by Ann Rule
One of the best clues to body identification are dental records, but the dead woman’s teeth would be of little help. Four teeth were missing and she had no fillings in her remaining teeth. Her fingernails were well cared for; they were long and filed neatly, and were still coated with platinum-colored polish. She had small hands and feet. She wore a Timex watch, which had stopped at 3:10. But whether it was A.M. or P.M., they had no way of knowing.
There was a silver friendship band on her ring finger, left hand, and, in her hair, a white metal barrette.
She had eaten kidney beans and ham within hours of her death.
None of this information seemed likely to identify the Jane Doe victim. Like her age, the cause of her death could not be determined as precisely as it would if she had been found sooner. She had suffered cerebral contusions before she died. Someone had struck her on the forehead and around the bony orbits of her eyes causing injury to the brain itself.
There seemed to be evidence of some hemorrhaging in the strap muscles of her neck indicating she may have been strangled, too, but tissue damage made it impossible for Dr. Wilson to be sure. But one thing was certain; she had been alive when she entered the river, although she was undoubtedly unconscious. River silt was evident in her larynx and trachea.
Who was she?
The best chance of identifying her might be through her fingerprints. Because her fingertips were so decomposed, it was relatively easy to slip the loose skin off and send the outer layer with ridges and whorls still apparent to the FBI for possible matching.
Not really hoping to find much, Detective Dick Reed and his sergeant, Ivan Beeson, went back to the banks of the Duwamish near where the body had floated. They scoured the river banks searching for some item of clothing, I.D.—anything that might be linked to the drowned woman. They found nothing.
Dick Reed pored over all the Seattle Missing Persons reports, looking for a woman answering the description of the body found in the Duwamish. Descriptions of the “Jane Doe” appeared in The Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer, asking for citizens to come forward with information. As always, there was a flurry of calls. Some of them even looked promising.
Two area women had told friends that they were going to Vancouver, British Columbia, some weeks before, and they seemed to have disappeared completely. The women had criminal drug abuse records in both Washington and British Columbia so their fingerprint classifications were on file.
The FBI Lab in Washington, D.C. was trying to raise the prints from the woman in the river, but it would be days before FBI technicians could complete the difficult process. It might even prove impossible.
Several people had viewed the corpse and a few had made a tentative identification. It was well nigh impossible though to be sure with only a visual observation.
A man familiar to police because he hung around Seattle’s skid row told detectives about meeting a “lonely woman” at a waterfront charity shelter. “Sometimes she called herself Margie,” he said. “Sometimes it was Betty—and sometimes she said her name was Sue. I expect none of those were her real name. She had a little drinking problem. Not real bad, you understand. But I haven’t seen her around for a month.”
The man first identified a morgue photo of the unidentified body as his friend. But then he remembered that “Margie-Betty-Sue” had had a rather distinctive tattoo in a “sort of private part of her person.” The murder victim had no tattoos at all.
People seeking lost daughters, wives and friends filed through the county morgue, but there was always something that didn’t quite match. The body was too tall, or the eyes were the wrong color. She was not the “lost sister” from Bothell. She wasn’t the runaway daughter from a posh neighborhood on Mercer Island. Nor was she either of the two women who’d traveled to Vancouver. On December 5, the FBI was able to make prints from the dead woman’s fingertips, but they did not match those on the rap sheets of the two missing women.
More devastating to the search, the FBI had no record in their voluminous file of the “Jane Doe’s” prints. Apparently, she had never been printed so one of the better methods of identifying nameless bodies was lost to the investigation.
Nevertheless, the Seattle investigators made up bulletins for every law enforcement agency in the U.S. and Canada with the woman’s description and her fingerprint classification. If there was someone out there who missed her the detectives would hear about it in time. Though nothing came in that shed any light on the case, they would not give up.
The lack of response was frustrating. Until the Jane Doe body could be linked somehow with the world she lived in, the people she knew, the predictable patterns of her daily existence, finding her killer would be impossible.
In January of 1970, the pitiful corpse was buried as a “Jane Doe” in Grave Lower 6, Lot 122, Section J at Riverton Crest Cemetery. Somewhere, there was probably someone who loved her and who waited for some word from her. The detectives who had tried so hard to identify the lost woman did not forget her. “Someday, we’ll find out who she is,” Dick Reed commented, “And when we do, we’ll find her killer too.”
Nine months after she was buried, on September 7, 1971, a report came in that tentatively linked the dead woman with a missing teenager from a small town east of the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Some weeks after the “Jane Doe” was buried, a Missing Persons report had come in from Mr. and Mrs. Murphy* of Cle Elum, Washington. Their daughter, Georgia*, eighteen, had disappeared while on a visit with relatives in Seattle during October and November of 1969.
Georgia was five feet, two inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. She had brown hair and blue eyes. Tragically, but inevitably, neither Seattle nor King County police connected the missing Cle Elum girl with the unnamed woman pulled from the Duwamish. The physical characteristics given for Georgia Murphy and those charted during the “Jane Doe’s” autopsy were widely disparate. The dead woman was five feet five; the Murphy girl was said to be five feet two. Their weights were different and Dr. Wilson had estimated the victim’s age as from twenty-eight to thirty-five, while the Cle Elum girl was only eighteen. There was really no reason to link the two.
At the time that Georgia Murphy was reported missing, Seattle Police Missing Persons detectives had done some routine checks: utilities companies, phone listings, unemployment records, to see if she had established residence in Seattle and had stayed in the city by choice. But they hadn’t gone further. Georgia was eighteen and considered legally to be an adult so it was impossible for the police department in a large city to spend their time and resources trying to find someone who had the legal right to leave home.
Now, however, in 1971, King County Detective Ben Colwell and Detective Sergeant Ray Jenne had new information on Georgia Murphy. Georgia had gone missing not from the city, but from the county. Her parents had said in their missing report that she’d intended to stay with an uncle and his family who lived in a mobile home park in the south end, a park not far from the Duwamish River. But the uncle didn’t know where she was.
Colwell perused the records of all the unidentified female bodies found since October of 1969. None of them came close to Georgia Murphy’s description—but the woman in the river had been found very close to the trailer park. He called for a conference with Don Cameron and Ted Fonis of the Seattle Homicide Unit.
The four detectives studied the picture provided by Mrs. Murphy, and shook their heads. The missing girl smiled gently in what appeared to be a graduation photo. She was pretty in an elfin way, and she had short dark hair and light blue eyes. The handwritten description on the back of the picture described a petite girl.
“I don’t think it’s Georgia. The location of the body is the only thing that fits,” Fonis commented. “But we’re willing to push it and see if we can find some positive identification. It’s remotely possible that the height and weight could be way off. Teenagers grow and parents aren’t always aware of just how tall they are. The eyes? That’s rougher. Without
contacts, people’s eye color doesn’t change. But let’s see what we can turn up.”
Detectives Fonis and Cameron drove to Cle Elum, a tiny hamlet on the other side of the Cascade Mountains some seventy-five miles from Seattle. Once a thriving mining town, it had become picturesque—but quiet. It was the kind of town kids often left behind as they set out for adventure in the world.
The information they received from the worried parents was not promising. Georgia had always been a girl who trusted people—sometimes at her own peril. She had longed for love and new experiences, and laughed at her family’s concern for her. At eighteen, she believed that there was no situation she couldn’t handle.
There were no dental records available for Georgia Murphy; she had always had perfect teeth. As far as her mother knew, Georgia wore pink nail polish—not platinum. Her eyes were definitely blue. There was no question about that. Georgia Murphy had had a very slight foot deformity on her left instep which she favored when she walked. And to the best of her parents’ knowledge, Georgia had never had her fingerprints taken.
But yes, Georgia had worn a Timex watch with a silver band. (The Timex found on the unidentified body had a gold band.) And, yes, she had worn a silver ring of some sort on the third finger of her left hand.
* * *
Georgia Murphy’s parents fought to retain their composure as they recalled the last few days they had spent with their daughter. She had been accepted by the Army as a recruit in October of 1969, and she had been excited about going into the service. Because she knew lots of people in Seattle, Georgia left a little early to go to the city to report for duty. “She left on about October 28 to say good-bye to her friends there,” Mrs. Murphy said. “She was going to stay with her uncle.”
Her mother said she received word from the Army that Georgia should report for duty on November 5. She had relayed this message to Georgia’s uncle, and just assumed he had told Georgia.
Oddly, Georgia’s uncle had shown up in Cle Elum on November 11. He said that he and his family had left Seattle for good and were moving on. He returned all of Georgia’s clothes—except one outfit her mother remembered: her blue jeans, a blue blouse, blue nylon jacket, and her tennis shoes.
“He told us that she didn’t need the rest of her clothes because she would be getting Army issue stuff.”
Mrs. Murphy told the Seattle detectives that she’d found her brother’s behavior peculiar and a bit scattered. First, he was going to stay in Cle Elum. He even found a job as a clerk at the local police department through a government funded program, but he stayed only one night and then moved on.
He didn’t seem to have a plan. He came back to Cle Elum again on November 21, and asked Mrs. Murphy if she had heard from Georgia. When told no, he replied, “She probably went to Canada.” On another visit, he’d advised her parents to “forget her.”
The rest of Georgia’s family was not about to do that, but they tried to convince themselves that she had reported to the Army and was in basic training somewhere. But she hadn’t written or called and that just wasn’t like her.
Suspicious of the uncle’s behavior, Detectives Fonis and Cameron talked to a number of people who knew him. He was younger than Georgia’s parents, and he was described as a pleasant enough man until he imbibed too much, and then he could be a “mean drunk.”
What the two detectives needed most was something to link Georgia Murphy to the nameless dead woman. So they checked military records to see if Georgia had had her prints taken when she applied to join the service. But her fingerprints hadn’t been taken. That would have happened when she reported for duty, but she had never shown up. There was no entry in the Army records that showed Georgia Murphy as being on active duty.
Most of all, the disparity in eye color between the body in the river and Georgia puzzled the investigators. How could bright blue eyes change to muddy brown? They wondered if it was possible that the pollutants in the Duwamish River had somehow changed the appearance of the dead woman’s eyes—so much so that they appeared brown? The detectives contacted plants along the river to find what chemicals were dumped into the Duwamish. The answers were startling if only from an ecological standpoint, and they could have great bearing on their investigation. Employees grudgingly admitted to getting rid of waste in the river: “Caustics, oil, oil sludge, sodium hydroxide, and hydrogen sulfide.”
The investigators called forensic pathologists all over the West Coast. Their queries were without precedent. Some thought that human eye color would never change; others thought it was quite possible.
The blood in the dead woman’s body had putrefied at the time of autopsy but even so a sample had been frozen. Although DNA testing was a long time away, there were fairly sophisticated techniques available to test blood in the sixties and seventies, and criminalists were able to type it. The blood samples proved to be the same type as Georgia Murphy’s, although the experts could not narrow it down to enzymes and RH factors.
The Timex watch was no help at all. The number etched on the back was a model number—not a serial number.
Detectives Fonis and Cameron tried another fingerprint check through the FBI. If Georgia Murphy had simply run away, perhaps she had had her prints taken somewhere over the past eighteen months.
No luck.
“We have to find something with Georgia Murphy’s prints on it,” Cameron said. “Let’s go back to Cle Elum.”
Again the duo crossed the mountains. They gathered papers and a cosmetic bag that had belonged to the missing girl. They also took hair curlers which still had strands of Georgia’s hair twisted in the rollers.
Criminalists using the Ninhydrin process with iodine fumes and heat can bring up fingerprints left on paper decades earlier. Some distinctive prints were raised from Georgia’s personal papers and her books. On January 7, 1972, the FBI confirmed that the prints taken from the woman in the Duwamish and those on Georgia Murphy’s belongings were the same. There was no question now that Georgia Murphy was dead.
The polluted river and inaccurate measurements of height and weight recorded in the missing reports circulated after Georgia’s disappearance had contributed to the tragic delay in identifying the lost girl from Cle Elum. Years had passed since a much beloved daughter had been buried as Jane Doe in a pauper’s grave.
Now, detectives were forced to confirm what Georgia Murphy’s parents had feared all along. On February 17, the Murphys came to the Seattle Homicide office and were briefed on the detectives’ work on the case. Georgia was no longer missing. But the truth behind her violent death was still unknown.
Georgia’s uncle became a prime suspect. The last place she had been seen alive was near his mobile home. According to witnesses, Georgia had had a date with a young sailor, his sister, and her boyfriend on November 4—the night she disappeared. Her date had told mutual friends that he let Georgia out of his car in front of the trailer park in the early morning hours on the 5th. The uncle had told everyone that she never came home at all.
Information came back to Seattle police headquarters in late March of 1972 that the uncle was in Dallas, Texas. Ted Fonis and Don Cameron requested an address check by Dallas Police. When the man was located in the Texas city, they sent a case summary to the Dallas department and asked that a polygraph examination be administered to Georgia’s uncle. Frankly, they believed he had murdered his niece; his skittishness and the way he traveled from place to place certainly made him look like a guilty man.
With a list of questions prepared by the Seattle investigators, Dallas Police Chief Frank Dyson instructed his lie detector expert to test Georgia’s uncle. On April 13, 1972, he was hooked up to all the leads on the polygraph: blood pressure, heart rate, galvanic skin response, respirations. They expected him to “blow ink all over the walls.”
But he didn’t. He passed the test. He passed so cleanly, in fact, that he was eliminated from suspicion. This was frustrating but not unusual in police probes. Some of the “best” susp
ects turn out to be clean, and some of the most innocent-looking are guilty.
It meant starting over. Now, the Washington investigators focused their attention on the young sailor Georgia had dated on the night of November 4, 1969. Apparently they had gone out several times. His name was Bernie Pierce, and he was just a kid, too, not more than twenty or twenty-one. The detectives learned that Pierce had left the Navy, and was reported to be living with a sister in Flathead County, Montana.
Don Cameron called Flathead County Sheriff Curtis Snyder in his Whitefish office. Snyder assigned Detective Britt Davis to talk with Pierce’s Montana relatives. Davis had no luck finding Bernie himself, but he quickly located the man who had accompanied Georgia Murphy, Bernie Pierce, and Pierce’s sister on the double date in Seattle on the night of November 4.
“We went to the Double Decker Restaurant,” the man recalled. “Georgia and Bernie were fighting as usual. About marriage. Georgia wanted to get married—and Bernie wanted to stay single.”
“Were they drinking?” Britt Davis asked.
The young man shrugged. “Georgia wasn’t. Bernie might have been. He usually drank heavily when he was on leave. Sometimes he was mean.”
The quarreling pair had left the Double Decker sometime after midnight, and Bernie Pierce had told the witness later that he’d taken her home. His friend said that Pierce had seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Georgia was missing.
The next question was, Where was Bernie Pierce now?
His friend told Detective Davis he wasn’t sure, but thought he might be in the Seattle area. Bernie’s sister was no longer in Montana, and was rumored to be back in Seattle. The informant also suggested that detectives check out a man he knew only as “Sid” who worked in an auto-wrecking yard in Seattle. “I heard he raped a thirty-eight-year-old woman,” Pierce’s friend said, “and I know Georgia went out with him two or three times while she was in Seattle.”