by Katherine Miller
For a life to be lost and their case to go cold is a truly terrible thing. In this paper, I want to tell you the case of a young women who was trapped in anonymity for 55 full years before the processes and advancements from forensic anthropology and DNA testing finally gave her back her name. Her body was buried and left to disintegrate in the ground under the name Jane Doe. But when the case is finally reopened, the reconstruction and forensic expertise of the anthropologists on the case were able to create a 3-D image, which ultimately caught the eye of one of the few remaining people who could prove through DNA exactly who this woman was. Her name is Dorothy Gay Howard, and she does not deserve to be forgotten. Allow me to tell you her story.
Two students, Wayne Swanson and James Andes, from the nearby University of Colorado were on a hike April 8th, 1954. A regular day, enjoying the outdoors until they saw something strange along the bank of Boulder Creek, directly below a 29-foot embankment, only 30 feet from a busy road. “At first we thought it was a store window dummy,” one of the students was quoted as saying. “We didn’t think it could possibly be a human body.” (Howard, Dorothy Gay, n.d.) Upon closer inspection, they realized in horror that they were looking at a badly decomposed body. The students returned to their car and drove straight to the nearest police station to inform them of the grisly discovery. Once the authorities arrived, they found the body of a young woman, completely nude, with decomposition and clear destruction by wildlife on what had once been her fragile frame. She was unrecognizable. Silvia Pettem tells us in her book Someone’s Daughter that the original autopsy told that “The flesh on her neck and face, except for her forehead, was so ravaged by animals that it appeared incongruously attached to her badly bruised but otherwise intact body.” (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) She had most likely been waiting to be found for 1 full week, completely exposed to all elements.
She was believed to be around 20 years old, give or take a year or two. She was unlikely to have given birth, although this would not be confirmed till later. She had no fillings in her teeth and only one cavity that needed to be filled. This led the dentist assisting in the autopsy to believe she grew up in an environment with a water supply that contained fluoride, (Pettem, Someon's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) and the only clear operation she had was a scar from an appendectomy. She appeared to have been terribly beaten and exhibited bruises covering her body. There also appeared to be some ligature marks on her wrists. The manner was thought to be murder. The autopsy expanded on her extensive injuries: “In addition to multiple contusions and abrasions, the woman had sustained fractures on her skull, jaw, left arm, left collarbone, and the first to fourth ribs on her left side. The collarbone and rib fractures formed a nearly vertical line, indicating that all were incurred at the same instant.” (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) Although they attempted to acquire a fingerprint from her left thumb, the only finger that still had any skin left, but it was of no use for identification. (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) After the finality of her autopsy the cause of death was determined to be severe shock – a term meant to embody all of her injuries, and that it was proper to assume that her skull fracture was the proximate cause of death. (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) Early in the investigation there were people coming forward thinking perhaps this young woman was their daughter, sister, or niece, but all of these were quickly found to be inconsistent with Boulder Jane Doe. So, who was she? Shouldn’t it be easy to find not only the identity of this young woman, but also whoever had done this to her? Unfortunately, this was not the case. She was buried as a Jane Doe and would be forced to wait 55 years to be given back her name.
In 2004, the case of Boulder Jane Doe was reopened by Sheriff Joe Pelle, finally able to due to private donations that would help to pay for her exhumation in order to do a forensic analysis on her skeleton, her DNA testing, and hopefully facial reconstruction. All of this fundraising was orchestrated and organized by Silvia Pettem, who had made it her life goal to give Jane Doe back her name and to try and find her killer. When Silvia first heard about this case back in 1996, it caught her attention, and she felt this girl needed her to fight for her. She began intense research and was finally able to come to the conclusion that what was needed was an exhumation. It had been so long ago that her autopsy was done, and science and forensics had come so incredibly far since 1954, she knew there was more that could be found, and knew this could be the last hope for Jane Doe to be identified. She also enlisted the help of Vidocq Society members (forensic specialists who volunteer to help solve cold murder cases) who donated their time and expertise over the years. (Marshall, 2010) The members of the Vidocq Society that participated in the investigation of Jane Doe were Dr. Walter Birkby, a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Richard Froede, a forensic pathologist, and Dr. Robert Goldberg, a forensic pathologist and the leader of the group. In June 2004, a backhoe scraped away the dirt in Columbia Cemetery to reveal a disintegrated coffin and the exposed remains of Jane Doe. (Marshall, 2010) The lack of a coffin prompted an abrupt and dramatic change in plans. Beth Conour, the local forensic anthropologist who had taken her time off from her job as the Boulder County medical investigator in order to participate in the excavation, immediately retrieved her archaeological kit from her car. Jane Doe's original headstone (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) Dr. Birkby had cautiously climbed down into the grave and began using the archaeological tools to ever so carefully begin revealing the skull from the dirt and the splinters of what had once been a coffin. Not long into the excavation process, a ladder was brought out and laid horizontally across the grave, to give Beth the opportunity to lie across it and extend her arms down in order to carefully continue removing the fragile bones, while Dr. Birkby was in the grave doing the same. After a grueling two full days the exhumation was complete, and Jane Doe was carefully parceled away to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office to give her bones time to dry out as there had been plenty of rain during the exhumation process, and the fear of her bones being overly handled before they were ready was very prevalent. Finally, in September 2004 they were delivered to the office of Dr. Birkby where he began the grueling and tedious process of putting her bones, primarily her skull, that had fallen apart underground back together.
“…Dr. Birkby had to clean the dirt off the bones and stabilize the individual pieces with polyvinyl acetate resin. The water-resistant film kept the bones from fragmenting even more. For up to an hour, he let them dry. Only then was he comfortable handling them, beginning to get a feel for how the pieces would fit together. Complicating the process was the fact that a half century of pressure from wet soil had caused the bones to warp. Starting with the largest fragment, Dr. Birkby searched until he found an adjoining piece, then he bonded the pieces together with Duco Cement. When that was good and dry, he glued on another piece. If he found that he had glued the wrong piece, he could dissolve the cement with Jane Doe's remains in the process of exhumation acetone and start over.” (Pettem, Someon's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009)
This entire painstaking process took six full weeks. Once this was at last complete, he and Dr. Richard Froede joined forces to analyze the skeleton they had in front of them against the original autopsy report. The original seemed to be fairly consistent with their findings, as she had a fracture on the lower right side of her skull, and the following bones broken all on the left side of her body: Left humerus, left maxilla, left mandible, and left clavicle, as well as the first through the fourth rib. (Pettem, Someon's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) The consensus of the two anthropologists held solidly with the original finding that all of these injuries happened at the same time, in the same Jane Doe's Skull after being pieced back together (the straight cuts were made as part of the forensic autopsy process) moment. They were at long last able to confirm the smooth nature of her pubic symphysis, indicating once and for all that it was extremely unlikely for her to have born children of her own. In an interesting twist, they did find an unreported fracture to her right kneecap. This led them to believe that perhaps she had been hit by the bumper of a car.
“…her right leg would have been on the ground, and the impact of the car would have caused her knee to pivot. The left-side injuries then may have been caused as she was thrown against the side or hood of the car, and the skull fracture could have come as she fell back down on the ground.” (Pettem, Someon's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009)
With the secondary autopsy complete, the bones (particularly the skull) were photographed, and sent to Dr. Todd Fenton of Michigan State University Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, along with the photos of current known missing persons that seemed plausible to be this Jane Doe. He would be able to superimpose the images together to try and see if the bone structures matched. The angles, however, were not convenient, so the option that proceeded was for Jane Doe’s skull to travel from her current home to Michigan, to allow him the ability to focus on her every element. It was easy to begin the elimination from here, so what was needed next was an image of her likeness to attempt find more leads. Frank Bender, another member of the Vidocq society nicknamed ‘the recomposer of the decomposed’, (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) created a 3-D image using her remains of what she most likely looked like, and soon it was appearing everywhere from People magazine to America’s Most Wanted.
(Marshall, 2010) This also led to a few promising leads; all fell through but one. In 2009 Silvia Pettem received a message from a young woman who had seen the bust and believed that this was her missing Great-Aunt. She told them she had been in the process of researching her family history and had found several similarities between her relative and Boulder Jane Doe, one in particular being her teeth, which were known to be practically perfect, and the time of her disappearance seemed to fit within the period of the death. (Jane Doe Identified After Five Decades, 2022) As the pieces fell into place, the missing woman’s only surviving sister, Marlene, agreed to give her DNA to be tested against Jane Doe’s DNA that had been extracted from her tooth in 2004 after her exhumation. (Pettem, In Retrospect: Former Jane Doe a part of Boulder’s history and culture, 2023) In 2009, Jane Doe was found and had her name and her family back. She was confirmed to be Dorothy Gay Howard, an 18-year-old woman who had gone missing in March of 1954. Finally, Jane Doe’s life was no longer a mystery, she was Dorothy.
Dorothy Gay Howard was a beautiful soul at no more than 18 years old. She was described by those who knew her as lively and outgoing individual, people who knew her praised her helpful and amicable nature, which helped her make new acquaintances quickly. (Mitra, 2023) Although she was young, she had already lived so much life! She was the eldest of three daughters, and she was known to adore her little sisters and do anything for them. She grew up in Texas and had only moved with her family to Phoenix, Arizona in 1942, just two years before she would be found dead. She was married at 15 with her parents’ consent to David G. Powell, but they divorced soon after.
She is recorded to have married a second time to Kenneth Kirkman at 17 but did not keep her family informed of this decision. She worked as a live-in nanny and took pride in her work. Dorothy’s family realized she was missing in March 1954 when she failed to turn up to take her sister to the movies. Since her sisters meant the world to her, it was uncharacteristic of her to miss such an event. (Mitra, 2023) They reported her missing, but her case was never connected with that of ‘Boulder Jane Doe’ until 2009 when she was given back her name. Initially her sister and surviving family were unsure of why Dorothy would have ended up in Colorado, until they remembered how fond and comfortable the young lady was with her aunt Ola Mae. She lived in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. It is believed that Dorothy went to Colorado with the intent of staying with her beloved aunt. However, this choice may have placed her directly in the path of a future serial killer who lived in her aunt’s same neighborhood.
The only suspect in her case to date is Harvey Glatman, a man who murdered at least 3 women, but implied to investigators to have killed more. His modus operandi was to find pretty young women, like Dorothy, and offer them money to model. He would then drive them far away, bind them, and sexually assault them, before strangling them to death and leaving them nude and alone. He was known to have lived in the area the same time that her body was found, owned his own vehicle, and was known to have sexual deviancies from a young age.
During one of his confessions, he made a strange comment that he hadn’t killed any other girls back when he lived in Capitol Hill Colorado, unless of course they’d been hit by his car. This lends credence to the idea that she was hit by the bumper of a car, possibly after trying to escape from him. The ligature marks on her wrists also appeared consistent with the marks left on his confirmed victims, and the one survivor who is the reason he was caught. People could ask why he didn’t strangle her like he did the later victims, but the answer to that is simple; perhaps he didn’t have the opportunity. She was a fiery fighter, and perhaps he Harvey Glatman - the one suspect in Dorothy's murder became flustered as she began to escape his clutches. He used his car as the final weapon. Unfortunately, there was no DNA evidence on her body, and Harvey Glatman made no true confession. He was sentenced to death, and on September 18, 1959, he was executed by poisonous gas at the San Quentin State Prison. (Mitra, 2023) If he had the answers, he either brought it to the grave with him, or left it in his cryptic comment. The sad truth is we will never know if it was Glatman, or if it was some other cruel man who took it into their own hands to play God and take her life.
In conclusion, although her case may still be cold and perhaps justice wasn’t served in the way any of us would hope for, what truly matters most was discovered; Dorothy was found. Her life was not forgotten, and her family finally received the closure they had searched 55 long years for. A surviving cousin told Silvia Pettem “Her disappearance was an unspoken tragedy in the family. They dealt with anger, sadness, and then hopelessness bordering on despair.” (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) Not only does her family finally have her back and can smile at her memory once more, but the revival of her death investigation brought answers and closure to at least two other families with their own missing loved ones. The search for Dorothy’s identity led to the discovery of what happened to Twylia May Embrey, a girl who ran away from home, changed her identity, and died at 71 never knowing her family was searching for her. Twylia’s sister had searched her whole life, sitting by the phone just in case she called, but was so happy to finally learn throughout this case that her sister was not Jane Doe and had lived a long life. It also led to the surprising discovery of Katharine Farrand Dyer, a woman who was long believed to be Jane Doe but ended up being found alive and well in Australia. (Pettem, Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition), 2009) Dorothy and her family could not have had the closure they deserved if not for the advancements in Forensic Anthropology and DNA and the people willing to give up their time and energy to find out who she was. She was reburied in the Boulder cemetery, at the request of her family at long last under her own name. She is not forgotten, and now she never will be.
References
Howard, Dorothy Gay. (n.d.). Retrieved from Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons: https://www.unresolvedhomicides.org/victim/howard-dorothy-gay/ Jane Doe
Identified After Five Decades. (2022, March 16). Retrieved from True Crime Edition: https://www.truecrimeedition.com/post/dorothy-howard Marshall, L. (2010, September 1).
Sleuthing for Jane Doe. Retrieved from Coloradan Alumni Magazine: https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2010/09/01/sleuthing-jane-doe Mitra, S. (2023, January 19).
Dorothy Gay Howard Murder: Is Harvey Glatman Dead or Alive? Retrieved from The Cinemaholic: https://thecinemaholic.com/dorothy-gay-howard-murder-is-harveyglatman-dead-or-alive/ Pettem, S. (2009).
Someone's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe"(Updated Edition). In S. Pettem, Someon's Daughter "In Search of Justice for Jane Doe" (Updated Edition). Lyons Press. Pettem, S. (2023, February 12-17).
In Retrospect: Former Jane Doe a part of Boulder’s history and culture. Retrieved from DailyCamera: https://www.dailycamera.com/2023/02/12/in-retrospectformer-jane-doe-a-part-of-boulders-history-and-culture/
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