After years of fruitless gratuities and dead-end guides, governments got a big break in identifying “El Dorado Jane Doe, ” a inexplicable maiden who was killed at a unkempt Arkansas motel nearly three decades ago.
El Dorado Police Detective Lt. Cathy Phillips told HuffPost that authorities were able to use DNA evidence to track down relateds of Jane Doe, an important step forward in the process of identifying the woman.
A recent conference call with the DNA Doe Project led to Doe’s DNA being associates itself with GEDmatch, the same genomics and pedigree website police in California used to identify a suspect in the Golden State Killer case.
Phillips said she was notified two weeks later of the first DNA hit.
“We did a pedigree background and a woman in Alabama was our first link to it, ” the detective told HuffPost on Wednesday. “I couldn’t find a telephone number for her, so I contacted the family on Facebook. At first, they pondered I might be a quack, so they did some checking and found out you did a story on it and then it extended from there.”
Phillips said a genealogist she is working with has since identified Doe’s father as a successor of Daniel Wood and Mamie Carter, who had nine children and lives in Virginia. The duet is the great-grandparents of Christina Tilford, the Alabama woman whose DNA furnished the first tie-up in the case.
Tilford, who learned she’s Doe’s second cousin, told HuffPost she didn’t recognize Doe but could see a family similarity. She said she shared her DNA with the website about a year ago in hopes of find their own families roots.
“I was really sickened, ” Tilford said of being notified by the investigator about the parallel. “I didn’t expect something like this to come from my DNA test.”
Phillips, a 25 -year veteran of planning department who has expended roughly 15 times looking for answers in the odd occasion, said she is “ecstatic” about the recent developments.
