another came.

Kane was at home for the weekend on June 3, 2010, when he received a call from the office. The database had found another match.

Her name was Chantal Tobler, born on Aug. 6, 1993, who ran away from her Milwaukee home at the age 15 and was believed to be headed to Green Bay. She was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 145 pounds. She had brown hair and brown eyes.

“We really thought she was the one,” he said. “I even came into work early, thinking this is it.”

Again, the lead ended as quick as it began. Ruled out by DNA.

“Strike 150,” Kane said. “Or whatever.”

Tobler was found safe in September 2011, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Kane has not had another major lead since. He still gets potential matches from the missing persons databases and the occasional phone call, but none have led anywhere.

“You get your hopes high. You work on the case for so many years. That one was disheartening,” he said. “There’s almost a sense of failure.”
Say goodbye

On Dec. 7, 2011, detectives decided to put the unidentified girl to rest. They’d had no new leads in over a year.

They organized a public funeral for the girl. About a dozen local residents showed up for the burial ceremony at Cattaraugus Cemetery near Waupun.

Cold wind slapped at their faces as the Sheriff’s Office Chief Chaplain Pastor Don Deike led detectives, media and others in prayer. A laminated sign that read “Jane Doe” served as her headstone. A light blue casket was lowered into the ground. A wreath donated by the Waupun high school lay atop the coffin. Two women brought flowers.

Kane was there. He remembers how cold it was. He remembers the people who came, all of them complete strangers. Some cried.

“It could have been their daughter,” he said.

He hoped media coverage of the funeral would bring the case back to life. That someone, maybe, would come forward with some information.

Detectives worked with Fond du Lac Monument to build a headstone that included a quick response, or QR, code. People can scan it with their cellphones to view a website with information about the girl where they can alsosubmit tips.

Nearly two years later,Kane’s still waiting for a response.
Somebody knows

Kane has tried everything he can think of to identify the girl.

He got her profile on the state’s first edition of the Cold Case playing cards, which were distributed in state prisons in hopes of attracting tips.

He had anthropologists begin crafting a clay model of the girl’s head, but his department couldn’t afford the price tag of the life-like bust.

Kane even discussed with Texas law enforcement the possibility of taking his search into Mexico. They all but laughed at the notion of getting cooperation from the people there. Previous attempts to generate national news media exposure in the Wisconsin mystery girl case’s proved unsuccesful.

So today Kane is waiting. With nowhere left to go, he can only wait for a big lead.

“Every day that goes by, it becomes more disheartening,” Kane said. “It would be something — it would be satisfying to have something come out in the next seven years before I retire.”

http://www.fdlreporter.com/article/20130804/FON019804/308040064/Unidentified-murder-victim-total-nightmare-case-detectives