She is Jane Doe no longer.
On Wednesday, Boulder County sheriff’s investigators and a dogged local historian announced they have used DNA testing to give a name and a face to the previously unidentified victim whose body was found nude and badly bruised at the bottom of an embankment in Boulder Canyon 55 years ago.
She was, they said, Dorothy Gay Howard, an 18-year-old who left her family’s home in Phoenix one month before the discovery in Boulder Canyon.
Though detectives had previously announced — then ruled out — other possible identities for the murdered young woman, investigators say a DNA match between Howard’s sister and Jane Doe convinced them their search had ended.
“We feel very confident,” said Boulder County sheriff’s Cmdr. Rick Brough.
The turning point in the case came last month, when a woman who lives out-of-state contacted local historian Silvia Pettem and said she thought her great-aunt “Dot” might be Jane Doe.
Pettem has been pursuing Jane Doe’s identity for more than a decade, and the woman had apparently been following Pettem’s work via her website. When a previously announced possible identity was ruled out because that woman was found living in Australia, Howard’s great-niece decided to send Pettem an e-mail. Boulder police obtained a DNA sample from Howard’s sister and sent it to a lab in Pennsylvania for analysis.
Pettem said Howard’s family has asked her not to divulge how Howard came to be in Boulder in the spring of 1954.
“I promised the family I would respect their privacy,” said Pettem, who was scheduled to have a signing in Boulder on Wednesday for a book she has written about the hunt for Jane Doe’s identity. “. . . I think this was a shock to them.”
For Pettem, the revelation brought a mix of sadness, joy and relief. She said she hopes to raise money for a new headstone bearing Howard’s name to sit atop Jane Doe’s grave in Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery.
“I’ve been so invested in this, I feel almost like this is my daughter and we finally have a resolution,” Pettem said.
Investigators said they would continue to pursue details of the case in the hopes of confirming their theory that Jane Doe was the victim of serial killer Harvey Glatman.
Glatman — who graduated from high school in Colorado and was arrested several times in Denver and Boulder for attacks on women — was executed in California in 1959 for the rapes and murders of three women.
Boulder detectives had considered Glatman a suspect in the Jane Doe case decades ago, and, when asked whether he was involved, Glatman “gave kind of a cryptic response that wasn’t an absolute no but wasn’t an absolute yes either,” Boulder sheriff’s Division Chief Phil West said. West said marks on Jane Doe’s body also fit with a distinctive way that Glatman would bind his victims.
“We’re not going to give up,” West said. “. . . We should do our level best to solve them all. We never want to give up on a homicide investigation.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
