December 18, 2025 • 45 mins
Back in 2013, Robin wrote a Listverse article profiling ten heartbreaking cases of unidentified people found under mysterious circumstances—Jane and John Does whose names seemed lost forever. At the time, they were buried under placeholder names like “Little Miss Panasoffkee,” “Lyle Stevik,” and “Beth Doe,” with investigators following dead-end leads and families never knowing what happened to their loved ones.
But here’s the incredible part: they’re not mysteries anymore. Thanks to groundbreaking advances in DNA technology, forensic genealogy, and tireless cold case investigators, several of these forgotten souls have finally gotten their names back. Over this three-episode series, we’ll revisit each case from Robin’s original article, share the haunting details that captivated true crime followers for decades, and reveal the remarkable breakthroughs that solved them.
You’ll hear about Little Miss Panasoffkee, identified in October 2025 after 54 years through cutting-edge fingerprint technology; Lyle Stevik, whose identity was uncovered by genetic genealogy but remains protected by his family’s wishes; Beth Doe, the brutally murdered pregnant teen who turned out to be 15-year-old Evelyn Colon; Baby Hope, identified as 4-year-old Anjelica Castillo after an anonymous tip; and the Grateful Dead fan finally named as Jason Callahan after Reddit sleuths and DNA testing brought him home. We’ll also cover El Dorado Jane Doe (now known as “Kelly”), Caledonia Jane Doe (Tammy Jo Alexander), and explore which cases still remain unsolved, waiting for that one crucial breakthrough.
Each episode will take you through the original mystery, the painstaking investigation, and the emotional moment when these unidentified people finally got their dignity—and their names—back.
Support the Show:
Patreon.com/julesandashley
Patreon.com/thetrailwentcold
But here’s the incredible part: they’re not mysteries anymore. Thanks to groundbreaking advances in DNA technology, forensic genealogy, and tireless cold case investigators, several of these forgotten souls have finally gotten their names back. Over this three-episode series, we’ll revisit each case from Robin’s original article, share the haunting details that captivated true crime followers for decades, and reveal the remarkable breakthroughs that solved them.
You’ll hear about Little Miss Panasoffkee, identified in October 2025 after 54 years through cutting-edge fingerprint technology; Lyle Stevik, whose identity was uncovered by genetic genealogy but remains protected by his family’s wishes; Beth Doe, the brutally murdered pregnant teen who turned out to be 15-year-old Evelyn Colon; Baby Hope, identified as 4-year-old Anjelica Castillo after an anonymous tip; and the Grateful Dead fan finally named as Jason Callahan after Reddit sleuths and DNA testing brought him home. We’ll also cover El Dorado Jane Doe (now known as “Kelly”), Caledonia Jane Doe (Tammy Jo Alexander), and explore which cases still remain unsolved, waiting for that one crucial breakthrough.
Each episode will take you through the original mystery, the painstaking investigation, and the emotional moment when these unidentified people finally got their dignity—and their names—back.
Support the Show:
Patreon.com/julesandashley
Patreon.com/thetrailwentcold
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
So welcome to our final episode in our series about
ten non mysterious cases involving unidentified people. If you've listened
to our first two episodes, you might know that the
format here is quite different than usual. We're going back
to an article I wrote for listfirst dot com way
back in June of twenty thirteen, which was titled ten
mysterious Cases involving Unidentified People. Because all ten victims on
(00:53):
this list over the past twelve years have wound up
being identified. So we've been following the format where I
will read my original entry, then you too will share
your thoughts, and then I will reveal the details about
how these victims were identified. So we've done entries ten
through four on our last two episodes. So for our
final episode, we're going to do the last three entries
(01:14):
on the list, and I'm going to start off by
what is undoubtedly the saddest one and most tragic, and
this involves a istdent known as Baby Hope. So one
of the largest homicide investigations in New York City history
was launched on July the twenty third, nineteen ninety one,
when a cooler was found in a park bordering the
Henry Hudson Parkway. It contained the decomposed body of a
(01:36):
young girl estimated to be between the ages of three
and five. She was wrapped in a black garbage bag
and buried under cans of Coca cola. The girl had
been asphyxiated and likely been dead for days, and evidence
was later discovered that the girl was sexually abused. With
no clue to her identity, she was nicknamed Baby Hope.
Authority sent out a publicly for information and later received
(01:59):
a call from a woman using the name Judy Brown.
She claimed that while she was driving on the parkway
nine days before Baby Hope was found, she saw a
well dressed Hispanic couple carrying a cooler, but this woman
never came forward to provide further information, while Baby Help
remains identified. Over twenty years later. Detectives initially thought they
saved the case when they found sexually abusive images on
(02:21):
polaroids with a goal resembling Baby Hope in the same
area three months later. They later discovered the person in
the photos was actually a twelve year old girl living
in New Jersey, and in an eerie coincidence, her name
was also Hope.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
This whole case is heartbreaking. It involves not one, but
actually two little girls who are physically and sexually abused.
You know, they're emotionally abused as well. The fact that
this cooler is found and there's a child's body discarded
like trash, knowing that she had also been sexually abused.
(02:55):
I can't imagine the horror that her first three to
five years entailed. And then you continued to go down
and twenty years later detectives think, hey, we might actually
have a lead. There's these explicit photos we found of
a child who resembles this baby, and turns out it's
another child who's being exploited and abused. It's just absolutely heartbreaking.
(03:18):
And to think that for so long this child didn't
have a name, and there was no one who said
she's of value to claim and to know her name.
It's absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Just looking at her photo, she looks like a little angel.
She looks so sweet and so innocent. But to think
of the cold, calculated and casually callous nature of whoever
decided to put her body into a cooler and then
to cover it with cans of coke like they had
to have known that this isn't going to be something
(03:52):
that's going to be able to camouflage the body long term.
Just the decision to put this everyday item that people
consume it's full of sugar on top of the body
of this deceased child who we later find out has
been sexually abused. It's so horrific, And there's something about
this case that just really as soon as we started
(04:14):
to read through the description, it just really gets under
your skin.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, I'm always heartbroken by all the cases involving unidentified
decedents when they're children, especially when they're a really young age,
because you think to yourself, well, if no one ever
reported this child missing and they can't match it up
to someone, then there's a good chance that this poor
baby has been murdered by their parent or their caregiver
who just disposed of them and hope that they will
never get caught. We're actually seeing more and more cases
(04:40):
like this in recent years get solved, where they use
genetic genealogy to finally trace the deceased child back to
their parent and they wound up getting arrested and you
find out that they had a child that they just
got rid of early on in life and just moved
on with their lives if nothing has happened. I'm going
to talk about how Baby Hope was solved, and this
one actually pre date genic genealogy. It actually gets solved
(05:02):
in twenty thirteen, only a couple months after I published
this article, so I think it was the very first
case on the list to finally have a resolution. And
of course, why don't you hear what happened? It's pretty infuriating.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Did I just ask a quick question?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So, as far as when I look at the photo
of baby Hope, she looks to be Southeast Asian to me,
like she looks like she could be from Myanmar or Cambodia.
The fact that I lived in Southeast Asia, I feel
like this just looks like so many of the girls
that I saw who lived there. And it's said in
(05:42):
the description that you wrote that two well dressed Hispanic
people were seen holding a cooler, so perhaps it was them.
Did they release any information about what they thought would
be her heritage?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I don't know if they did. At the time, I
think they mostly thought that she was going to be
Mexican American, and that turned out to be true. You
were going to find out that she was born in
New York, but I think her family was from Mexico.
But I don't think they really thought that she was
going to be Asian or Cambodian or anything. I think
they thought from the very beginning that she was from
an Hispanic heritage. So it was in the summer of
(06:20):
twenty thirteen when the New York Police Department decided to
reopen the case because this is one that had haunted
them for over twenty years, and they finally got a
tip from someone who had seen the new media coverage
and openly wondered if the child might be her older sister,
Angelica Castillo, whom she had not seen in over twenty years.
(06:40):
This led the investigators to this person's mother. Her name
was Margerita Castillo, who had a total of ten children,
and confirmed that Angelica, this missing child, had left New
York when she was only four years old. But Margerita
just said that she assumed that Angelica's biological father had
taken her back to his native Mexico. So that's why
(07:02):
she never filed a missing person's report and why no
one ever put two and two together back in nineteen
ninety one. Well, they would use DNA testing to eventually
confirm that Margarita was baby Hope's biological mother, so the
victim was positively identified as Angelica Castillo, and Margherita, as
you can imagine, faced a lot of criticism for not
(07:23):
reporting Angelica missing. It's unclear if she knew what really
happened to her baby, but it turned out that she
was not directly responsible for Angelica's death, as the investigation
soon focused towards Margherita's fifty two year old paternal cousin,
whose name was Conrado Juarez, and after being extensively investigated
(07:44):
by police, Warez finally confessed to being responsible for Angelica's murder,
claiming that he had sexually assaulted the child inside his
apartment and then wound up smothering her to death with
a pillow when she started screaming, and then afterwards, Warez
and his sister, who were presumably the couple seen with
the cooler, decided to place Angelica's body into the cooler
(08:05):
and dumped it alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway a. Warez
his sister was already to cease by this point, but
they were able to charge Warez with a felony second
degree murder, but he soon recanted his confession and claimed
it was coerced, so he entered a plea of not guilty,
But there never would be a trial for the crime,
as Warez wound up dying of pancreatic cancer while he
(08:27):
was in jail in November of twenty eighteen. And that's
a very unpleasant way to eye. So even though it
was very unsatisfying to not see this case achieved total justice,
I guess you could say that karma really got this
guy in the end.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
That sounds so terrible to think that you would take
this small little child and sexually abused her, and then
when she screams out, likely for her mom or whomver,
you decide that you just can't handle this sound of
her screen so you don't want anyone to hear it.
Let's just it's horrific. And to think that he didn't
(09:04):
pay for what he did, I mean, pancreatic cancer. Like
you said, that could be his karma. But anytime there's
a case with a child involved, it just it like
rocks me to my core. I have such a hard
time with that, especially when there's the inclusion of sexual
abuse like this. To think of a young baby dying
(09:25):
like that, in total fear, screaming for her mommy. It
just hurts my heart in ways I can't even describe.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, it's disgusting. It makes me so heartbroken when you
think about this, and to think that this is somebody
who was able to do this, discard of a child
like she had no value, and then continue to live
a normal life. There's a chance this was not his
only victim. This is a victim that wasn't able to
have her voice heard right until decades later when she
(09:54):
got her name back. But this is likely not his
only victim. And you think about the poor mom. You know,
their Hispanic family, They had immigrated here to the United States.
She thought that the father had taken her. And one
review that I read, one article that I read, said
that she actually feared reporting anything or reaching out for
(10:16):
help or even trying to find her daughter because language barriers,
immigration issues, And so it really does highlight this idea
that you know in the nineties, she's also scared for
the safety of the children that are still in her care.
If she were to call and to say I can't
locate my child. Is she charged with neglect? Is she
investigated for a potential deportation, and so all of these
(10:39):
things were also weighing on the mother. I'm not saying
it makes it right. She's just as much value as
the other nine children in the family. But if she
truly believed she went with the father, and let's say
she's struggling to make ends meet, she trusts that, you know,
a biological parent is caring for this child, and unfortunately,
because she did not know where that baby was, it
(11:00):
ended up in the hands of the cousin. And like
I said, of what breaks my heart the most is
I highly doubt someone who's that sick and unhealthy and
can continue to live a normal life that that was
his only victim. I highly doubted. So it makes me
incredibly upset to think of what other child suffered at
his hands, either deceased or continued to fight to have
(11:23):
a life after abuse from him. So very, very tragic
case by far to me, the most disturbing we've talked about.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
And it's crazy to think too that that was Like
you brought up the fact that it was the nineties,
but if there was a woman who was in a
similar situation now as Baby Hope's mother, I could see
it in current times her having difficulty reporting it, especially
if there was immigration issues, because you would be very
worried about what would happened to your other nine children.
(11:50):
So I have deep empathy for her experience as a
mother when you have to go like the ends justifies
the means, like I'm not reporting my daughter missing, and
it's easy to judge, but when you have nine other
mouths to feed and you're worried about potential deportation or
like you said, language barrier, any type of issues that
(12:12):
people who are minorities would face in that type of
a situation, and they would have been a lot, especially
in nineteen ninety one. So for her mother, I could
understand where she came from. Although it obviously led to
this taking a lot longer to be solved, it's just
it's a sad case overall for so many reasons.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, And the woman that called in the tip that
finally led to this being solved, it turned how her
name was Laurenceita Ramirez, and it turned out she was
Angelica's biological sister, and she also said that she didn't
even know that Angelica existed until she was eleven years old,
because apparently her mother and the rest of her siblings
never talked about her and just went with the narrative
(12:57):
that her father had come and kidnapped her and taken
her back to Mexico. They did look into her father,
Gennaro Ramirez, and initially they thought he might have been
involved in Angelica's murder until Conradojarez made his confession, and
they still haven't located Gennaro. He is still believed to
be living in Mexico, and he may not even know
(13:17):
what happened to his daughter because he hasn't been part
of his family's life in so many years. But and
for the record, I do not believe Conrado Juarez's claims
that confession. His confession was coerced, because we've seen this
in a lot of cases where a lot of people
are wrongfully convicted after being forced to give a confession.
But when you look at all the evidence, it strongly
(13:37):
suggests that he and his sister were the two people
who were seen disposing of the cooler next to the parkway,
And I do think that if he had had a
chance to go on trial, he would have been convicted.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Can you imagine what that conversation with his sister would
have gone like? Because she was also related to his
sister would have been her cousin as well. To think, Okay,
I accidentally killed our baby cousin while I was molesting her,
or while I was sexually abusing her, and then the
sister decides to help. Maybe she too, Like astually brought
(14:10):
up that he likely had other victims. Maybe she too
was a victim. Maybe she was scared of him at
some point, and maybe he exerted some kind of coercion
or control over her. It's just a really unthinkable scenario
when we don't know all of the details to think
that you just jump up and help to dispose of
your cousin in a cooler topped with coke.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
She also could have been an abuser as well, So
we think about, you know, the men being sexual abusers
or physical abusers, but women also play a role. And
when you have people who are in this unhealthy relationship,
let's say it was a offender and victim, even though
they're related, or they're both just offenders.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
That's not uncommon where you'll see multiple family members who
engage in the abuse of one child. They become the
scapegoat of all anger, frustration, sexual tension, right, that that
child's just the target, and so I wouldn't put it
past her actually having knowledge of and or participating in
abuse as well.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, when na Warez recanted his confession, he tried to
put all the blame on his sisters, saying that oh,
all he did was disposed of the body, that his
sister was the one who asked him for help and
told her that Angelica had died from a fall down
the stairs. Because the sisters no longer round, we can't
hear her side of the story. But maybe he did
the same thing to her. Maybe he just said, oh,
(15:29):
Angelica fell down the stairs, and he didn't tell her
that he'd been abusing her, and then she agreed to
dispose of it to avoid potential legal problems. So yeah,
this is a technically a SOLVET case. But because the
main perpetrator died before he could go on trial and
the accomplice died many years ago, we were probably never
going to learn the full story about how these events unfolded.
(15:51):
So our next entry on the list is the Huntington
Beach Jane Doe. On April the first, nineteen ninety, a
young woman stepped on to Pacific Coast high at Huntington Beach, California,
and was instantly killed after being struck by two vehicles.
She carried no identification, but wore one very unique item,
a ring made of human hair. When the media published
(16:12):
a sketch of the woman, many residents came forward to
claim they had interacted with her. She had told some
people that her name was Andrea and that she was
twenty five or twenty six, though she looked young enough
to be between sixteen and eighteen years old. One resident
claimed that Andrea was a transient and that he let
her spend the night with his family. This is where
he witnessed the woman cut off a chunk of her
(16:33):
hair and wrap it around her finger as a ring.
Other residents who spoke with her gave conflicting stories about
her being from Virginia and New York. One person said
the woman mentioned she was adopted and was searching for
her birth family, and she also claimed that her parents
were pretty well known. In spite of investigators following up
on numerous leads, the woman still remains unidentified over twenty
(16:55):
years later.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
This is such a strange case that this woman who
went by the name of Andrea was obviously a lot
younger trying to pass herself off is older and more mature,
maybe because she would be taken more seriously, or you
would feel safer if people perceived you to be older
and more worldly than being like eighteen years old, where
(17:17):
you're just kind of discovering things for the first time.
It makes me wonder what her home life was like
if she was indeed that young, What was she running
away from? What was she running towards? Was there something
traumatic that happened. I also find the human hair ring
to be a really bizarre detail.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
For sure, And you also have to think that you know,
what is she battling, not only what home life is
she escaping or what perceived home life is she escaping,
but it almost sounds like she's struggling with mental health
issues as well. She's telling multiple stories. Could it be
to cover and to try to, like you said, appear
to be a different person to the people she's interacting with,
possibly and keeping a live straights very hard. So what
(18:00):
if some of these ideas she's expressing and these kind
of contradictions are a result of a mental health episode
where she's continuing to tell people these grand stories. You
know she's adopted, she's running away. She has these parents
that are well known. You know, she's radically shifting on
the spectrum. Could she have run away from a home
that maybe wasn't bad and she's perceived it because she's
(18:24):
had this mental health break? Is she running from something?
Or do we really not know the background whatsoever? There's
so many things that could have happened. But am I
right that one of the witnesses said that they actually
watched her cut her own hair off and tie her
own hair around her finger.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, she was staying with someone because she was a transient,
and they welcomed her in her home and they just
saw her just do this out of nowhere. And when
her body was found, she was still wearing the uh
ring man out of hair.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Okay, So when I first read it, I was thinking
like an antique hair ring that they would use in
morning jewelry. But no, this is a kid who's cutting
off a think of her hair and tinyen around her finger.
So again I think it really screams this idea of
she's having a almost psychotic break of reality. And maybe
each person's story is what they were told, and you
(19:12):
have this person who we don't know much about but
did she really have touch of her reality before she
went missing.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Well, as we're going to find out, she probably did
have mental health issues, and she hailed a long way
from California, and we'll probably never know the real story
about why she traveled there. I first became familiar with
this when it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries during the
nineteen nineties. They did a segment on Unidentified John or
Jane does and at the end they had kind of
(19:40):
a role call where they would show a couple of
unidentified decedents and ask people to come forward if they
had information. And ironically enough, the roll call also featured
the Sumpter County Doze, which we talked about on our
first episode, and they've also been identified. And I actually
briefly talked about this one on The Trail Went Cold
in early two thousand and six seventeen, when I did
(20:01):
my minisode about the disappearance of Janelle Matthews, which took
place in Greeley, Colorado, in nineteen eighty four. And I
only brought it up because someone made a Reddit post
which brought up the possibility that perhaps Janelle was the
Huntington Beach Jane Doe because there were some compelling similarities.
But of course, as we all know, Janelle Matthews was
(20:22):
abducted and murdered by a man named Steve Panky, so
these cases are completely unrelated. But ironically enough, just a
couple months after I dropped that trail and cold episode
in May of twenty seventeen, we finally got an identification
in this case. And much like Little Miss PANASOFKI, this
one wasn't done with DNA. It was done by the
old fashioned method of fingerprints. It turned out that the
(20:45):
victim's name actually was Andrea. Her name was Andrea Kuyper.
She was twenty six years old at the time of
her death, and she originally hailed from Fairfax, Virginia, all
the way on the other side of the country to California.
The upload Jane Doe's fingerprints into the FBI's automated fingerprint
identification system, and it turned out the back in nineteen
(21:07):
eighty seven, Andrea Kuiper had gotten a job with the
US Department of Agriculture, which required her to provide her
fingerprints on her application, and because those prints were entered
into a government database, they wound up being matched to
the Jane Doe. So they got in touch with Andrea's family,
who were still living in Virginia, and they confirmed that
(21:27):
they had not seen her since nineteen eighty nine, that
she just decided to leave home for unexplained reasons. And
then a few months before her death, a friend of
hers called her family to let them know Andrea was okay,
but didn't share any information from about her current whereabouts.
They completely lost touch with her, and of course they
were unable to file a missing person's report because there
(21:49):
was no real jurisdiction. She didn't have a fixed address,
they had no idea where she was at the time,
and they just figured that, oh, maybe she's gone off
living her life somewhere, and maybe she's still a lot
today and has just never contacted us. But sadly, it
turned out that only a year after she left home,
she was killed in a traffic accident when she was
hit by two vehicles in Huntington Beach, California. So it
(22:12):
turned out that Andrea did have a history of bipolar
disorder and drug usage. Because this was the nineteen eighties,
I don't think they really delved too deeply into what
kind of mental health issues she had. But it sounds
like she just decided to leave Virginia for her own reasons,
make a cross country trip to California, and then she
wound up dead. So it's a tragic end of the story.
(22:34):
But at least Andrea's parents finally have answers about what
happened to her, and she has finally gotten her name back.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
It's wonderful for the family anytime that they have the
answers and they now can lay that to rest. And
it's not a case where we're looking at somebody being murdered.
The difference here is we're looking at a tragic accident
with somebody who had likely descended into psychosis. I mean
the hair being that could just be something that this
(23:02):
individual did. But when you mention that she has bipolar disorder,
then it seems likely that this could have been an episode,
especially if she was putting herself into dangerous situations that
would have got her killed, like getting hit by those cars.
So it's a real tragedy and it brings up, you know,
the larger conversation of what was the conversation around mental
(23:23):
health during this time, And it was nineteen ninety so
there wasn't much of a conversation around mental health, and
it was really poorly understood. And a lot of it
is an invisible illness. And so unless somebody is having
an active episode where they're dealing with psychosis, or they
deal with something that you can see every day, perhaps
(23:45):
somebody who is dealing with OCD, but somebody who's bipolar,
if they're having a youthmic period, you're not going to
see it. They may seem very like like quote unquote
normal or typical, but then if they go into a
manic or a hypomanic episode, you're going to notice that.
And if that mania goes into the territory of psychosis,
(24:07):
which it very often does, then dangerous things can happen,
and people will put themselves in great danger and they
won't realize it.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, that's a sad thing is that I think her
ability to recognize a need for help is impossible at
that point, right when you're sick or you're struggling and
you're not getting the treatment you need, and you aren't
around people who are aware of your diagnosis and can
help keep you in a healthy state, when you yourself
can't regulate that, I think it's really sad in here.
(24:38):
Robin how old was she.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
She turned out she was twenty six when she died,
even though she looked like she could have been young
enough to be in her late teens.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Okay, so she was an adult. And that's another thing
that you'd struggle with here. The family, even if they said, hey,
she left, well she left voluntarily, and friends are even
calling and saying, hey, she's okay, don't worry about her,
she's okay. It gets to the point as a parent
parenting an adult child you almost have to just say
(25:06):
a prayer and hope that you know, at some point
she comes home. And like you said, they said, we
often just hoped, hey she's living her life and she's okay.
There's not much action law enforcement can take unless you
can report a concern or a known act of violence.
Right an adult wanting to leave on their own, especially
an adult with mental health issues, it's very easy for
(25:29):
the police to say she made a choice and she's
allowed to do so. And for this poor family, it
ended up where because she likely was struggling, she was
perhaps doing something where she walked in front of these
cars or was in a location where she could be
hit by vehicles, and she lost her life. So as
helpful as the answers are, it's so sad to think
(25:50):
of a family who's saying, you know, God, please just
let her be okay, let her be consciously living a
life and be happy and healthy. To know that that's
not how it turned out had to be absolutely devastating.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
It was, But I have so much empathy because it's
a recurring theme in a lot of these cases where
these decedents broke off all contact with their family, but
they just weren't able to do anything with the authorities
because they were living a transient lifestyle, just kind of
moving along the country, so they just couldn't get law
enforcement to perform an investigation because there was no direct
evidence of foul play. And I'm sure that the Kuyper
(26:23):
family never would have thought that poor Andrea would be
killed on the other side of the country and briefly
be mentioned on Unsolved Mysteries, And for all we know,
maybe they watched the episode but just didn't have any
inkling that this Jane Doe would have been Andrea. And
it was just kind of a luck that now that
they had a more advanced fingerprinting system that they get
enter or prints into that's how they wound up making
(26:44):
a match. But yeah, you do feel with the families,
but at the very least they finally get to their
loved ones back. And I know that Andrea was transported
back to Virginia so that she could get a proper burial,
so her family finally does have answers. So our final
entry the list is one of our most unique stories
about the El Dorado Jane Doe, and this is one
(27:05):
where she had a number of friends and acquaintances that
she'd been interacting with for years, but it turned out
that she had been living under a false identity before
she died, and they were trying to figure out who
she really was. So on July the ninth, nineteen ninety one,
a blonde woman was found beaten and shot to death
in her room at the Whitehall Motel in El Dorado, Arkansas.
(27:26):
Her id said that her name was Cheryl Anne Wick,
but investigators soon discovered that she had stolen this identity
from another Sharyl Anne Wick in Minneapolis, who was alive
and well and did not know the victim. The blonde
had been murdered by her boyfriend, James Roy mcalfin, who
served twelve years in prison. For the crime, but Kanacha
had any light on her real identity. The woman was
(27:47):
known to have resided in Dallas, Houston, Shreveport in Little
Rock before she arrived in El Dorado, and also told
her friend she was originally from Florida. In addition to
Cheryl Anne Wick, she also went under the aliases Kelly
Lee Kharr, Shan Wiley, and Mercedes. She had worked as
a sex worker and topless dancer, had been arrested on
numerous occasions for sex work and writing bad checks. It
(28:10):
was possibly wanted for bank robbery in Virginia. She also
had a bible in her possession which included names from
a family she had lived with for a while. But
in spite of all these leads, no one has ever
been able to uncover her true identity.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
This one's incredibly interesting because you have someone who we
actually know who the perpetrator was, and there's someone who
has quite a history, and yet that whole history is
underneath this alias and stolen identity of this poor woman
who's living somewhere else and going that's not me. I'm alive,
and well, that is not me. She must have stolen
(28:45):
my identity. It's incredibly interesting. I wonder if it took
time for this investigation to really gain traction because of
her lifestyle, or did police act pretty quickly to try
to figure out who she is.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think they did, Like they just looked into her name,
Cheryl Ann Wick, but then they found this other Cheryl
Ane Wick living in Minneapolis, and once they realized, oh,
she stole this identity, we'n't got quite a mystery here.
We have to figure out who this woman is because
she had a lot of friends and acquaintances who just
thought of her as Cheryl. They thought that was her
real name. And while the other victims that we've talked
(29:21):
about have only had composite sketches released of them, this
one they actually had photographs of Cheryl that her friends
had taken over over the years that they displayed on
the internet. And everyone's just so confused, like, we know
what this woman looks like, how come no one has
recognized her? Who knows her true identity? So it became
a very different mystery than the other ones on this list.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Maybe she had been impersonating other people for a very
long period of time that she'd been on the run
or trying to evade charges in other States, and we
know she went by multiple aliases, so she'd been estranged
from her family and what her original name was for
a very long time. Perhaps her physical appearance had changed
(30:03):
or shifted really dramatically and the family just didn't recognize her,
or the images weren't distributed widely enough for them to
have been able to see them. But one thing I
find interesting and I'm curious with if you have any
more information, is about her murder. Did they figure out
that it was a boyfriend right away? Did they think
(30:24):
it could have been one of her clients? Did he
say what the motivation was? He didn't shed any light
on who she was. It was it that he didn't know,
or was it that he didn't want to share any information.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Well, if they solved this mystery right away, because they
had been getting into an argument in a motel room
and there was suddenly a gunshot and they called the
police and macalvin was arrested immediately. And obviously he tried
to say that she shot herself, but nobody believed that.
But because they couldn't prove it, that's why he was
allowed to enter a plea deal to second degree murder
(30:57):
and only wound up serving twelve years, and he was
very manipulative with the police. Like in retrospect, I believe
he legitimately didn't know her real background because he'd only
known her for a few years, But as the years
went on he would try to like bargain with him
and say with the police, if you give me money,
I will finally tell you her real backstory. And are
(31:17):
you familiar with the fort Worth missing trio case?
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yes, yes, I'm Mark.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
And I lived in Fort Worth.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, I think you are ash. We might have talked
about it at some point in time.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Okay, well, real quick, one second digestion of it. What
is the case?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Okay? What's about three girls who went missing from Fort Worth,
Texas in nineteen seventy four. They had gone Christmas shopping
at a mall and they found the abandoned car, but
they didn't find the three girls. And then the following day,
her family received a letter in the mail where she
said that she just needed to get away, so they
all ran away together. But they don't think it was
(31:54):
in her handwriting, and they think the letter was probably
sent by someone who was responsible for their disappear urans
in order to throw off the investigation I covered it
all the way back on episode number two of The
Trail Went Cold, way back when, and in a weird coincidence,
it got mentioned just a few weeks later in conjunction
with this case because Mcalvin said, Cheryl told me that
(32:17):
during her early days she was part of a sexual
slavery ring and that she was with three other kidnapped
girls who were probably the fort Worth Missing Trio. But
of course in retrospect, it looks like Mcalvin was completely
full of it, Like, I seriously do not think that
the fort Worth Missing Trio were kidnapped and sold into
sex slavery, or that they crossed paths with Cheryl, So
(32:37):
I think he was just kind of make that up
to try to make money. But at the time I
was like, WHOA, this is a pretty big development a
connection between the two cases. But it just kind of
shows that I don't think he had any idea of
her background and he was just doing this just to
try to get attention, and that the actual truth about
where Cheryl came from was a lot less sensational. So
(32:58):
in January of two thousand nineteen, it was announced that
there had been a major breakthrough in this case. Because
El Dorado, Jane Doe's DNA have been uploaded again, match
and hint was made, which eventually led to an Alabama
woman named Christina Tilford who had the same genetic profile
of the victim. But here's where it's get interesting, because technically,
even though this showed that Christina Tilford was Jane Doe's
(33:22):
second cousin, she claimed that she had never met her
and had no idea who she was, So a genealogist
would identify Jane Doe's biological father as being a descendant
of a Virginia cuff pole named Daniel Wood and Mamie Carter,
who happened to be Christina Tilford's great grandparents and had
nine children of their own. So the most prevalent theory
(33:43):
which came up was that Jane Doe might have been
conceived when one of the male members of that family
had an extramarial affair and fathered an illegitimate child, which
would go a long way at explaining why Christina Tilford
had no idea who she was and why no one
from the family seemed to know who she was either,
And it would actually be another three years before they
(34:04):
were finally able to figure out the Jane does true identity,
and for privacy reasons, they haven't really revealed everything. But
in May of twenty twenty two, they finally announced that
the victim have been positively identified as a woman named Kelly,
but for privacy reasons, they have never released her surname publicly,
(34:25):
and most of it has been written in a blog
post by a genealogy expert who worked on the case.
But they have revealed that Kelly was originally born in
Virginia in nineteen sixty eight, which meant that she was
twenty three years old at the time she was murdered.
Her mother was named Brenda, and she also had a
half sister who was three years younger than her. And
even though Brenda had a couple of different husbands during
(34:46):
Kelly's childhood, one of whom was very abusive, it does
not sound like Kelly ever met her biological father. I
don't know if the investigation has uncovered the identity of
Kelly's father, as they may have withheld that from the
public for private reasons, and I don't even know if
he knew Kelly's existence. But like I said, it's possible
that the father had an extramaral affair or a one
(35:09):
night stand with Brenda, and that's how Kelly was conceived,
and this man just may have moved on with his life.
So it sounds like Brenda Hale from a pretty unstable family.
Is she had a lot of personal problems, like a
cocaine addiction, and did multiple stints in jail for such
offenses as grand larcity and credit card theft, and as
a result, Kelly wound up spending her teen years moving
(35:31):
around a lot with her mother, and she dropped a
high school during the tenth grade, and she wound up
developing a cocaine addiction of her own after her own mother, Brenda,
introduced her to cocaine, which is another sad element to
the story. So Kelly did a stit in rehab at
age eighteen and then spent the next five years living
in a number of different states where she pretty much
(35:51):
broke off all contact with her mother and then started
living under a bunch of false identities, including the name
Cheryl Ann Wick, which she stole from I'm an Exotic
Dancer and she was using at the time she was murdered.
And as for Brenda, she moved to Florida, to live
with her sister in nineteen ninety two, the year after
Kelly was murdered, and even though she was sometimes was
(36:13):
asked where Kelly was, Brenda just did not seem to
know or care all that much. And she died in
two thousand and eight. So pretty much it sounds like
Kelly led a really troubled lifestyle. And after all this
stuff with the genetic genealogy, they were finally able to
figure out who she was, so at the very least,
a lot of the rest of her genetic relatives finally
got conclusive answers about what happened to her. They know
(36:35):
that she got murdered, and also we know that Kelly
had a genetic connection to Christina Tilford, but we still
don't know the full story about Kelly's father. But yeah,
this is a really convoluted backstory. I had to share
with you about this one. But they finally do have
a resolution.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, it was just really sad. It's like she didn't
even have a chance when she started, you know, could
she have been the result of an extra marital affair
and then she was this child who wasn't wanted or
needed to be hidden, and then she quickly becomes in
a lifestyle where it's very difficult to get out of that.
Right as a young young girl, she's battling addiction and
she's trying to get help. But once you start going
(37:12):
down that road, unless you have a really stable support system,
it's very difficult not to continue to use and then
to do crimes to supplement your usage too. So it's
just a very tragic case when you think about her
early life and then how quickly it was ended at
age twenty three.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
I think it's so sad that we still don't know
who her biological father is, and the fact that her
mother introduced her to cocaine, that she was at rehab
at eighteen, it just speaks of a life that was
filled with sadness and substance used disorder. Given her background,
I can completely empathize with why she likely wanted to
(37:48):
escape and how she ended up down the road that
she ended up. And it is tragic that she died
at the hands of her boyfriend, who we maybe can
assume from the way that she dies that he could
have been an abusive partner and that this is something
that she dealt with on a continuous basis. But the
fact that she didn't feel comfortable enough to share who
(38:11):
she truly was with people that really resonated with me.
Can you imagine You've got all these friends, like people
have taken photos of her, but nobody knows who she
truly is. And maybe because her father's out there and
she feels rejected by him, maybe there's a sense that
she doesn't feel like she knows who she is and
(38:31):
that's why she goes by all of these other different aliases.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, according to some of the friends she had during
the last years of her life, she was very secretive
when talking about her background, but which she would say stuff, Oh,
I can't talk about it because I'm in a witness
protection program, which obviously turned out not to be true.
And I don't think she ever mentioned any of the
stuff we eventually learned about her, about her having this
mother who introduced her to cocaine and got her addicted.
(38:56):
So it sounds like she was like really ashamed from
like her past life, and at the age of eighteen,
she just decided, I'm starting a clean slate here, I'm
starting over, and she felt that the only way to
do that is to commit petty crimes, travel across the country,
and take up these new identities. I think she was
going to continue doing it until she found a life
that worked for and tragically she wound up being trapped
(39:18):
in a terrible life with an abusive boyfriend who was
also her pimp as well, so it was a pretty
terrible relationship and wound up being murdered at the age
of twenty three. But it sounds like she lived a
lot in those twenty three years and had to go
through some really rough patches. And I'm just glad that
even though we don't know her last name, we can
now refer to her as Kelly instead of referring to
(39:40):
as El Dorado Jane Doe, we're referring her to Sheryl
Anne Wick, and that they have finally resolved this mystery.
So yeah, it's always a thrill to me because, like
I said, the Huntington Beach Jane Doe and the El
Dorado Jane Doe were featured on the Trail Went Cold
at one point, and it's always exciting to see cases
from the podcast we have a resolution after so many years,
(40:02):
And this rings true ten times as much for this
particular list, because, like I said, I wrote it in
twenty thirteen, and as the years went on, they just
started solving more and more of them, and until earlier
this year, the only Loane hold out was little miss Panasofki,
but only a few weeks before we recorded this, they
finally identified her as Mare and Rowan, meaning that every
(40:24):
single victim on this list officially got her name back.
And that's why Jules and I decided that we have
to do an episode about this where we go through
all these cases one by one, and I'm glad we
did because we have finally given names back to these
people who for so many years were nothing more than
unidentified John or Jane does. But now we have finally
gone over the backstory for all these people.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
This fills my heart with joy because I feel like
we have referenced, We've either covered or referenced every single
one of these cases during the time that we've been
doing this podcast. I think it's been five years, has it, brother?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I think so. Yeah, it's almost ten year anniversary for
the Trail a Cold, So I think we're getting up
on our five year anniversary, which is wild.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
And to think that we have talked about this list
for US article countless times and there was always those holdouts,
and I remember the last time we talked about one
of the cases and you were like, you're still miss Panasaki.
It needs to be solved. And then finally coming full circle,
every single person on that list being identified. Some of
(41:26):
the mysteries aren't solved because we don't know with some
of the murders who murdered them. But to have their
dignity back, to have their names back, and to give
the family that peace of mind to know where their
loved one is, that is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Any final thoughts, Ashy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah, absolutely, this is one of those that was a
pleasure to record. I love that we got to do
a three part series. And the real idea here is
that these individuals mattered no matter what their life style was,
no matter what their age was, no matter what their
background was, right they're herited their culture, none of that.
These were people's lives who were lost to some extent
(42:04):
from either accident, violence, potential suicides, and we didn't know
who these people were, which means there's a family who
didn't know the end result of their loved ones life.
And so for me, it's that dignity and repairing this
idea to assign a name, to be able to call
them by their name, to be able to give them
(42:25):
a proper burial in many of these cases, and for
the family to have an idea of what happened and
a place or an ability to mourn and grieve this individual.
So for decades in most of these cases, that was
not a possibility, and because of police work, genetic genealogy,
(42:46):
random tips, decades later, these individuals got their name back.
And to me, that is the most incredible thing, and
that your whole list was named amazing. Thank you for
letting us be part of this special episode.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I please you. This is definitely when my favorite episodes
to record, and I've mentioned in countless times that we're
seeing more and more of these cold cases get solved
thanks to genetic genealogy. And there are a lot of
other lists that I've written in the past where there
are cases from that that have been solved. So maybe
one of these days we'll be able to do another
list where every single entry on my list that I
wrote something like twelve thirteen years ago gets solved and
(43:20):
we'll be able to go through them one by one.
But until then, thank you so much for listening to
this episodes. Next week, we'll return by doing one of
our traditional episodes about an Unsolved Cold case and we
will see you then, So goodbye everyone. Robin.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Do you want to tell us a little bit about
the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on
(44:01):
the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon,
and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in
(44:25):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.
Speaker 4 (44:44):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jewels and nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our
Path Went Chili mini's, which are always over an hour,
so they're not very mini, but they're just too short
to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those,
so we hope you'll check out those patreons will link
them in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated.
You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com.
You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwink. So
until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold
trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
So welcome to our final episode in our series about
ten non mysterious cases involving unidentified people. If you've listened
to our first two episodes, you might know that the
format here is quite different than usual. We're going back
to an article I wrote for listfirst dot com way
back in June of twenty thirteen, which was titled ten
mysterious Cases involving Unidentified People. Because all ten victims on
(00:53):
this list over the past twelve years have wound up
being identified. So we've been following the format where I
will read my original entry, then you too will share
your thoughts, and then I will reveal the details about
how these victims were identified. So we've done entries ten
through four on our last two episodes. So for our
final episode, we're going to do the last three entries
(01:14):
on the list, and I'm going to start off by
what is undoubtedly the saddest one and most tragic, and
this involves a istdent known as Baby Hope. So one
of the largest homicide investigations in New York City history
was launched on July the twenty third, nineteen ninety one,
when a cooler was found in a park bordering the
Henry Hudson Parkway. It contained the decomposed body of a
(01:36):
young girl estimated to be between the ages of three
and five. She was wrapped in a black garbage bag
and buried under cans of Coca cola. The girl had
been asphyxiated and likely been dead for days, and evidence
was later discovered that the girl was sexually abused. With
no clue to her identity, she was nicknamed Baby Hope.
Authority sent out a publicly for information and later received
(01:59):
a call from a woman using the name Judy Brown.
She claimed that while she was driving on the parkway
nine days before Baby Hope was found, she saw a
well dressed Hispanic couple carrying a cooler, but this woman
never came forward to provide further information, while Baby Help
remains identified. Over twenty years later. Detectives initially thought they
saved the case when they found sexually abusive images on
(02:21):
polaroids with a goal resembling Baby Hope in the same
area three months later. They later discovered the person in
the photos was actually a twelve year old girl living
in New Jersey, and in an eerie coincidence, her name
was also Hope.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
This whole case is heartbreaking. It involves not one, but
actually two little girls who are physically and sexually abused.
You know, they're emotionally abused as well. The fact that
this cooler is found and there's a child's body discarded
like trash, knowing that she had also been sexually abused.
(02:55):
I can't imagine the horror that her first three to
five years entailed. And then you continued to go down
and twenty years later detectives think, hey, we might actually
have a lead. There's these explicit photos we found of
a child who resembles this baby, and turns out it's
another child who's being exploited and abused. It's just absolutely heartbreaking.
(03:18):
And to think that for so long this child didn't
have a name, and there was no one who said
she's of value to claim and to know her name.
It's absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Just looking at her photo, she looks like a little angel.
She looks so sweet and so innocent. But to think
of the cold, calculated and casually callous nature of whoever
decided to put her body into a cooler and then
to cover it with cans of coke like they had
to have known that this isn't going to be something
(03:52):
that's going to be able to camouflage the body long term.
Just the decision to put this everyday item that people
consume it's full of sugar on top of the body
of this deceased child who we later find out has
been sexually abused. It's so horrific, And there's something about
this case that just really as soon as we started
(04:14):
to read through the description, it just really gets under
your skin.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, I'm always heartbroken by all the cases involving unidentified
decedents when they're children, especially when they're a really young age,
because you think to yourself, well, if no one ever
reported this child missing and they can't match it up
to someone, then there's a good chance that this poor
baby has been murdered by their parent or their caregiver
who just disposed of them and hope that they will
never get caught. We're actually seeing more and more cases
(04:40):
like this in recent years get solved, where they use
genetic genealogy to finally trace the deceased child back to
their parent and they wound up getting arrested and you
find out that they had a child that they just
got rid of early on in life and just moved
on with their lives if nothing has happened. I'm going
to talk about how Baby Hope was solved, and this
one actually pre date genic genealogy. It actually gets solved
(05:02):
in twenty thirteen, only a couple months after I published
this article, so I think it was the very first
case on the list to finally have a resolution. And
of course, why don't you hear what happened? It's pretty infuriating.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Did I just ask a quick question?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So, as far as when I look at the photo
of baby Hope, she looks to be Southeast Asian to me,
like she looks like she could be from Myanmar or Cambodia.
The fact that I lived in Southeast Asia, I feel
like this just looks like so many of the girls
that I saw who lived there. And it's said in
(05:42):
the description that you wrote that two well dressed Hispanic
people were seen holding a cooler, so perhaps it was them.
Did they release any information about what they thought would
be her heritage?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I don't know if they did. At the time, I
think they mostly thought that she was going to be
Mexican American, and that turned out to be true. You
were going to find out that she was born in
New York, but I think her family was from Mexico.
But I don't think they really thought that she was
going to be Asian or Cambodian or anything. I think
they thought from the very beginning that she was from
an Hispanic heritage. So it was in the summer of
(06:20):
twenty thirteen when the New York Police Department decided to
reopen the case because this is one that had haunted
them for over twenty years, and they finally got a
tip from someone who had seen the new media coverage
and openly wondered if the child might be her older sister,
Angelica Castillo, whom she had not seen in over twenty years.
(06:40):
This led the investigators to this person's mother. Her name
was Margerita Castillo, who had a total of ten children,
and confirmed that Angelica, this missing child, had left New
York when she was only four years old. But Margerita
just said that she assumed that Angelica's biological father had
taken her back to his native Mexico. So that's why
(07:02):
she never filed a missing person's report and why no
one ever put two and two together back in nineteen
ninety one. Well, they would use DNA testing to eventually
confirm that Margarita was baby Hope's biological mother, so the
victim was positively identified as Angelica Castillo, and Margherita, as
you can imagine, faced a lot of criticism for not
(07:23):
reporting Angelica missing. It's unclear if she knew what really
happened to her baby, but it turned out that she
was not directly responsible for Angelica's death, as the investigation
soon focused towards Margherita's fifty two year old paternal cousin,
whose name was Conrado Juarez, and after being extensively investigated
(07:44):
by police, Warez finally confessed to being responsible for Angelica's murder,
claiming that he had sexually assaulted the child inside his
apartment and then wound up smothering her to death with
a pillow when she started screaming, and then afterwards, Warez
and his sister, who were presumably the couple seen with
the cooler, decided to place Angelica's body into the cooler
(08:05):
and dumped it alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway a. Warez
his sister was already to cease by this point, but
they were able to charge Warez with a felony second
degree murder, but he soon recanted his confession and claimed
it was coerced, so he entered a plea of not guilty,
But there never would be a trial for the crime,
as Warez wound up dying of pancreatic cancer while he
(08:27):
was in jail in November of twenty eighteen. And that's
a very unpleasant way to eye. So even though it
was very unsatisfying to not see this case achieved total justice,
I guess you could say that karma really got this
guy in the end.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
That sounds so terrible to think that you would take
this small little child and sexually abused her, and then
when she screams out, likely for her mom or whomver,
you decide that you just can't handle this sound of
her screen so you don't want anyone to hear it.
Let's just it's horrific. And to think that he didn't
(09:04):
pay for what he did, I mean, pancreatic cancer. Like
you said, that could be his karma. But anytime there's
a case with a child involved, it just it like
rocks me to my core. I have such a hard
time with that, especially when there's the inclusion of sexual
abuse like this. To think of a young baby dying
(09:25):
like that, in total fear, screaming for her mommy. It
just hurts my heart in ways I can't even describe.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, it's disgusting. It makes me so heartbroken when you
think about this, and to think that this is somebody
who was able to do this, discard of a child
like she had no value, and then continue to live
a normal life. There's a chance this was not his
only victim. This is a victim that wasn't able to
have her voice heard right until decades later when she
(09:54):
got her name back. But this is likely not his
only victim. And you think about the poor mom. You know,
their Hispanic family, They had immigrated here to the United States.
She thought that the father had taken her. And one
review that I read, one article that I read, said
that she actually feared reporting anything or reaching out for
(10:16):
help or even trying to find her daughter because language barriers,
immigration issues, And so it really does highlight this idea
that you know in the nineties, she's also scared for
the safety of the children that are still in her care.
If she were to call and to say I can't
locate my child. Is she charged with neglect? Is she
investigated for a potential deportation, and so all of these
(10:39):
things were also weighing on the mother. I'm not saying
it makes it right. She's just as much value as
the other nine children in the family. But if she
truly believed she went with the father, and let's say
she's struggling to make ends meet, she trusts that, you know,
a biological parent is caring for this child, and unfortunately,
because she did not know where that baby was, it
(11:00):
ended up in the hands of the cousin. And like
I said, of what breaks my heart the most is
I highly doubt someone who's that sick and unhealthy and
can continue to live a normal life that that was
his only victim. I highly doubted. So it makes me
incredibly upset to think of what other child suffered at
his hands, either deceased or continued to fight to have
(11:23):
a life after abuse from him. So very, very tragic
case by far to me, the most disturbing we've talked about.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
And it's crazy to think too that that was Like
you brought up the fact that it was the nineties,
but if there was a woman who was in a
similar situation now as Baby Hope's mother, I could see
it in current times her having difficulty reporting it, especially
if there was immigration issues, because you would be very
worried about what would happened to your other nine children.
(11:50):
So I have deep empathy for her experience as a
mother when you have to go like the ends justifies
the means, like I'm not reporting my daughter missing, and
it's easy to judge, but when you have nine other
mouths to feed and you're worried about potential deportation or
like you said, language barrier, any type of issues that
(12:12):
people who are minorities would face in that type of
a situation, and they would have been a lot, especially
in nineteen ninety one. So for her mother, I could
understand where she came from. Although it obviously led to
this taking a lot longer to be solved, it's just
it's a sad case overall for so many reasons.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, And the woman that called in the tip that
finally led to this being solved, it turned how her
name was Laurenceita Ramirez, and it turned out she was
Angelica's biological sister, and she also said that she didn't
even know that Angelica existed until she was eleven years old,
because apparently her mother and the rest of her siblings
never talked about her and just went with the narrative
(12:57):
that her father had come and kidnapped her and taken
her back to Mexico. They did look into her father,
Gennaro Ramirez, and initially they thought he might have been
involved in Angelica's murder until Conradojarez made his confession, and
they still haven't located Gennaro. He is still believed to
be living in Mexico, and he may not even know
(13:17):
what happened to his daughter because he hasn't been part
of his family's life in so many years. But and
for the record, I do not believe Conrado Juarez's claims
that confession. His confession was coerced, because we've seen this
in a lot of cases where a lot of people
are wrongfully convicted after being forced to give a confession.
But when you look at all the evidence, it strongly
(13:37):
suggests that he and his sister were the two people
who were seen disposing of the cooler next to the parkway,
And I do think that if he had had a
chance to go on trial, he would have been convicted.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Can you imagine what that conversation with his sister would
have gone like? Because she was also related to his
sister would have been her cousin as well. To think, Okay,
I accidentally killed our baby cousin while I was molesting her,
or while I was sexually abusing her, and then the
sister decides to help. Maybe she too, Like astually brought
(14:10):
up that he likely had other victims. Maybe she too
was a victim. Maybe she was scared of him at
some point, and maybe he exerted some kind of coercion
or control over her. It's just a really unthinkable scenario
when we don't know all of the details to think
that you just jump up and help to dispose of
your cousin in a cooler topped with coke.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
She also could have been an abuser as well, So
we think about, you know, the men being sexual abusers
or physical abusers, but women also play a role. And
when you have people who are in this unhealthy relationship,
let's say it was a offender and victim, even though
they're related, or they're both just offenders.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
That's not uncommon where you'll see multiple family members who
engage in the abuse of one child. They become the
scapegoat of all anger, frustration, sexual tension, right, that that
child's just the target, and so I wouldn't put it
past her actually having knowledge of and or participating in
abuse as well.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, when na Warez recanted his confession, he tried to
put all the blame on his sisters, saying that oh,
all he did was disposed of the body, that his
sister was the one who asked him for help and
told her that Angelica had died from a fall down
the stairs. Because the sisters no longer round, we can't
hear her side of the story. But maybe he did
the same thing to her. Maybe he just said, oh,
(15:29):
Angelica fell down the stairs, and he didn't tell her
that he'd been abusing her, and then she agreed to
dispose of it to avoid potential legal problems. So yeah,
this is a technically a SOLVET case. But because the
main perpetrator died before he could go on trial and
the accomplice died many years ago, we were probably never
going to learn the full story about how these events unfolded.
(15:51):
So our next entry on the list is the Huntington
Beach Jane Doe. On April the first, nineteen ninety, a
young woman stepped on to Pacific Coast high at Huntington Beach, California,
and was instantly killed after being struck by two vehicles.
She carried no identification, but wore one very unique item,
a ring made of human hair. When the media published
(16:12):
a sketch of the woman, many residents came forward to
claim they had interacted with her. She had told some
people that her name was Andrea and that she was
twenty five or twenty six, though she looked young enough
to be between sixteen and eighteen years old. One resident
claimed that Andrea was a transient and that he let
her spend the night with his family. This is where
he witnessed the woman cut off a chunk of her
(16:33):
hair and wrap it around her finger as a ring.
Other residents who spoke with her gave conflicting stories about
her being from Virginia and New York. One person said
the woman mentioned she was adopted and was searching for
her birth family, and she also claimed that her parents
were pretty well known. In spite of investigators following up
on numerous leads, the woman still remains unidentified over twenty
(16:55):
years later.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
This is such a strange case that this woman who
went by the name of Andrea was obviously a lot
younger trying to pass herself off is older and more mature,
maybe because she would be taken more seriously, or you
would feel safer if people perceived you to be older
and more worldly than being like eighteen years old, where
(17:17):
you're just kind of discovering things for the first time.
It makes me wonder what her home life was like
if she was indeed that young, What was she running
away from? What was she running towards? Was there something
traumatic that happened. I also find the human hair ring
to be a really bizarre detail.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
For sure, And you also have to think that you know,
what is she battling, not only what home life is
she escaping or what perceived home life is she escaping,
but it almost sounds like she's struggling with mental health
issues as well. She's telling multiple stories. Could it be
to cover and to try to, like you said, appear
to be a different person to the people she's interacting with,
possibly and keeping a live straights very hard. So what
(18:00):
if some of these ideas she's expressing and these kind
of contradictions are a result of a mental health episode
where she's continuing to tell people these grand stories. You
know she's adopted, she's running away. She has these parents
that are well known. You know, she's radically shifting on
the spectrum. Could she have run away from a home
that maybe wasn't bad and she's perceived it because she's
(18:24):
had this mental health break? Is she running from something?
Or do we really not know the background whatsoever? There's
so many things that could have happened. But am I
right that one of the witnesses said that they actually
watched her cut her own hair off and tie her
own hair around her finger.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, she was staying with someone because she was a transient,
and they welcomed her in her home and they just
saw her just do this out of nowhere. And when
her body was found, she was still wearing the uh
ring man out of hair.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Okay, So when I first read it, I was thinking
like an antique hair ring that they would use in
morning jewelry. But no, this is a kid who's cutting
off a think of her hair and tinyen around her finger.
So again I think it really screams this idea of
she's having a almost psychotic break of reality. And maybe
each person's story is what they were told, and you
(19:12):
have this person who we don't know much about but
did she really have touch of her reality before she
went missing.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Well, as we're going to find out, she probably did
have mental health issues, and she hailed a long way
from California, and we'll probably never know the real story
about why she traveled there. I first became familiar with
this when it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries during the
nineteen nineties. They did a segment on Unidentified John or
Jane does and at the end they had kind of
(19:40):
a role call where they would show a couple of
unidentified decedents and ask people to come forward if they
had information. And ironically enough, the roll call also featured
the Sumpter County Doze, which we talked about on our
first episode, and they've also been identified. And I actually
briefly talked about this one on The Trail Went Cold
in early two thousand and six seventeen, when I did
(20:01):
my minisode about the disappearance of Janelle Matthews, which took
place in Greeley, Colorado, in nineteen eighty four. And I
only brought it up because someone made a Reddit post
which brought up the possibility that perhaps Janelle was the
Huntington Beach Jane Doe because there were some compelling similarities.
But of course, as we all know, Janelle Matthews was
(20:22):
abducted and murdered by a man named Steve Panky, so
these cases are completely unrelated. But ironically enough, just a
couple months after I dropped that trail and cold episode
in May of twenty seventeen, we finally got an identification
in this case. And much like Little Miss PANASOFKI, this
one wasn't done with DNA. It was done by the
old fashioned method of fingerprints. It turned out that the
(20:45):
victim's name actually was Andrea. Her name was Andrea Kuyper.
She was twenty six years old at the time of
her death, and she originally hailed from Fairfax, Virginia, all
the way on the other side of the country to California.
The upload Jane Doe's fingerprints into the FBI's automated fingerprint
identification system, and it turned out the back in nineteen
(21:07):
eighty seven, Andrea Kuiper had gotten a job with the
US Department of Agriculture, which required her to provide her
fingerprints on her application, and because those prints were entered
into a government database, they wound up being matched to
the Jane Doe. So they got in touch with Andrea's family,
who were still living in Virginia, and they confirmed that
(21:27):
they had not seen her since nineteen eighty nine, that
she just decided to leave home for unexplained reasons. And
then a few months before her death, a friend of
hers called her family to let them know Andrea was okay,
but didn't share any information from about her current whereabouts.
They completely lost touch with her, and of course they
were unable to file a missing person's report because there
(21:49):
was no real jurisdiction. She didn't have a fixed address,
they had no idea where she was at the time,
and they just figured that, oh, maybe she's gone off
living her life somewhere, and maybe she's still a lot
today and has just never contacted us. But sadly, it
turned out that only a year after she left home,
she was killed in a traffic accident when she was
hit by two vehicles in Huntington Beach, California. So it
(22:12):
turned out that Andrea did have a history of bipolar
disorder and drug usage. Because this was the nineteen eighties,
I don't think they really delved too deeply into what
kind of mental health issues she had. But it sounds
like she just decided to leave Virginia for her own reasons,
make a cross country trip to California, and then she
wound up dead. So it's a tragic end of the story.
(22:34):
But at least Andrea's parents finally have answers about what
happened to her, and she has finally gotten her name back.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
It's wonderful for the family anytime that they have the
answers and they now can lay that to rest. And
it's not a case where we're looking at somebody being murdered.
The difference here is we're looking at a tragic accident
with somebody who had likely descended into psychosis. I mean
the hair being that could just be something that this
(23:02):
individual did. But when you mention that she has bipolar disorder,
then it seems likely that this could have been an episode,
especially if she was putting herself into dangerous situations that
would have got her killed, like getting hit by those cars.
So it's a real tragedy and it brings up, you know,
the larger conversation of what was the conversation around mental
(23:23):
health during this time, And it was nineteen ninety so
there wasn't much of a conversation around mental health, and
it was really poorly understood. And a lot of it
is an invisible illness. And so unless somebody is having
an active episode where they're dealing with psychosis, or they
deal with something that you can see every day, perhaps
(23:45):
somebody who is dealing with OCD, but somebody who's bipolar,
if they're having a youthmic period, you're not going to
see it. They may seem very like like quote unquote
normal or typical, but then if they go into a
manic or a hypomanic episode, you're going to notice that.
And if that mania goes into the territory of psychosis,
(24:07):
which it very often does, then dangerous things can happen,
and people will put themselves in great danger and they
won't realize it.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, that's a sad thing is that I think her
ability to recognize a need for help is impossible at
that point, right when you're sick or you're struggling and
you're not getting the treatment you need, and you aren't
around people who are aware of your diagnosis and can
help keep you in a healthy state, when you yourself
can't regulate that, I think it's really sad in here.
(24:38):
Robin how old was she.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
She turned out she was twenty six when she died,
even though she looked like she could have been young
enough to be in her late teens.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Okay, so she was an adult. And that's another thing
that you'd struggle with here. The family, even if they said, hey,
she left, well she left voluntarily, and friends are even
calling and saying, hey, she's okay, don't worry about her,
she's okay. It gets to the point as a parent
parenting an adult child you almost have to just say
(25:06):
a prayer and hope that you know, at some point
she comes home. And like you said, they said, we
often just hoped, hey she's living her life and she's okay.
There's not much action law enforcement can take unless you
can report a concern or a known act of violence.
Right an adult wanting to leave on their own, especially
an adult with mental health issues, it's very easy for
(25:29):
the police to say she made a choice and she's
allowed to do so. And for this poor family, it
ended up where because she likely was struggling, she was
perhaps doing something where she walked in front of these
cars or was in a location where she could be
hit by vehicles, and she lost her life. So as
helpful as the answers are, it's so sad to think
(25:50):
of a family who's saying, you know, God, please just
let her be okay, let her be consciously living a
life and be happy and healthy. To know that that's
not how it turned out had to be absolutely devastating.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
It was, But I have so much empathy because it's
a recurring theme in a lot of these cases where
these decedents broke off all contact with their family, but
they just weren't able to do anything with the authorities
because they were living a transient lifestyle, just kind of
moving along the country, so they just couldn't get law
enforcement to perform an investigation because there was no direct
evidence of foul play. And I'm sure that the Kuyper
(26:23):
family never would have thought that poor Andrea would be
killed on the other side of the country and briefly
be mentioned on Unsolved Mysteries, And for all we know,
maybe they watched the episode but just didn't have any
inkling that this Jane Doe would have been Andrea. And
it was just kind of a luck that now that
they had a more advanced fingerprinting system that they get
enter or prints into that's how they wound up making
(26:44):
a match. But yeah, you do feel with the families,
but at the very least they finally get to their
loved ones back. And I know that Andrea was transported
back to Virginia so that she could get a proper burial,
so her family finally does have answers. So our final
entry the list is one of our most unique stories
about the El Dorado Jane Doe, and this is one
(27:05):
where she had a number of friends and acquaintances that
she'd been interacting with for years, but it turned out
that she had been living under a false identity before
she died, and they were trying to figure out who
she really was. So on July the ninth, nineteen ninety one,
a blonde woman was found beaten and shot to death
in her room at the Whitehall Motel in El Dorado, Arkansas.
(27:26):
Her id said that her name was Cheryl Anne Wick,
but investigators soon discovered that she had stolen this identity
from another Sharyl Anne Wick in Minneapolis, who was alive
and well and did not know the victim. The blonde
had been murdered by her boyfriend, James Roy mcalfin, who
served twelve years in prison. For the crime, but Kanacha
had any light on her real identity. The woman was
(27:47):
known to have resided in Dallas, Houston, Shreveport in Little
Rock before she arrived in El Dorado, and also told
her friend she was originally from Florida. In addition to
Cheryl Anne Wick, she also went under the aliases Kelly
Lee Kharr, Shan Wiley, and Mercedes. She had worked as
a sex worker and topless dancer, had been arrested on
numerous occasions for sex work and writing bad checks. It
(28:10):
was possibly wanted for bank robbery in Virginia. She also
had a bible in her possession which included names from
a family she had lived with for a while. But
in spite of all these leads, no one has ever
been able to uncover her true identity.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
This one's incredibly interesting because you have someone who we
actually know who the perpetrator was, and there's someone who
has quite a history, and yet that whole history is
underneath this alias and stolen identity of this poor woman
who's living somewhere else and going that's not me. I'm alive,
and well, that is not me. She must have stolen
(28:45):
my identity. It's incredibly interesting. I wonder if it took
time for this investigation to really gain traction because of
her lifestyle, or did police act pretty quickly to try
to figure out who she is.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think they did, Like they just looked into her name,
Cheryl Ann Wick, but then they found this other Cheryl
Ane Wick living in Minneapolis, and once they realized, oh,
she stole this identity, we'n't got quite a mystery here.
We have to figure out who this woman is because
she had a lot of friends and acquaintances who just
thought of her as Cheryl. They thought that was her
real name. And while the other victims that we've talked
(29:21):
about have only had composite sketches released of them, this
one they actually had photographs of Cheryl that her friends
had taken over over the years that they displayed on
the internet. And everyone's just so confused, like, we know
what this woman looks like, how come no one has
recognized her? Who knows her true identity? So it became
a very different mystery than the other ones on this list.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Maybe she had been impersonating other people for a very
long period of time that she'd been on the run
or trying to evade charges in other States, and we
know she went by multiple aliases, so she'd been estranged
from her family and what her original name was for
a very long time. Perhaps her physical appearance had changed
(30:03):
or shifted really dramatically and the family just didn't recognize her,
or the images weren't distributed widely enough for them to
have been able to see them. But one thing I
find interesting and I'm curious with if you have any
more information, is about her murder. Did they figure out
that it was a boyfriend right away? Did they think
(30:24):
it could have been one of her clients? Did he
say what the motivation was? He didn't shed any light
on who she was. It was it that he didn't know,
or was it that he didn't want to share any information.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Well, if they solved this mystery right away, because they
had been getting into an argument in a motel room
and there was suddenly a gunshot and they called the
police and macalvin was arrested immediately. And obviously he tried
to say that she shot herself, but nobody believed that.
But because they couldn't prove it, that's why he was
allowed to enter a plea deal to second degree murder
(30:57):
and only wound up serving twelve years, and he was
very manipulative with the police. Like in retrospect, I believe
he legitimately didn't know her real background because he'd only
known her for a few years, But as the years
went on he would try to like bargain with him
and say with the police, if you give me money,
I will finally tell you her real backstory. And are
(31:17):
you familiar with the fort Worth missing trio case?
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yes, yes, I'm Mark.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
And I lived in Fort Worth.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, I think you are ash. We might have talked
about it at some point in time.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Okay, well, real quick, one second digestion of it. What
is the case?
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Okay? What's about three girls who went missing from Fort Worth,
Texas in nineteen seventy four. They had gone Christmas shopping
at a mall and they found the abandoned car, but
they didn't find the three girls. And then the following day,
her family received a letter in the mail where she
said that she just needed to get away, so they
all ran away together. But they don't think it was
(31:54):
in her handwriting, and they think the letter was probably
sent by someone who was responsible for their disappear urans
in order to throw off the investigation I covered it
all the way back on episode number two of The
Trail Went Cold, way back when, and in a weird coincidence,
it got mentioned just a few weeks later in conjunction
with this case because Mcalvin said, Cheryl told me that
(32:17):
during her early days she was part of a sexual
slavery ring and that she was with three other kidnapped
girls who were probably the fort Worth Missing Trio. But
of course in retrospect, it looks like Mcalvin was completely
full of it, Like, I seriously do not think that
the fort Worth Missing Trio were kidnapped and sold into
sex slavery, or that they crossed paths with Cheryl, So
(32:37):
I think he was just kind of make that up
to try to make money. But at the time I
was like, WHOA, this is a pretty big development a
connection between the two cases. But it just kind of
shows that I don't think he had any idea of
her background and he was just doing this just to
try to get attention, and that the actual truth about
where Cheryl came from was a lot less sensational. So
(32:58):
in January of two thousand nineteen, it was announced that
there had been a major breakthrough in this case. Because
El Dorado, Jane Doe's DNA have been uploaded again, match
and hint was made, which eventually led to an Alabama
woman named Christina Tilford who had the same genetic profile
of the victim. But here's where it's get interesting, because technically,
even though this showed that Christina Tilford was Jane Doe's
(33:22):
second cousin, she claimed that she had never met her
and had no idea who she was, So a genealogist
would identify Jane Doe's biological father as being a descendant
of a Virginia cuff pole named Daniel Wood and Mamie Carter,
who happened to be Christina Tilford's great grandparents and had
nine children of their own. So the most prevalent theory
(33:43):
which came up was that Jane Doe might have been
conceived when one of the male members of that family
had an extramarial affair and fathered an illegitimate child, which
would go a long way at explaining why Christina Tilford
had no idea who she was and why no one
from the family seemed to know who she was either,
And it would actually be another three years before they
(34:04):
were finally able to figure out the Jane does true identity,
and for privacy reasons, they haven't really revealed everything. But
in May of twenty twenty two, they finally announced that
the victim have been positively identified as a woman named Kelly,
but for privacy reasons, they have never released her surname publicly,
(34:25):
and most of it has been written in a blog
post by a genealogy expert who worked on the case.
But they have revealed that Kelly was originally born in
Virginia in nineteen sixty eight, which meant that she was
twenty three years old at the time she was murdered.
Her mother was named Brenda, and she also had a
half sister who was three years younger than her. And
even though Brenda had a couple of different husbands during
(34:46):
Kelly's childhood, one of whom was very abusive, it does
not sound like Kelly ever met her biological father. I
don't know if the investigation has uncovered the identity of
Kelly's father, as they may have withheld that from the
public for private reasons, and I don't even know if
he knew Kelly's existence. But like I said, it's possible
that the father had an extramaral affair or a one
(35:09):
night stand with Brenda, and that's how Kelly was conceived,
and this man just may have moved on with his life.
So it sounds like Brenda Hale from a pretty unstable family.
Is she had a lot of personal problems, like a
cocaine addiction, and did multiple stints in jail for such
offenses as grand larcity and credit card theft, and as
a result, Kelly wound up spending her teen years moving
(35:31):
around a lot with her mother, and she dropped a
high school during the tenth grade, and she wound up
developing a cocaine addiction of her own after her own mother, Brenda,
introduced her to cocaine, which is another sad element to
the story. So Kelly did a stit in rehab at
age eighteen and then spent the next five years living
in a number of different states where she pretty much
(35:51):
broke off all contact with her mother and then started
living under a bunch of false identities, including the name
Cheryl Ann Wick, which she stole from I'm an Exotic
Dancer and she was using at the time she was murdered.
And as for Brenda, she moved to Florida, to live
with her sister in nineteen ninety two, the year after
Kelly was murdered, and even though she was sometimes was
(36:13):
asked where Kelly was, Brenda just did not seem to
know or care all that much. And she died in
two thousand and eight. So pretty much it sounds like
Kelly led a really troubled lifestyle. And after all this
stuff with the genetic genealogy, they were finally able to
figure out who she was, so at the very least,
a lot of the rest of her genetic relatives finally
got conclusive answers about what happened to her. They know
(36:35):
that she got murdered, and also we know that Kelly
had a genetic connection to Christina Tilford, but we still
don't know the full story about Kelly's father. But yeah,
this is a really convoluted backstory. I had to share
with you about this one. But they finally do have
a resolution.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, it was just really sad. It's like she didn't
even have a chance when she started, you know, could
she have been the result of an extra marital affair
and then she was this child who wasn't wanted or
needed to be hidden, and then she quickly becomes in
a lifestyle where it's very difficult to get out of that.
Right as a young young girl, she's battling addiction and
she's trying to get help. But once you start going
(37:12):
down that road, unless you have a really stable support system,
it's very difficult not to continue to use and then
to do crimes to supplement your usage too. So it's
just a very tragic case when you think about her
early life and then how quickly it was ended at
age twenty three.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
I think it's so sad that we still don't know
who her biological father is, and the fact that her
mother introduced her to cocaine, that she was at rehab
at eighteen, it just speaks of a life that was
filled with sadness and substance used disorder. Given her background,
I can completely empathize with why she likely wanted to
(37:48):
escape and how she ended up down the road that
she ended up. And it is tragic that she died
at the hands of her boyfriend, who we maybe can
assume from the way that she dies that he could
have been an abusive partner and that this is something
that she dealt with on a continuous basis. But the
fact that she didn't feel comfortable enough to share who
(38:11):
she truly was with people that really resonated with me.
Can you imagine You've got all these friends, like people
have taken photos of her, but nobody knows who she
truly is. And maybe because her father's out there and
she feels rejected by him, maybe there's a sense that
she doesn't feel like she knows who she is and
(38:31):
that's why she goes by all of these other different aliases.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, according to some of the friends she had during
the last years of her life, she was very secretive
when talking about her background, but which she would say stuff, Oh,
I can't talk about it because I'm in a witness
protection program, which obviously turned out not to be true.
And I don't think she ever mentioned any of the
stuff we eventually learned about her, about her having this
mother who introduced her to cocaine and got her addicted.
(38:56):
So it sounds like she was like really ashamed from
like her past life, and at the age of eighteen,
she just decided, I'm starting a clean slate here, I'm
starting over, and she felt that the only way to
do that is to commit petty crimes, travel across the country,
and take up these new identities. I think she was
going to continue doing it until she found a life
that worked for and tragically she wound up being trapped
(39:18):
in a terrible life with an abusive boyfriend who was
also her pimp as well, so it was a pretty
terrible relationship and wound up being murdered at the age
of twenty three. But it sounds like she lived a
lot in those twenty three years and had to go
through some really rough patches. And I'm just glad that
even though we don't know her last name, we can
now refer to her as Kelly instead of referring to
(39:40):
as El Dorado Jane Doe, we're referring her to Sheryl
Anne Wick, and that they have finally resolved this mystery.
So yeah, it's always a thrill to me because, like
I said, the Huntington Beach Jane Doe and the El
Dorado Jane Doe were featured on the Trail Went Cold
at one point, and it's always exciting to see cases
from the podcast we have a resolution after so many years,
(40:02):
And this rings true ten times as much for this
particular list, because, like I said, I wrote it in
twenty thirteen, and as the years went on, they just
started solving more and more of them, and until earlier
this year, the only Loane hold out was little miss Panasofki,
but only a few weeks before we recorded this, they
finally identified her as Mare and Rowan, meaning that every
(40:24):
single victim on this list officially got her name back.
And that's why Jules and I decided that we have
to do an episode about this where we go through
all these cases one by one, and I'm glad we
did because we have finally given names back to these
people who for so many years were nothing more than
unidentified John or Jane does. But now we have finally
gone over the backstory for all these people.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
This fills my heart with joy because I feel like
we have referenced, We've either covered or referenced every single
one of these cases during the time that we've been
doing this podcast. I think it's been five years, has it, brother?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I think so. Yeah, it's almost ten year anniversary for
the Trail a Cold, So I think we're getting up
on our five year anniversary, which is wild.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
And to think that we have talked about this list
for US article countless times and there was always those holdouts,
and I remember the last time we talked about one
of the cases and you were like, you're still miss Panasaki.
It needs to be solved. And then finally coming full circle,
every single person on that list being identified. Some of
(41:26):
the mysteries aren't solved because we don't know with some
of the murders who murdered them. But to have their
dignity back, to have their names back, and to give
the family that peace of mind to know where their
loved one is, that is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Any final thoughts, Ashy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah, absolutely, this is one of those that was a
pleasure to record. I love that we got to do
a three part series. And the real idea here is
that these individuals mattered no matter what their life style was,
no matter what their age was, no matter what their
background was, right they're herited their culture, none of that.
These were people's lives who were lost to some extent
(42:04):
from either accident, violence, potential suicides, and we didn't know
who these people were, which means there's a family who
didn't know the end result of their loved ones life.
And so for me, it's that dignity and repairing this
idea to assign a name, to be able to call
them by their name, to be able to give them
(42:25):
a proper burial in many of these cases, and for
the family to have an idea of what happened and
a place or an ability to mourn and grieve this individual.
So for decades in most of these cases, that was
not a possibility, and because of police work, genetic genealogy,
(42:46):
random tips, decades later, these individuals got their name back.
And to me, that is the most incredible thing, and
that your whole list was named amazing. Thank you for
letting us be part of this special episode.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I please you. This is definitely when my favorite episodes
to record, and I've mentioned in countless times that we're
seeing more and more of these cold cases get solved
thanks to genetic genealogy. And there are a lot of
other lists that I've written in the past where there
are cases from that that have been solved. So maybe
one of these days we'll be able to do another
list where every single entry on my list that I
wrote something like twelve thirteen years ago gets solved and
(43:20):
we'll be able to go through them one by one.
But until then, thank you so much for listening to
this episodes. Next week, we'll return by doing one of
our traditional episodes about an Unsolved Cold case and we
will see you then, So goodbye everyone. Robin.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Do you want to tell us a little bit about
the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on
(44:01):
the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon,
and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in
(44:25):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.
Speaker 4 (44:44):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jewels and nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our
Path Went Chili mini's, which are always over an hour,
so they're not very mini, but they're just too short
to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those,
so we hope you'll check out those patreons will link
them in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated.
You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com.
You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwink. So
until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold
trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
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