St. Louis Jane Doe/Hope Pt. One

February 28, 1983. St. Louis, Missouri. The body of an African-American girl is found in the basement of an abandoned apartment building. She is believed to be between eight-to-eleven years old and has her hands tied behind her back and it turns out she was sexually assaulted and strangled to death before she was beheaded. Since the victim’s head is never recovered and she cannot be identified, she becomes known as the “St. Louis Jane Doe”. Over the years, investigators explore a number of different leads, but they are unable to determine the girl’s identity or figure out who was responsible for killing her. On this week’s episode of “The Path Went Chilly”, we explore one of the most horrific and tragic stories you’ll ever find about the murder of an unidentified decedent, who has also been known by such as names as “Little Jane Doe” and “Precious Hope”.If you have information about this case, please contact the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department at [phone].

Additional Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Jane_Doe

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/54ufmo.html

https://unidentified-awareness.fandom.com/wiki/St._Louis_Jane_Doe_(1983)

“Our Precious Hope: St. Louis’ Little Jane Doe Revisited” Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:29):
So welcome back to the Path Went Chili. I'm Robin. Unfortunately,
Ashley is quite busy tonight, so she is unable to
join us for this series of episodes. It'll just be
Jewels and I. So what I'll be doing is I'll
be sharing the details from original script about the case,
and then Jewels will give off her reactions. So I
guess take it away with the intro Jules.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
February twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three, Saint Louis, Missouri, the
body of an African American girl is found in the
basement of an abandoned apartment building. She's believed to be
between eight and eleven years old and has her hands
tied behind her back, and it turns out she was
sexually assaulted and strangled to death before she was beheaded.

(01:11):
Since the victim's head is never recovered and she cannot
be identified, she becomes known as the Saint Louis Jane Doe.
Over the years, investigators explore a number of different leads,
but they are unable to figure out the girl's identity
or who was responsible for killing her.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
After that, the Path went chilly, So today we're going
to be covering the unsolved nineteen eighty three murder of
a young girl who has never been identified, the Saint
Louis Jane Doe. There are so many tragic cases out
there involving John or Jane does, but this might be
the most horrifying because of the circumstances of how the
victim was murdered. The Saint Louis Jane Doe is an

(01:50):
African American girl estimated to be between eight and eleven
years old, who was discovered inside the dark basement of
a vacant apartment building. Not only was the victim's sexual
assaulted and strangled to death, but the killer went to
the trouble of decapitating her and disposing of her head.
As a result, there have been no facial reconstructions or
composite sketches created for this girl in order to showcase

(02:12):
what she may have looked like. Even though the story
has gotten extensive publicity over the years, no one has
ever come forward to claim or identify the Saint Louis
Jane Doe, which has led to speculation that a killer
may have been a parent or a caregiver. I covered
this case on the Trail Went Cold just over two
years ago shortly after the release of a documentary titled

(02:33):
Our Precious Hope Revisited Saint Louis's Little Jane Doe, directed
by Edrar byrd Sosa. The film is currently available for
streaming on a number of platforms, and not only does
it reveal new details about the case which many people
did not know before, but it has also offered some
clarification on misinformation which has spread over the years. The

(02:53):
documentary did confirm that an active effort is underway to
identify this victim by DNA profiling and Janet genealogy, but
it looks like it's going to be a challenging task,
and following the release of My Trail and Cold episode,
I actually received a complimentary email from ed Rar Bird Sosa,
who is a very nice guy and genuinely passionate about

(03:14):
giving this girl her name back. I should also mention
that the Saint Louis Jane Doe has been referred to
by a number of different names over the years, including
Little Jane Doe, Hope, and Precious Hope, and for the
purpose of humanizing the victim, we're going to be referring
to her as Hope throughout this episode, So Jules were
you familiar with this case before we sat down to

(03:34):
record this episode.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
No, I wasn't familiar with the case, And what really
got me is her age. There's something so heartbreaking about
this tiny little girl who's went between the ages of
like eight and eleven, and there's nobody there to claim her.
Surely somebody has to be missing her, So I can
understand why the authorities were leaning towards this has to

(03:56):
be a caregiver, because how does a child go missing
and not get reported to authorities? And the manner in
which this person chose to kill her is horrendous. And
maybe it was because they wanted to avoid identification by
beheading her, but it is so horrific, and I can
understand Sosa's need or birds need to give her back

(04:20):
her identity and give her that dignity and potentially some
justice in the process.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah. Out of all the cases involving John or Jane,
does that have been heavily discussed over the years on
the internet, I'd say this is definitely one of the
top ones. And we've seen so many of them get
identified to get their names back these past several years.
But somehow the Saint Louis Jane Doe is still unidentified,
even though there is an effort to try to use
genetic genealogy to figure out who she came from. And

(04:47):
of course what's heartbreaking is because they never found her head.
They've never even been able to create a composite sketch
or a face to show what she might have looked like.
So she's pretty much just this nameless girl, and that's
just a horrible way to remember her. So our story
begins in Saint Louis, Missouri, in nineteen eighty three, at
around noon on February the twenty eighth, two men in

(05:09):
their late teens from the neighborhood broke into a boarded up,
three story Victorian apartment building located at fifty six thirty
five Clemens Avenue, which had been vacant for just under
five years. When they went into a dark furnace room
in the basement and lit up a cigarette, the illumination
from their lighter caused them to notice the body of
a young African American girl on the floor. Now, the

(05:30):
official story, which has been spread over the years, is
that these two teens broke into the building in order
to search for a metal pipe to fix their broken
down car, but according to the afore mentioned Our Precious
Hope Revisited documentary, this account is probably inaccurate, as neither
of them owned a car, and they may have actually
been looking for copper and scrap metal. One part of

(05:51):
the story which doesn't often get shared, is that these
two teens lived nearby in the same neighborhood, and a
barbecue is being held at one of the residences that
day with friends and family. The teens did not immediately
report their discovery to police, and actually went back to
the barbecue and told some other kids there about what
they had found. This prompted the kids to head to
the building to take a closer look at the girl's body,

(06:13):
and that's when they discovered that she was missing her head.
Even though some of these kids didn't want to get involved,
at least one of them felt compelled to contact the
Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department aka the SLMPD. When the
authorities arrived at the scene, they discovered that the victim
was lying on her stomach with her hands bound behind
her back with a red and white nylon rope. She

(06:35):
was nude from the waist down and the only item
of clothing that she was wearing was a yellow, long
sleeved V neck sweater which appeared to be newly purchased.
The sweater had blood on it, and the tag had
also been removed. Since the area was rampant with drugs
and prostitution at that time, the police were initially under
the impression that the victim might be an adult sex worker,

(06:56):
but when they turned the body over and noticed that
she did not have breasts, they realized that she was
a pre pubescent girl. It was believed that she was
between eight to eleven years old, and even though her
head was missing, the initial estimates of her height were
between four foot ten and five foot four.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
She was just a baby like that is so young.
To think of what this little girl had to endure
at the hands of somebody who is clearly some type
of predator or if it's a family member. To do
this to a young child, you're a monster. It's absolutely
egregious and disgusting. I can't imagine to steal someone's innocence

(07:35):
like that and to just dump them like their trash
in this abandoned building, which I would assume would be
in an economically depressed area. Given the fact that these
teenagers were trying to break in looking for like copper
wire or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, it was not the best neighborhood, and it's actually
kind of blind luck that they were able to find
her body when they did, because this door was like locked,
this building was locked from the front, and it was
very dark inside, so it was ordinarily not the type
of place where people broke into. So for all we know,
it could have been a long time, perhaps even years
before someone found her body potentially, and by then it

(08:12):
could have been heavily deposed. It would have been even
more difficult to identify her. But I think it was
just luck that these two teens happened to go in there.
But I guess it gives you an impression about what
a bad neighborhood it was that they find a beheaded
body in there, and their initial impression was, we're not
going to tell the police. We're just going to tell
our friends about it because we don't want to get
them involved.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
And this is Baltimore that I'm thinking of. But it
reminds me of The Wire. Do you remember that season
where there was all those bodies in those row houses
and the one cop was like, oh, no, we're not
going to We don't want the stats on this, We
don't want all these murders. Close them back up.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Oh yeah, there was an entire season about that. It
was such a dilapidated neighborhood that the drug dealers realized,
if we kill our victims and put them inside this house,
then they will remain there forever because no one wants
to take the responsibility and nobody's going to go looking
for them. And I think there was even a scene
later on where these neighborhood kids like went in there
on a dare and said, there's a rumor there's a

(09:10):
body in there, let's go look at it. Because it
was just a way of life for them, and it
sounds like this was kind of a similar neighborhood. So
the autopsy would reveal that the victim had likely been
sexually assaulted and her exact cause of death was strangulation.
Her head had been removed with a large blade, possibly
a serrated knife, and green paint was found on the
cop marks on her neck. It was suspected that the

(09:32):
killer had decapitated the girl at another location before placing
her body in the basement. As very little blood was
found at the scene. In fact, there were little streaks
of blood on the wall, which were likely left there
when the perpetrator brushed the body against it while walking
through the basement. Even though the police performed an extensive
search for the girl's head, which included checking through the

(09:53):
local sewer system, it was never recovered. When the Missouri
Botanical Garden performed mold tests on the girl's out daman
and neck and thigh, the estimated that she was killed
approximately forty five days before she was discovered. In spite
of the brutal nature of her murder, there were no
distinct marks or deformities on her body to indicate that
she had suffered long term abuse, and she also had

(10:15):
two coats of crimson red nail polish on each of
her fingers. A pubic hair belonging to a Caucasian male
was found on the victim's right thigh, but it did
not contain enough useful DNA to have evidentiary value. Investigators
have theorized that the hair may not have actually belonged
to the killer, but rather one of the police officers
of the scene, and it wound up on the girl's

(10:36):
body by a cross contamination. Even though we've pointed out
some inconsistencies in the official story about the discovery of
the body, the two teens who found the girl were
extensively questioned and investigated by the authorities and were never
considered to be suspects in her murder. At the time,
the slnpd's homicide unit was led by Captain Leroy Adkins,

(10:57):
who was the first African American head of that unit
in the history of the city, so he took a
special interest in identifying the girl and solving the case.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Okay, let me ask you a question. How likely is
it that the pubicare of one of the police officers
on the scene is just going to randomly appear on
the body through cross contamination.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, we'll talk more about that later on. But one
theory is that it's not like the guy took his
pants off at the scene or something like that and
the hair came off. It's a possible. An alternate explanation
is that he could have gone to the bathroom a
short time before he arrived and a pubic care just
happened to go on the outside of his pants and
then fell off onto the body or something like that.
That's an explanation I've seen pushed forward. I mean, I

(11:39):
don't know how likely it is, but I guess that
could be. And there's also another one about it possibly
coming off a body bag from a previous descendant or
something like that. So there are some alternate explanations for
a pubic haare winding up there that didn't belong to
the killer.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
I suppose that could be true if one doesn't wash
one's hands after using it restroom. But still to think that, like,
you're at this abandoned building, so unless you're peeing outside,
you likely use some type of facility and then got
in your car and drove there. What are the chances
that that puba care is going to linger on your
hand for all of that time and not get deposited

(12:17):
somewhere along the way and then just somehow miraculously make
it onto the victim's body. It just seems like the
probability is so low.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know why they're so like
willing to discount the possibility that it belongs to the killer.
I mean, even if it does, it might not matter because,
like I said, there isn't enough DNA on it, so
it's never had much evideniry value, but it just seems
weird that they're just willing to discount it and come
up with this alternate explanation about it belonging to a
police officer.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
They don't have any evidence to dismiss it or to
include it, but I would think that until you had
something that would be like, Okay, we know for a
fact that this is the killer and this pubacare. Now
that we've tested the DNA and twenty twenty five say
that they did, we know that it doesn't match the killer,
so it likely got there through cross contamination. I understand

(13:07):
eliminating it at that point, but at this point we
just don't know what we don't know about that Pubicare exactly.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
I mean, I think the odds are low because she
was already dead beforehand that I don't think anyone sexually
assaulted her inside the building unless they were in a
necrophilia or something like that. But I guess they have
run every avenue they can, and I guess the Pubicare
has just not led them to any promising leads. So
even though the crime garnered extensive publicity, no one ever

(13:36):
came forward to claim or identify the girl over the
course of the next several months, ads about it were
run in every African American newspaper and magazine in the country,
such as the Saint Louis American, as well as Ebony
and Jet magazines. Investigators checked school records for Saint Louis
and the rest of Missouri, but all black girls between
the ages of eight and eleven who fit the criteria

(13:58):
of the victim could be account for. This led to
speculation that the girl was from out of state, but
even though the SLMPD corresponded with every state police agency,
they did not uncover any missing persons reports for young
girls who are promising match to the Jane Doe. However,
even if the victim was not from Saint Louis, investigator
suspected that a killer may have been familiar with the area,

(14:21):
as the apartment building where her body was dumped was
not close to any major road or thoroughfares. The building
was also not easy to access, as the front entrance
was boarded up, so the perpetrator would have needed to
enter the basement through a door located at the back.
The girl remained in the city Morgue for nine months,
but on December the second a decision was made to

(14:41):
Burrier in a pauper's grave at Washington Park Cemetery, an
historic African American cemetery located in the Berkeley suburb. Since
she could not be identified, the girl became known as
the Saint Louis Jane Doe. She would later earn the
nickname Precious Hope, and even though that's likely not her
real name, we'll be referring to her as Hopes throughout
the rest of this episode rather than Jane Doe, the

(15:04):
girl or the victim. Shortly after hopes burial, a couple
who owned a local business called Schaefer's Monument Company offered
to donate a small headstone for Hope's grave, but the
Saint Louis Medical Examiner's Office thought it might be inappropriate.
When Livingston Community High School, located just over the state
line in Livingston, Illinois, learned about this, they organized a

(15:26):
letter writing campaign to city officials, so the Medical Examiner's
Office finally relented and allowed the headstone to be placed
in the cemetery. It featured the day when Hope's body
was found, as well as the inscription quote the saddened
hearts were healed. Knowing the pain of life is over
and the beauty of the soul revealed. End quote.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
That's really sad, but it's also really beautiful. I love
that she got that proper creditscend off and recognition that
this is Hope buried here. She doesn't need to be
buried in a pauper's grave. And what does the medical
examiner care? Why did they think that it would be
so inappropriate? And like why did it take high school

(16:06):
students to change their minds? You know?

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, I never understand the logic in that. It does
kind of sound like the Saint Louis police and law
enforcement in general was kind of a mess at this time,
and as we're going to talk about later on this episode,
the cemetery where she was buried was also something of
a mess as well, so recovering her body at a
later time would be difficult. But like you said, it
was really nice that she got the inscription on there.

(16:31):
I have seen so many of these stories about unidentified
decedents where the community rallies and like really cares about
these victims and they go out of their way to
give them a proper burial and a headstone, and feel well,
if there's no one else out there who cares for them.
We're going to care for them, and we're at least
going to make sure that she gets the proper respect
in death. And I've actually seen other cases where these

(16:52):
John and Jane does are identified years later and their
family members, once they find out, decide it's okay, we're
not going to take them home where we're from to
bury them. We're going to leave them buried here because
this town or this city took good care of them
and paid them the proper respect by giving them a
grave and a headstone, that we're going to make this
their home and allow them to continue to be buried there.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
I love that the community just embrace little Hope and
wrapped their arms around her little soul and said, you
know what, no one's coming forward, no parents, but this
little girl won't be parentless like we will all be
her parents. We will all step in, will be her siblings,
will be her friends, will be all of those things
that it clearly seems like she didn't have, or that

(17:36):
they weren't permitted to come forward. Say, if it was
siblings and it was a caregiver that did it, maybe
they were told a story about what happened to their sister,
if she was somebody's sister, and maybe if there was
two parents and one did it, that one was able
to silence the other and it was some kind of
conspiracy at that point of silence. There's just so many

(17:57):
different possibilities about who could have done this. But I
love to see a community step up and say that, like,
this person isn't a stranger, this person is now the
US as a collective, our family.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah. I've seen this in a lot of these cases
involving decenans, where a lot of people will go to
their funerals. They just have the mentality, we don't know
who this victim is, but we're going to show that
we care. And it's always kind of moving when they're
actually like people around when they're buried and they have
their funeral, when you realize that no one cared enough
about her in her personal life to come forward and
claim her. Well. Within the next few years, a potential

(18:35):
suspect in Hope's murder would pop up on the radar.
On March the seventh, nineteen eighty five, nineteen year old
Sennetta Ford was stabbed in her chest and throat with
a butcher knife inside her Saint Louis basement apartment before
she was strangled to death. The investigation soon led to
the building's maintenance man, who went by the name Thomas Turner.
The authorities did not yet realize that his real name

(18:57):
was Vernon Brown, and he had previously he served four
years in prison for sexually assaulting a twelve year old
girl in Indianapolis. Brown also had an active arrest warran
in Indiana for robbery and six counts of child molestation,
which is why relocated to Saint Louis and changed his
name to Thomas Turner. While Brown denied any involvement in

(19:18):
Seneta Ford's murder, his wife, Kathy Moore, later told police
that he confessed to the crime and revealed details which
had not been released publicly, such is the fact that
Seneta had been strangled with an electrical cord from a
curling iron. Even though a warrant was issued to arrest
Brown for murder, the charges were soon dropped after Kathy
Moore recanted her story about her husband's confession. In addition,

(19:41):
Missouri law had a statute at that time which prevented
a defended spouse from testifying against them in court. Unfortunately,
over the course of the next year, Brown would commit
habitual sexual assault on his wife's three sons from a
previous marriage, who were aged eleven, nine, and seven. On
October the twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six, Brown was sitting

(20:02):
on his residence's front porch when he noticed a nine
year old African American girl named Janet Perkins walking home
from school. Brown proceeded to lure Janet into his residence,
and even though his three step sons were home, he
ordered them to lock themselves into the rooms while he
took Janet down to the basement. He then proceeded to
strangle Janet to death with a rope, and the three

(20:23):
boys would later claim that they could hear her screaming
through the vents. After Brown placed the girl's body in
two trash bags, he disposed of it inside a dumpster
in an alley behind his house. Well. It wasn't long
before Janet's body was found, and since a witness had
seen her going into Brown's residence, he was immediately questioned
by police. Brown soon made a full confession of the

(20:45):
crime and was charged with first degree murder. After going
on trial on October of nineteen eighty eight, Brown was
convicted of Janet's murder and sentenced to death. Almost immediately thereafter,
he was indicted with Sennetta Ford's murder, and he would
be try, convicted and sens to death for that crime
as well. At one point, Brown was also charged with

(21:06):
the murder of nine year old Kimberly Campbell, who was bound,
sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled to death in Indianapolis in
August of nineteen eighty, but since the crime took place
in a different state and Brown was facing execution in Missouri,
it was ultimately decided not to take him to trial
for killing Kimberly. During his time living in Saint Louis,

(21:26):
Brown resided only a few miles away from the apartment
building where Precious Hope's body was found, and given the
similarities between that crime and the other murders that Brown committed,
he was looked at as a potential suspect. A Saint
Louis police detective named Tom Carroll theorized that Hope might
have been the daughter of one of Brown's previous girlfriends,
and she was too frightened to report the murder to police.

(21:49):
Prior to Brown's execution, Carol attempted to question him about
Hope's murder, but Brown simply replied, quote, I've got nothing
to say to you. When Carroll told Brown that confessed
to Hope's murder could bring closure to her family, Brown
said he did not care about them. Maybe eighteenth, two
thousand and five, Brown was executed by a lethal inchection

(22:10):
at the age of fifty one.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Wow, that was a lot of information, and that was
absolutely vile. I am not a proponent of the death
penalty just because they typically there's so many not typically,
there's many instances where we know they've got it wrong,
or people who are sitting on death row and they're
wrongfully convicted. But if I were to make an exception

(22:36):
for a human being to be executed that goes against
my beliefs, it would be Brown, because this man is
a scourge on humor, was a scourge on humanity to
be able to do those types of vile acts to
children and women and young boys. He truly didn't seem

(22:58):
to discriminate, and he would pre date on anybody that
he saw was vulnerable and that he was able to
isolate them. The fact that he did that to little
Janet Perkins is so horrible, and the trauma that those
three boys who also had been assaulted by Brown that
had been ongoing, that they had to hear her screaming

(23:21):
through the vents, and then to know that her little
body was disposed of in garbage bags and thrown in
a dumpster and then found later. I cannot imagine what
those poor children went through at the hands of Brown,
but it checks out to me that it is possible
that it could have been one of his former partners,
because can you imagine being with a person like that

(23:44):
who's capable of doing things like that that you would
truly be scared for your life, and if you had
other children, you'd be scared for them as well.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, and we saw that with Kathy Moore, where she
could have had him go to prison for his original murder,
but then she recanted her statement because she was so
terrified of him, and then he went on to assault
her boys and murder another girl as well. And yeah,
I agree with you. I'm more nearly not a proponent
of the death penalty, but I definitely did not shed
any tears when Brown was executed, because he was an

(24:16):
absolute monster, and even if he had nothing to do
with Hope's murder, Like, I think he's narcissistic enough that
instead of just simply saying before execution, no, i'dn't harmor
he just decides to say, I've got nothing to say
to you. And that's what a lot of these murderers
are like, where if they're at the point where they've
got nothing left to lose, they still get off on
toying with people. So he couldn't even just deny it

(24:38):
even if he didn't do it. And if he did
murder Hope, of course he's going to take that secret
to his great even though he's already been implicated in
these other murders. So I mean, it's definitely reasonable to
assume he's capable of such an horrific crime like that,
but they just have not found any evidence against him.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
Think what a way to make your name live on
not admitting to this murder, refuting it, not saying yeah,
I indeed did this. That way, you know, is attached
to an unsolved case, and until they solve that, you're
always going to be mentioned in connection with little Hope.
And I'm sure that he knew that. So it's like,

(25:16):
you know, what these other ones that I've been charged with,
and even the murder that he was charged or he
was going to be charged with, but they figured he'd
already got the death penalty twice and it was in
a different state, So why do that he's going to
be put to death Anyways, we know that he's committed
all these murders, it's not a question. But with her
there is a big question mark, And so what a

(25:37):
way to live on kind of inm perpetuity because people
like us are going to be talking about him.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
It's true, it'd be nice when we were able to
forget talking about someone like this, but because he's associated
very loosely with an unsolved cold case, we still have
to debate him and talk about a horrific acts on
this podcast, and unfortunately we'll still have to unless they
actually solve Hope's murder at some point.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Do you know at the time what the population of
Saint Louis was.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
I'm just going to look that up out of curiosity
and thinking it was probably at least in the millions
or so, because it is a fairly large city. Oh,
actually today it's only two hundred and seventy nine thousand,
So back in the eighties it was around four hundred
and fifty thousand.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, I think a lot of people left when I
went to rehab. One of the guys who's he was
from a very affluent family and he lived in like
the suburban part because he said that it used to
be safer in like downtown Saint Louis and stuff, but
he said it was a very, very dangerous. And I
really knew nothing about Saint Louis, but from what he said,

(26:38):
it was just like not somewhere that you wanted to go,
maybe somewhere that at times, you know, people would talk
about Chicago the same way, where there was a lot
of gang violence, or Baltimore, those cities where you go, okay,
like if I'm not familiar with this area and I
don't really know it, like probably don't want to go
walking through random neighborhoods because something could happen.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, I mean, I could see it a good comparison
with Baltimore because I went there thirty years ago just
because I wanted to visit their ballpark and see the
Orioles play. It would probably be the same thing if
I ever went to Saint Louis, I'd want to see
some of their sports teams, but I wouldn't just go
there to visit the city itself because there are some
dangerous parts. So desperate for new leads in this case,

(27:20):
Captain Leroy Adkins, as well as a detective who worked
on the case named Joe Bragoon, agreed to appear on
an episode of the TV show Sightings, which focused on
the paranormal. The episode aired in November of nineteen ninety
four and featured Atkins and Burgoon having a phone conversation
with a Florida based psychic named Noreen Rainier. Reneer claimed

(27:40):
that she specialized in psychometry, where she would hold onto
an item that once belonged to a missing or murdered
victim and quote unquote become that person, allowing her to
have visions from the victim's point of view during the
last moments of their lives. Believe it or not, Adkins
and Bergoon agreed to mail two key pieces of evidence
to Raneer, hope It's yellow sweater, as well as the

(28:01):
nylon rope used to bind her. The Sightings episode then
showed Reneer touching these items and supposedly having visions of
Hope's murder. She expressed her belief that the killer was
a teacher who had once been dishonorably discharged from the military,
and based on Rhineer's description, a composite sketch was created
for him, but unfortunately, the sweater and the rope would

(28:23):
go missing, and this has often been cited as one
of the worst blunders ever committed in a police investigation.
The makers of the Are Precious Hope Revisited documentary reached
out to Narene Rnier, and while she declined to do
an interview, she maintained that she did send the items
back to the SLMPD after the episode was filmed. While

(28:43):
during the documentary, Sergeant Brian McGlynn, a homicide investigator who
is currently working on this case, was interviewed and he
confirmed that the police department did receive the items from
Renier and claimed that there was even a signed postal
evidence slip to prove it, but for reasons on known,
the items somehow went missing from the department's mail room

(29:03):
and have not been seen since.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
How do you know that you're dealing with a case
from the nineteen eighties when you have the police go
ahead and mail a psychic items of evidence and when
they get them back, they don't properly log it into evidence,
and the items disappear. I wish that I like, I
wish I could say that I was surprised, but we've
heard so many different cases that are unsolved that have

(29:28):
elements of psychics and things that happen that are similar
to this.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Oh yeah, Like, if you go on Reddit and you
look for discussions about the worst mistakes and a police investigation,
a lot of people will cite this one. And thankfully
when I watched the documentary, because I always used to
assume it was just some random psychic who phoned them
or something like that, a complete stranger and they mailed
the evidence. But say what you will about Narin and Ranier,
at least she was an established psychic who had worked

(29:54):
on a bunch of police investigations at that point. She
had been featured on Unsolved Mysteries, so they at least
mailed the items to someone who was familiar with this
sort of thing. And everyone just kind of assumed that
the psyche just took the items and never sent them back.
But now it has been clarified that yes, Rainier did
mail them back, but of course, for whatever reason, they
still went missing and It's all the more frustrating because

(30:15):
back then they wouldn't have been thinking about DNA evidence
on the sweater or the rope. But if you were
to find those items today and do the testing, they
might have DNA that belongs to Hope or her killer.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
That's a major slip of our oversight. But that is
one thing about this that I did take note of
is that I recognized the name Noreen Rainier, and it's
probably because she was on other episodes of Unsolved Mysteries.
I couldn't tell you where I knew it from, if
it was from another case, from a TV program, what
it was from, but that definitely stood out to me.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, She's also worked on a very famous missing person's
case from Canada, the nineteen eighty nine disappearance of Kimberly mccandrew,
which took place in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But that's another
one where the investigators have been criticized because they put
too much focus on her and pretty much took all
her so called visions as gospel and like pretty much
used that as their number one source of information. But

(31:10):
of course it didn't lead anywhere and the case is
still unsolved to this day anyway, the information Reynier provided
during the Sightings episode did not seem to be of
much use, and there has been no shortage of false
leads provided by psychics and amateur sluice over the years.
One of the most unusual leads was provided by a
woman named Sharon Nolty, who spent seven years and twenty

(31:31):
three thousand dollars of her own money conducting her own
independent investigation into the case. Nolty came to believe that
Precious Hope was a Chippewa Native American named Shannon Johnson,
and that the killer was a drifter living in southern Texas.
In fact, she even went so far as to collect
DNA samples from this man, as well as a woman
whom she believed was related to Shannon Johnson. Well, DNA

(31:55):
testing showed no genetic connection between the woman and Hope,
so this lead was dismissed, but Nolty still insisted that
she was correct. Here is a quote that Nolty provided
for an article about the case in the December first,
two thousand and four edition of The Riverfront Times. And
I almost cannot believe this is actually real. Quote. I
don't give a rat's ass about the police department. I

(32:17):
think they stink. I told them who she was and
who killed her, and they never did anything with it.
I had a bag full of the killer's pubic care.
Do you know how difficult it is to collect a
bag full of pubycare? End quote?

Speaker 2 (32:30):
I knew you were like, oh lord, okay, well yeah,
I would assume to create to actually gather a bag
full one? Does it require a whole bagfull? I don't
know that was her motivation there, And like, what is
your excuse? Like is this a fetish that you're saying
that you have. Did you sleep with this person over

(32:51):
time and just slowly collected those puber cares one at
a time. I really want to know.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah. Unfortunately you don't have any further contexts on that quote,
but once you heard it, you instantly knew that this
woman's credibility was out the window because they have DNA
showing that it doesn't match this person that you think
is Hope. And you're still saying, Nope, the police is wrong,
science is wrong, and I'm right the woman with a
bag full of pubicare So you should definitely listen to me.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Wow, Yeah, you get people with a really fixed mindset
where they seem to have such tunnel vision. And we
see this with law enforcement all the time too. They
get held bend that this is the suspect, even when
there's evidence to the contrary, and they just push forward
that narrative. And I think it can happen to regular
people too, where you get in your mind that this
is the guy that did it. I'm going to gather

(33:38):
all this pubicare and they are going to see the truth.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, this is such a sad, tragic case. But I
had to include that line to give a little levity
to this story because of how ridiculous it was. So
in two thousand and nine, a decision was made to
exume Hope's body for more advanced forensic testing, but when
the grave was dug up, it turned out that three
different bodies were buried there, and none of them belonged
to her. It seemed apparent that the headstone, which had

(34:04):
been donated for Hope was placed in the wrong spot.
For the past few decades, Washington Park Cemetery had not
been properly maintained, and by this point it was pretty
much in complete disarray thanks to botched burials and sloppy
record keeping. The Saint Louis Medical Examiner's Office stated that
no new exhumations would be authorized for Hope unless someone

(34:25):
could determine the exact spot she was buried. Well. In
twenty thirteen, aerial images from the US Geological Survey were
used to determine the location of Hope's remains. This was
made possible by examining old photographs which had been taken
of Hope's funeral on the day she was buried, as
the photos featured trees and headstones which were still in

(34:46):
the same spot after thirty years. Once Hope's burial location
was pinpointed and a body was exhumed, the medical examiner
was able to determine that it belonged to her, since
there was decapitation at the shoulder level. DNA samples were
extracted from Hope's remains, and some of her bones were
sent to the Smithsonian Institute, the National Center for Missing

(35:07):
and Exploited Children NamUs, and the University of North Texas
for stable isotope analysis, which could possibly help determine where
Hope had lived prior to her murder. Well, it seems
like the different tests yielded different results, as One of
them concluded that Hope may have lived in one of
ten Southeastern states Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee,

(35:32):
North Carolina, or South Carolina. However, another test seemed to
point towards Hope hailing from one of these Midwestern or
mid Atlantic states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, or
West Virginia. Regardless, the one conclusion all these tests seemed
to reach is that Hope did not live in the

(35:52):
Saint Louis area and was unlikely to be from Missouri
or Illinois. In February of twenty fourteen, after the testing
was completed, Hope's remains were reinterred in a new casket
with angels on the corners, and she was redressed in
a pek and white checker dress. A ceremony was held
in which she was laid to rest in Saint Louis's
Cavalry Cemetery in a section called the Garden of Innocence,

(36:16):
where unidentified decedents are buried.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
That's really interesting that like the radiocarbon dating or whatever
or whatever type of isotope tests they did brought about
all of these different states, Like, there's so many different possibilities.
And I'm not American, neither you, but you might be
more familiar with American geography than I am. How far
is Saint Louis from like the Midwestern or mid Atlantic states?

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Uh, they've been fairly close to Indiana at the very least,
Like I think it would just be a little bit
west from the places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and what
not in Wisconsin, like those border like Illinois and Missouri.
So I do find it interesting that they picked out
those specific states, but none of them said Illinois or Missouri,
so it kind of indicated that she could be from

(37:04):
that region, just not from where the spot where she
was found.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, which means that potentially if she was born in
one of those places, but what if she'd only lived
in Missouri or Illinois for the last you know, six
months or something, they wouldn't be able to tell. So
there's certain elements there. And also how close that they
are to those different states. It's like, well, do we

(37:30):
know how accurate they are there? Because we've got two
different tests, two different tests bringing up these different results.
So I don't know. It just brings up more questions
than answers.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Yeah, it just seems pretty broad. And I don't know
if you remember a Patreon mini So we did a
while back about an unidentified murder victim named little Miss
Panasafki who was found in Lake Panasafki in Florida, and
they did some stable isotope analysis of the fillings in
her teeth and they were able to like estimate that
she not only hailed from Europe, but they picked out

(38:02):
a specific fishing village in Greece, like a very out
of the way village, and said there's a good chance
she was a residence there at some point before she
relocated to the United States and was murdered. And I'm
thinking to myself, if you're able to be that specific
with your testing, it's kind of weird that this testing
is so broad and is naming all these different states.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
So do you know, like I'm guessing, So this was
in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen where they did the tests
in this case on Little Hope and do you know
on little Miss Panasovki what the time period was that
they did those tests.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Same time period around twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, because I
think they were just starting to use it in investigations,
and I guess it's more maybe specific in little miss
Panasovski's case, because they were using fillings in her teeth,
whereas we don't have teeth in this particular case. So
I guess maybe if you have teeth or enamels or
something like that, you can get more specific, and they

(38:58):
were more limited with Hope. But I still find it
interesting that we have all these different states, yet there's
certain Missouri. The spot she was found is not where
she was from. So in September of twenty twenty two,
the aforementioned documentary Our Precious Hope Revisited Saint Louis's Little
Jane Doe was finally released. The film's director, ed Arar

(39:19):
Bird Soso, was living in Saint Louis and ten years
old when Hope's body was found, and he vividly remembered
his mother telling him to come inside because little kids'
heads were being cut off. Well near the end of
the documentary, Sergeant Brian McGlenn publicly revealed for the first
time that C. C. Moore, a renowned genetic genealogist who
works for Parabond nonolobs was working on this case, and

(39:42):
he gave the filmmaker's permission to interviewer. Parabon has used
genetic genealogy to resolve dozens of cold cases over the
past few years, and more confirmed. When Hopes DNA was
entered in the database jed Match, they immediately wound up
getting two promising matches. However, both these matches were for
individuals who were born around one hundred years ago and

(40:03):
had passed away. They also happened to be descendants from
former slaves, which can present a challenge for constructing family
trees for African American individuals since records for them were
often not kept during the era of slavery, making documentation
about ancestral lineage difficult to find. Moore did confirm that
she tracked down and spoke to the granddaughter of one

(40:25):
of the two individuals who was a match, but when
this person learned that Moore was working on a law
enforcement investigation involving an unidentified deceited, she told Moore never
to contact her again and immediately removed her relatives DNA
from the ged match database. Moore also spoke to the
daughter of the second individual who was a DNA match

(40:45):
and While she initially agreed to help, the woman soon
broke off all contact with Moore and ghosted her. Regardless,
even though the process will be challenging, Parabond nanolabs will
still continue to work on attempting to find genetic relatives
of Precious Hope and hopes of figuring out her true identity.
But after more than forty years, the identity of the

(41:06):
Saint Louis Jane Doe, as well as the identity of
her killer, continued to remain unsolved mysteries. So I guess
you could say the path went chili.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
That is really interesting that they got those matches for
the two people that had passed away one hundred years
ago and then two living relatives. One of them chose
to put their relatives DNA on JED match, Like that's
a choice and you know that it can be used
to help solve the case. So I find it really
interesting that when they found out that it was for
this unsolved case with the decedent who's a child, and

(41:39):
little Hope is currently like a quote unquote Jane Doe
and they don't know who she is. So the fact
that she recoiled it that and went radio silent and
then the other family member who share the genetic material
also first agreed to help and then decided not to.
I wonder if there's like an inherent trust distrust of

(42:02):
law enforcement at that point in time, or if there's
some relatives who are potentially involved in criminality and they
didn't want to be seen as like a quote unquote snitch,
or if maybe they knew who this little Hope was
and they didn't want somebody who they might have suspected
to be responsible to get in trouble.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, Like, there's so many different possibilities, and just because
they wanted to break off all contact with law enforcement
does not necessarily mean that they know what exactly happened
to Hope or who she is, because, like you said,
it could just be an inherent distrust in law enforcement.
Because it's possible that they originally entered this DNA into
these databases before they started being used in law enforcement investigations,

(42:45):
because that really did become a big thing until around
twenty eighteen or so, and this person may not have
even realized that, oh, they're going into our DNA to
try to solve cold cases. I really want to value
my privacy. I'm going to remove it, and it could
just be someone who who has a very very loose
connection to Hope, who really has no knowledge of her case.

(43:05):
Because I personally know someone one of my listeners who
actually wound up helping solve a cold case because she
had entered her DNA into gen match and was contacted
by law enforcement saying, we're trying to solve this old
homicide from Colorado during the nineteen eighties, and we've got
a genetic match to you. And it turned out that
the killer was some distant cousin of hers who lived

(43:26):
in another state who was very very far removed, like
she had never actually met this cousin, didn't even know
he existed, but because they had a genetic lineage, they
were able to use her DNA to track him down
and solve the case. So you just never know if
your DNA is going to match someone you're related to,
even if they might be very far removed.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Wow, genetic genealogy is so wild and it's solving so
many cases. It's just amazing what they do, like building
out that family tree and then finally finding out who
that person is, who either who they are if they're
John R. Jane Doe or either who they are if
they are the killer. So it's just such a fascinating field,

(44:05):
and I think it's just going to become more and
more commonplace as we move forward and the technology improves.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Exactly, And I know that this case is in good
hands because CC Moore is pretty much the best of
the best when it comes to genetic genealogy and building
family trees. So even though this sounds like more challenging
than your average case, I have the confidence that if
anyone could identify Hope, she can. So getting back to
the subject of DNA profiling and genetic genealogy, I'm sure

(44:35):
you're well aware that this process has led to the
resolution of a lot of unsolved cold cases and the
identification of a few hundred John and Jane does these
past several years, thanks to the work of organizations such
as the DNA Doe Project, Authorham Incorporated, and Pairabond Anolops.
I had constantly seen people ask when one of these
organizations was going to tackle the Saint Louis Jane Doe case,

(44:58):
and it was not until the release of the Our
Precious Hope Revisited documentary when it was officially confirmed that yes,
C C. Moore is working on this case, so we
do know that it's in good hands. We've seen identifications
get made in some pretty high profile cases involving decendents,
and I'd wag sure that Precious Hope is currently one
of the most heavily discussed ones in which the victim

(45:20):
has not yet gotten her name back. It's really not
hard to imagine why the true crime community has such
an attachment to this story, because it's one of the
saddest and most horrific cold cases you'll ever hear about.
At one point, the FBI referred to this crime as
the quote unquote only decapitation in the nation involving someone
so young. It's hard enough to imagine someone being sadistic

(45:43):
enough to behead a little girl, but the fact that
this has also prevented her from being identified these past
four decades makes the whole story even more tragic. There's
not only a vested interest in getting this child her
name back, but also finding out the identity of the
evil monster who did this and ensuring they faced justice
if they are still alive after all this time. Around

(46:05):
the same time our Precious Hope Revisited was released, we
finally saw the identification of what was arguably the most
famous child decended of all time, The Boy and the Box.
As many of you probably know, the Boy in the
Box was a child who was found murdered in Philadelphia
in February of nineteen fifty seven and cannot be identified

(46:25):
for over sixty five years, But in December of twenty
twenty two, it was publicly announced that genetic genealogy had
helped identify the boy as Joseph Augustus Cirelli, who was
four years old at the time of his death. At
this particular point, the authorities know who Joseph's biological family was,
but they're still putting the pieces of the puzzle together

(46:46):
to try and figure out the circumstances of his murder.
For decades, it was theorized that Joseph was killed by
a parent or a caregiver, as that seemed to be
the only explanation for why he was never reported missing
and no one came forward to claim him. However, that
doesn't necessarily mean that Joseph's biological relatives were responsible for
his debt. As hypothetical examples of alternate scenarios, Joseph could

(47:10):
have been conceived during an extra marital affair or adopted
out or given away following his birth, and for all
we know, the same type of situation could have occurred
with Precious Hope.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
Wow, it's so wild. I just can barely wrap my
head around how many cases have been solved. But also
the Boy in the Box such a fascinating case. When
they're solved, it's like, WHOA. It just seems like the
true crime community it's constant, like we're having this constant
influx of these cases, and so I can understand why

(47:43):
so many people are really attached to what will hopefully
be a positive outcome with Hope, where she'll get her
name back, she'll have her identity back, and then hopefully
law enforcement will be able to focus on who the
killer is, because I I think it just seems likely
that she has to be either from somehere far away,

(48:05):
like if she was indeed from somewhere like Florida and
that person drove all the way to Saint Louis to
dispose of her body, which would seem like a very
long drive, then it would be a lot harder to
tie her to an individual. And if there's a missing
child in Florida, they're not looking in Saint Louis, especially
not in nineteen eighty three exactly.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
Yeah, then that's why they've tried to match up Hope
with a lot of other missing children's cases from that
time period, but they've never found a likely candidate to
be her. But yeah, the Boy in the Box, the
timing of it was so good that they identified him
right around the time that this documentary was released, because
if you're in the true crime world, you grew up
hearing about the Boy in the Box for years, and

(48:46):
unlike Precious Hope, they had photographs of this boy put
out in newspapers and on posters all the way back
in nineteen fifty seven, and it just seemed astonishing that
no one came forward to recognize him or identify him,
which is why people speculated that he could would have
been an abuse victim who was a shut in who
was kept from the outside world and then was murdered
by his caregiver. And even though they're still trying to

(49:08):
solve his murder, and I think there's a good chance
that even if they do figure it out, that person
is probably already dead by this point, whereas with Hope's case,
you think that well, at least there's a chance maybe
that if they can find the monster who did this,
you can still see them brought to justice. But considering
how old the boy in the box was, if they
were able to identify him and solve that case, then

(49:29):
there's always there's always a chance that it can happen
to someone like precious Hope.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Well. I think that there is a lot of hope
based on other cases, and knowing that there are family
members out there who were a genetic match means that
there could potentially be more and maybe with the genetic genealogy,
they will be able to build out that family tree
and they will be able to potentially find out who

(49:55):
Hope truly is, give her identity back, and also see
who were her pay parents and where were they from,
and did they report her missing or is it likely
that it was somebody in the family unit that did this.
I think there's a lot of questions to be answered here,
and she is not by the typical standards of what
people call a quote unquote valuable victim, but everybody has

(50:19):
embraced her and everybody has made her the most valuable
victim because little Hope matters. She was a little innocent child,
and she didn't deserve what happened to her. No murder
victim deserves what happened to her. But everyone has come
to embrace her, be it the true crime community or
Saint Louis. For them to just embrace her and to

(50:41):
make her one of their own is such a bright
spot here. And if one believes in the afterlife or
anything like that, then we can hope that she's looking
down and thinking.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Wow, I mattered.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Those people care and no one is going to stop
until they find out who I am and who did
this to me.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Yeah, that does give comfort the idea that in the
afterlife she's seeing people care for even if there was
no one who cared for during the time period she
was alive. So this would be a good time to
bring an end to Part one. Join us next week
as we present part two of our series about the
Saint Louis. Jane Doe Robin, do you.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Want to tell us a little bit about the Trail
Went Cold Patreon?

Speaker 1 (51:23):
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

(51:45):
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 UNSAWD 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

(52:08):
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 2 (52:27):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jules and n Ashy Patreons. So there's early
ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got
our Pathwent 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.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
We'll link them in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or d rate and review is greatly appreciated.
You can email us at the Pathwentchili at gmail dot com.
You can reach us on Twitter the Pathway. So until
next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails
and chili pass call for warm clothing.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy