This summer, the Phoenix Police Department has launched a new initiative to bring attention to cold case homicides. "Hot Desert, Cold Cases" will be a series of videos and other posts on the department's social media profiles, highlighting cold cases. In addition, Silent Witness is upping the reward for information leading to the arrest and/or indictment of the suspect/s of the crime. The reward will be $5,000 for the first four cold cases.
The series continues with the murder of an as-of-yet unidentified Jane Doe.
"First thing we get when we're born is our name," Detective Stuart Somershoe said. "That should be the one thing you get to keep when you die, and she doesn't have that."
'She' was hit and killed by a vehicle just after midnight on November 21, 2004. She was crossing the street near South 15th Street and East Broadway Road. Now, more than 16 years later, she is still unidentified. But forensic genealogy may finally be leading investigators to who this victim is.
"We've been kind of a caretaker for her for all these years, and so, we want to return her to her family" Detective Somershoe said. "Let them know what happened to her so they have some answers."
Detective Somershoe, from the Phoenix Police Department's Missing Person's Unit, said for a long time, all they knew about her was her physical description. She is an hispanic female, 40 to 50 years old, 5'4", short brown hair, and brown eyes. On that night, there was also illegible writing on her palm.
"Her death was probably instantaneous," the detective explained. "Witnesses saw the car fleeing from the scene and she was left lying there."
Investigators did all they could to identify this woman, and solve the case. And yet, no match has been made and the case has gone cold. She is what detectives refer to as a 'Jane Doe.'
But this year, Detective Somershoe took this case to the
DNA Doe Project—a non-profit organization that uses genetic genealogy to find familial matches of victims.
"We've been working on the genealogy for several months," Cairenn Binder, a forensic genealogist with the DNA Doe Project, said. "It all gets started with a process in the lab. I believe in this case, it was a blood card that was sent to that lab. They do an extraction of DNA. Another lab sequences the DNA information. And then our bioinformatics personnel make that into a usable file that we can upload into a database called GEDMatch. So that's where I come in, and my team. GEDMatch is a database that shows us familial matches of the Jane Doe in question and then we use those matches to build back family trees.
Binder said this victim's DNA shows that both parents are believed to be from a city called Calvillo in the Mexican state of Aguascalientes. This is a promising lead for investigators because Calvillo is small.
"We're looking for parents or siblings of this Jane Doe who are missing her, and it's not that uncommon for people to lose contact with their families back home when they moved to the United States. Maybe that's what her family is thinking, that they just sort of lost touch. But this Jane Doe deserves to have her name back."
If you have any information regarding this case, contact Silent Witness at 480-Witness or leave an anonymous tip on the Silent Witness website at
silentwitness.org. You will remain anonymous and could earn a cash reward.
Republished courtesy of Phoenix PD. Photo and video credit: PPD.