Credit: DDP
Nearly 50 years after the body of an elderly woman was found inside a cardboard box in a field in rural Indiana, the DNA Doe Project and their agency partners have identified her as Jane Hart. Hart was born in 1906 and was 69 years old at the time she was murdered. Although she was a native of Ohio, Hart’s last known residence prior to her death was in Chicago.
On October 8, 1976, a farmer tending to his field near Otterbein, Indiana came across a box about 15 yards from a nearby road. Stuffed into this small cardboard box was the body of a woman who had been shot in the back of the head. She was Caucasian, and it was estimated that she was between 55 and 65 years old. Local authorities believed that the box had only been in the field for about 12 hours, although it was estimated that the woman had been killed around one week before her body was discovered.
In 2021, the Benton County Coroner’s Office brought this case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does. After a DNA profile for the woman was generated, the DNA Doe Project team quickly determined that the unidentified woman was of Croatian descent. But people of Eastern European heritage are underrepresented in the DNA databases available to investigative genetic genealogists, and Benton County Jane Doe’s highest match shared just 1.6% of their DNA with her.
“We could tell that our Jane Doe had Croatian ancestry, which posed a challenge,” said Harmony Vollmer, team co-leader. “Without more people of Eastern European descent uploading to the GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNAJustice.org databases we have access to, cases like this will remain tricky to solve.”
Despite this hurdle, the team continued to work on the case and eventually made a breakthrough in 2024. Their years of research led them to a Croatian woman who immigrated to the US in 1905 and gave birth to a daughter a year later. Difficult family circumstances led to this daughter being entrusted to the care of an orphanage. Census records showed that the daughter later moved from Ohio to Chicago as an adult. Her name was Jane Hart, and in the 1970s she appeared to vanish from the public records.
“We uncovered further documentation from institutions that Jane had lived in, as well as probate records linking her to her family,” said Traci Onders, team co-leader. “This research revealed genetic and genealogical connections that enabled us to identify her as a candidate.”
With Hart now identified as the key person of interest, investigators began working to confirm this identification. Thanks to the work of the Benton County Coroner’s Office, it was later confirmed that the woman formerly known only as Benton County Jane Doe was in fact Jane Hart.
“It was thanks to the assistance of Jane’s surviving family that we have been able to confirm her identity,” said Onders. “Once we had identified Jane as a likely candidate, they assisted by taking DNA tests and uploading their DNA data to GEDmatch.com, the results of which proved Benton County Jane Doe to be their long-lost relative.”
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the Benton County Coroner’s Office, who entrusted us with this case; HudsonAlpha Discovery and Lakehead University’s Paleo-DNA Lab for some initial lab work; Astrea Forensics for DNA extraction; Intermountain Forensics for sequencing; Kevin Lord for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA for providing their databases; our generous donors who joined our mission and contributed to this case; and our dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our Jane and John Does home.
Republished courtesy of DNA Doe Project