Sonya Alice Langan (left) and Byung Ran Kim (right). Credit: DDP
For nearly four decades, investigators have searched for the identity of a young woman whose remains were discovered buried in a vacant lot. Now, the Bullhead City Police Department, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, and the DNA Doe Project have announced that she has finally been positively identified as Sonya Alice Langan.
On May 15, 1989, a construction crew discovered skeletal remains buried in a vacant lot on Castleberry Lane in Bullhead City, Arizona. Investigators determined the victim was a young woman between 17 and 19 years old, and evidence indicated she had been deceased for two to ten years prior to her discovery, placing her date of death as early as 1979. A bullet recovered from her skull confirmed the case as a homicide.
The young woman had shoulder-length brown hair that may have been partially bleached, and she wore a distinctive multicolored owl earring. She had also received extensive dental work in her life; two of her upper teeth were missing and had been replaced by a partial denture plate. Despite decades of extensive investigative efforts, her identity remained a mystery and the case went unsolved.
The turning point came in 2024, when the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office Special Investigations Unit approached the Bullhead City Police Department with the opportunity to secure federal grant funding for forensic genealogy testing. Once approved, the funds allowed evidence to be submitted to the DNA Doe Project, a non-profit organization whose expert investigative genetic genealogists work to identify John and Jane Does. In late 2025, researchers successfully developed a 99% match, finally restoring Ms. Langan’s name.
“This case came with its own complexities,” said team leader Eryk Jan Grzeszkowiak. “Sonya Alice Langan’s ancestry included French Canadian endogamy, and one of her grandparents was recorded as having 17 children. We are truly honored to have been able to restore her name through IGG."
2015 Jane Doe
More than a decade after her body washed ashore a beach, a Jane Doe found in Portland, Maine has been identified as 66-year-old Byung Ran Kim. Kim, an immigrant to the US from South Korea, was last known to be living in New York before her death in 2015.
On May 22, 2015, the body of a woman was found on East End Beach in Portland, Maine. She was believed to be 30-50 years old and of Asian descent, while it was estimated that she had died less than 24 hours before her body was discovered. It was also determined that her cause of death was drowning. The unidentified woman was well-dressed and had undergone expensive dental work, but there were no clues as to her identity.
In 2018, the Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner brought this case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does. Unfortunately, the genealogy research in this case was stymied by a lack of DNA matches, a common obstacle in cases involving people of Asian descent. The team was, however, able to deduce that the unidentified woman had roots in South Korea.
This information was passed on to the investigating agencies, who began looking into the possibility that she may have been a South Korean national. Detective Andjelko Napijalo of the Portland Police Department worked tirelessly to get her fingerprints compared against the South Korean database and, when this comparison eventually took place, a match was found. The former Jane Doe was identified as Byung Ran Kim, a 66-year-old from South Korea who had been living in New York prior to her disappearance. Kim’s family in South Korea were subsequently informed of her identification, providing them with some answers after eleven years of not knowing what had happened to her.
Republished courtesy of DNA Doe Project