May 14, 2008 12:07 pm US/Mountain
Missing Pieces Could Finally Give Jane Doe A Name
By Pierrette J. Shields and Jill P. Mott, (Longmont) Times-Call
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) ―
The earth at her grave site in Columbia Cemetery is a sunken reminder that she is not there.
The stone has been removed and put into storage for safekeeping while her delicate remains are kept in the Boulder County Sheriff's Office evidence locker, awaiting identification and reburial.
For 54 years, her name has been Jane Doe, the generic moniker assigned to the unidentified.
Her elusive true identity is likely Katharine E. Farrand Dyer, according to a cold-case investigation reopened in 2004 and spearheaded by a Boulder historian and a Boulder County Sheriff's Office detective.
Unlike many reopened cold cases, new DNA evidence did not tie a neat bow on the mystery. The likely identity of Jane Doe and her suspected killer, executed serial killer Harvey Glatman, were revealed slowly by Silvia Pettem and Boulder County sheriff's Detective Steve Ainsworth. The pair researched public records and interviewed the few people who are still alive and who remember the players in the case.
The unlikely investigative duo -- an intense historical writer and a busy detective -- spent four years arranging funding, pulling strings and sifting through decades-old media accounts of missing women to come to their conclusions.
Pieces are still missing that would ensure that the young woman's remains will be reburied with her name. Ainsworth would like to match DNA to a family member of Dyer's. But she lived a fairly anonymous life, and even with a name, finding family has been like chasing shadows.
"This one is more of a historical project," said Cmdr. Phil West of the Boulder County Sheriff's Office. "The likelihood of a prosecution 50 years later is virtually nil."
West said officials would like to rebury the body before summer. Having her body out of the grave for four years has left those searching for her identity, and her killer, uneasy. But without the final piece of the puzzle -- someone who knew Dyer or who shares her DNA -- she will return to Boulder's historic Columbia Cemetery, anonymously, as Jane Doe.
"We'll keep it low-key in deference to her dignity. We don't want to make it a circus," West said of the reburial.
For three months after the April 8, 1954, discovery of a young woman's battered body along the edge of Boulder Creek near Boulder Falls, local newspapers blared the latest news in all-capital-letter headlines, punctuated with exclamation marks, that took up a half-page.
Investigators at the time believed she was dead only a few days before two University of Colorado students hiking along the creek discovered her body. Her clothing and jewelry were gone. Animals had ravaged her face.
Investigators concluded she was still alive when her killer tossed her petite body down the creek embankment, where she died of exposure.
The Boulder community raised the money and accepted donated services to bury her remains in Columbia Cemetery. A small headstone bears the inscription: "Jane Doe April 1954 Age About 20 Years."
Investigators followed lead after dead-end lead to try to identify the woman. Name after name was excluded. One missing woman's mother even tried to identify the body but couldn't be sure it was her daughter. There was so little to go on.
Pettem has an extensive collection of the media accounts of the case. But sheriff's officials said the original case file, like most files before 1969, is missing.
By June 1954, the headlines quieted, and Jane Doe and her story were relegated to pulp detective magazines, such as the July 1954 edition of "Inside Detective," which called her the "Battered Blonde of Boulder Bend."
Pettem's intense focus on the Jane Doe case was stoked in 1996 at a historical re-enactment in Boulder called "Meet the Spirits." The actress portraying the unidentified young woman in the grave at Columbia Cemetery had little to say about her character, Pettem said.
"I was just sort of taken by her," Pettem said, noting that her own daughters were about the same age as Jane Doe was when she died. "It just sort of hit me at a gut level, thinking that could be my daughter. I couldn't imagine a daughter of mine buried in a cemetery without her name on a gravestone. It just sort of hit me on that sort of mom level."
It would take until 2003 for Pettem to ask the Boulder County Sheriff's Office to reopen the case. Jane Doe's case had nagged at her for seven years.
Sheriff Joe Pelle agreed to reopen the case, but not without private funds. Pettem opened a Jane Doe Fund through the Boulder Historical Society and raised the money for the two-day June 2004 exhumation of the body. Sheriff's investigators were aided by professionals from the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based organization dedicated to helping investigate unsolved crimes.
Over the years, Jane Doe's casket had been crushed under the weight of the dirt on top of it, and her skull had been smashed. The pieces were collected and reassembled, Ainsworth said. A Vidocq Society expert used a cast of the skull to create a model of what Jane may have looked like. Photos of the model were widely publicized, and the case was even featured on "America's Most Wanted."
But the publicity yielded no useful tips.
Pettem maintained a spreadsheet of possible identities for Jane Doe and found herself concentrating on Katharine Dyer. According to Denver media accounts, Dyer's landlady reported her missing from her rented room at 1118 Washington St. in Denver 13 days before Jane Doe's body was found.
"I firmly believe that she is our Jane Doe," Pettem said, adding that Dyer was a few years older than the 20-year-old estimate of the unidentified woman. "I think she just fell through the cracks."
Ainsworth is hopeful, but not sure, the body is Dyer's, and he doesn't want to be disappointed again. Twice, officials have excluded possible identifications since reopening the case.
With Dyer as her target, Pettem dove back into her research. She thinks it's possible Katharine Dyer was living under an assumed name, was illegitimate or was adopted, because her paper trail was scant.
In 1948, the woman was working at a soda fountain at the Republic Drug Co.
Pettem found records to show that Katharine E. Farrand married Jimmie Dyer in Prescott, Ariz. The brother of one of Katharine Farrand's soda fountain co-workers, Jimmie Dyer was a student at Arizona Teachers' College, which is now Northern Arizona University. The newlywed wife took a job as a waitress at Bushey's Fountain Cafe on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Ariz.
The couple's marriage affidavit claims she was born in 1926 in San Antonio, Texas. No other records could be found to prove the claim.
Jimmie Dyer graduated from college in 1950, and the couple moved to Denver, where he took a job with the Public Service Co. Katharine Dyer worked as an elevator operator in downtown Denver.
When the couple separated in 1953, Katharine Dyer rented a room in a boarding house on Washington Street.
Pettem's research also turned up one clear photo of Katharine Dyer at the Grand Canyon, a color photo in a collection of Jimmy Dyer's old slides.
"I consider that a breakthrough," Pettem said.
The photo was superimposed over the cast of Jane Doe's skull. A forensic investigator reported a "cannot exclude," the closest thing to a positive match as the method can turn up.
Ainsworth said he would like to see a DNA match, and releasing Katharine Dyer's photo is a last effort to find a maternal relative with the genetic key.
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