Tammy Jo Alexander was an American teenage girl who was found murdered in the village of Caledonia, New York on November 10, 1979. She had been fatally shot twice and left in a field just off U.S. Route 20 near the Genesee River after running away from her home in Brooksville, Florida, earlier that year. For more than three decades, she remained unidentified under the names Caledonia Jane Doe or Cali Doe until January 26, 2015, when police in Livingston County, New York, announced her identity 35 years after her death.
Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. is a convicted American murderer, rapist, and suspected serial killer. Conahan was convicted of one murder, but has been linked to a dozen murders, mostly of transients seeking employment and gay men in the Charlotte County, Florida area in what came to be known as the Hog Trail Murders. Conahan has also been named the prime suspect in the additional murders of eight men, collectively referred to as the Fort Myers Eight, who were discovered in a mass grave site in 2007.
Tammy Lynn Leppert was an American actress, model and beauty queen who went missing under mysterious circumstances at the age of 18.
Nicholas Thompson is an American technology journalist and media executive. In February 2021, he became Chief Executive Officer of The Atlantic. Thompson was selected in part for his editorial experience, which includes stints as the editor-in-chief of Wired and as the editor of Newyorker.com. He was responsible for instituting digital paywalls at both The New Yorker and Wired; at Wired, digital subscriptions increased almost 300 percent in the paywall's first year. While at The New Yorker, Thompson co-founded Atavist, which sold to Automattic in 2018, and in 2009, he published his first book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, a biography of George Kennan and Thompson's maternal grandfather, Paul Nitze. Thompson's assorted writing includes features on Facebook's scandals, his own friendship with Stalin's daughter, an unidentified hiker, and his marathon running.
Barbara Ann "Bobbie" Hackmann Taylor, also known as the "Tent Girl", was notable as an unidentified homicide victim for nearly 30 years after her body was found on May 17, 1968, near Georgetown, Kentucky. She was referred to as "Tent Girl" because of the material wrapped around her. On April 23, 1998, the Scott County Sheriff's Office announced that this victim had been identified. Hackmann Taylor, born in Illinois, was married and had an eight-month-old daughter when she went missing from her home in Lexington, Kentucky.
Sherri Ann Jarvis was an American murder victim from Forest Lake, Minnesota whose body was discovered in Huntsville, Texas on November 1, 1980. Her body was discovered within hours of her sexual assault and murder, and remained unidentified for 41 years before investigators announced her identification via forensic genealogy in November 2021.
Gwenn Marie Story was a 19-year-old American woman who was murdered in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 14, 1979. Her body remained unidentified for 44 years before being identified via DNA analysis and genetic genealogy in December 2023. Prior to her 2023 identification, Story was nicknamed "Sahara Sue" and "Jane Las Vegas Doe" because her body was found near the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, at the intersection of Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard. Developments indicated she may have used the name "Shawna" or "Shauna" when she was alive, though this proved unfounded.
Unidentified decedent, or unidentified person, is a corpse of a person whose identity cannot be established by police and medical examiners. In many cases, it is several years before the identities of some UIDs are found, while in some cases, they are never identified. A UID may remain unidentified due to lack of evidence as well as absence of personal identification such as a driver's license. Where the remains have deteriorated or been mutilated to the point that the body is not easily recognized, a UID's face may be reconstructed to show what they had looked like before death. UIDs are often referred to by the placeholder names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe". In a database maintained by the Ontario Provincial Police, 371 unidentified decedents were found between 1964 and 2015.
The Redhead murders is the media epithet used to refer to a series of unsolved homicides of redheaded females in the United States between October 1978 and 1992, believed to have been committed by an unidentified male serial killer. The murders believed to be related have occurred in states including Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The murders may have continued until 1992. The victims, many remaining unidentified for years, were usually women with reddish hair, whose bodies were abandoned along major highways in the United States. Officials believe that the women were likely hitchhiking or may have engaged in prostitution.
Lyle Stevik was the alias used by an American man who, in 2001, committed suicide inside a motel room in Amanda Park, Washington. Although his body was quickly discovered, and fingerprints, DNA and dental information collected and recorded, there were no matches in any databases and the man's identity remained unknown until 2018.
Alisha Ann Heinrich, previously known as "Baby Jane" and "Delta Dawn", was a formerly unidentified American child murder victim whose body was found in Moss Point, Mississippi, in December 1982. The child — aged approximately 18 months — was partially smothered before she was thrown alive from the eastbound Interstate 10 bridge into the Escatawpa River, where she ultimately drowned. Her body was recovered between 36 and 48 hours after her death.
Brenda Marie Gerow, previously known as Pima County Jane Doe, was a formerly unidentified American murder victim whose body was found on April 8, 1981. In late 2014, a photograph of a facial reconstruction of the victim was made public that led to Gerow's identification the next year. She had been buried under a headstone with the placeholder name of "Jane Doe" with the phrase "UNK – 1981". Gerow's body remained unidentified for 34 years until it was announced that her remains had positively been identified.
Sharon Lee Gallegos was a formerly unidentified American murder victim known as Little Miss Nobody whose body was found in Congress, Yavapai County, Arizona on July 31, 1960. Her remains were estimated to have been discovered within one to two weeks of the date of her murder. Due to the advanced state of decomposition of the child's remains, the specific cause of death of Gallegos has never been established, although her death has always been considered to be a homicide.
DNA Doe Project is an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased persons using forensic genealogy. Volunteers identify victims of automobile accidents, homicide, and unusual circumstances and persons who committed suicide under an alias. The group was founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press.
Mary Edith Silvani, known as "Sheep's Flat Jane Doe" and "Washoe County Jane Doe" while unidentified, was an American woman found shot to death near Lake Tahoe in Washoe County, Nevada in July 1982. She was unidentified for 37 years, the investigation becoming a cold case. The Washoe County Sheriff's Office announced her identity on May 7, 2019. Silvani was identified through DNA analysis and genetic genealogy with assistance from the DNA Doe Project and utilizing the public genealogy database GEDmatch.
Mary A. Anderson is the pseudonym that was used by an unknown woman who committed suicide in a Seattle, Washington, hotel room in October 1996. Investigations by multiple agencies have failed to identify her.
Gary Michael Hilton, known as The National Forest Serial Killer, is an American serial killer responsible for four known homicides between 2007 and 2008 committed in three states, all of which occurred within the premises of national forests. Sentenced to death in Florida and to life imprisonment in Georgia and North Carolina, Hilton remains a suspect in several other killings, including that of Judy Smith.
Steven Alexander "Stevie" Crawford was a formerly unidentified toddler whose body was found in a reservoir in Ashland, Oregon, on July 11, 1963. He was identified in 2021 using GEDmatch.
Othram is an American corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy to resolve unsolved murders, disappearances, and identification of unidentified decedents or murder victims. The company also offers law enforcement agencies tools and programs to infer kinship among individuals, both closely and distantly related, through a combination of short tandem repeat and single nucleotide polymorphism testing, as well as forensic genome sequencing of DNA.
Amore Joveah Wiggins, formerly known as Opelika Jane Doe was a formerly unidentified murder victim whose skeletal remains were found in a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama. Her identity was not known until nearly 11 years later in January 2023. Wiggins's father, Lamar Vickerstaff, was subsequently charged with felony murder and failure to report a missing child, while her step-mother, Ruth Vickerstaff, was charged with the latter. If convicted, Lamar would face up to life imprisonment without the possibility parole or the death penalty, and Ruth would face up to 10 years in prison.
