Mystery still surrounds burned body

ALICE COLLINSWORTH

EDMOND — Investigators say a soon-to-be-released forensic reconstruction may help identify a body found Dec. 5 in a charred field northeast of Edmond.

An Edmond Police officer discovered the body of a young woman in a pile of burning leaves and debris after an early morning grass fire. Although the case is still open three months later, the woman’s identity remains cloaked in mystery.

In an interview last week, Detective Chris Cook of the Edmond Police Department said the girl’s description was sent to agencies across the state and surrounding areas. Several possible leads came in, but none of the missing people matched the characteristics of the body found in Edmond.

Early information from the Police Department said the girl was probably in her late teens or early 20s, about 4 feet 8 inches tall, weighing about 80 pounds. She is believed to be Asian, and she had her lower two wisdom teeth removed within the last year.

She may possibly have been pregnant at an earlier time, police said.

“I also made contact with surrounding colleges and universities and gave them what I knew,” Cook said.

“I asked them to check into any missing students, and I asked their presidents or deans to talk to student leaders and ask that students be on the lookout for their friends, to report them if they were missing.”

Although the word went out to colleges virtually state-wide, nobody came forward to claim the young woman.

Kevin Rowland, chief investigator with the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s Office, said one of the reasons “John Does” or “Jane Does” remain unidentified is the person is not a resident of the area where their body is found.

“A lot has to do with publicity getting to the right place,” Rowland said last week.

“The reason we don’t get some of them identified, even through reconstruction, is that nobody knew them. They’re just not from around here.”

Cook agreed.

“It depends on where they’re from,” he said. “Maybe they’re an illegal (alien), and possibly nobody has actually missed them. Maybe they don’t have a close family. At college age, kids drop out of college all the time.

If they don’t have a strong family connection, nobody’s going to miss them.”

In the case of the woman found in Edmond, Cook said he believed she was possibly from a middle-class family.

“The dental care would lead a person to believe that she was from a medium socio-economic status,” he said.

Rowland said the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office is preparing the skull so a forensic artist can create a reconstruction.

“We’re a good two to three weeks away from reconstruction, though,” he said. “Some of this work is very time-consuming.”

In the meantime, the local Jane Doe’s body remains in the custody of the Medical Examiner. Bodies have been kept at the facility for as long as 10 years.

In the event she does not get identified, Oklahoma County will be responsible for her burial.

“She’ll be buried in the county where death occurred,” Rowland said. “We don’t allow the county to cremate an unidentified body, in case new evidence is ever needed.”

Rowland’s office is currently working on about 100 cases involving unidentified bodies, some from as far back as 1972.

“Considering that there are 33,000 deaths each year in Oklahoma, that’s not bad,” he said. Rowland said he normally sees between five and 10 unidentified bodies each year.

“Being here in Oklahoma, at the crossroads, we don’t always know where they come from,” he said. Bodies have been found here from as far away as Pennsylvania.

“You would think that younger people (like Edmond’s Jane Doe) would be easier to identify,” he said, “but in my experience, the younger they are, the more difficult it is to discover who they are.”

Cook said it is not yet known whether the young woman had been sexually assaulted before her death.

“When they did the autopsy, they would collect samples to see if there was sexual assault. That was sent to OSBI, which will take several months,” he said.

The backlog at OSBI is due to their enormous case load, he said.

Officials hope the new reconstruction will enable someone to identify Edmond’s mystery woman. If the new artwork doesn’t produce results, though, Rowland still has a plan.

Four times in the past, he’s shown reconstructions of Jane Does on the popular television show “America’s Most Wanted.” Although none of those four was ever identified, Rowland remains optimistic.

“If we don’t find her through local media outlets, we’ll try AMW,” he said. “Hopefully when we get the reconstruction done, we’ll have a more accurate picture. Maybe it’s somebody who lived here and the rest of the family is overseas. You just never know.”

Cook is hopeful that new reconstruction artwork will provide a name for the unknown woman.

“We just hope to have more information coming up soon,” he said.