Chain of Custody & The Kilgore Oil Field Recovery
On the afternoon of October 29, 2006, oilfield service workers inspecting an active pumpjack site located off rural Farm-to-Market Road 2011 near Kilgore in Gregg County, Texas, discovered heavily burned human remains lying adjacent to an oilfield access road.
Gregg County Sheriff's deputies and the Texas Rangers responded immediately. Accelerants had been used to ignite the body, causing third- and fourth-degree thermal burns across the torso and face. Remarkably, a portion of the victim's clothing had escaped incineration, including a distinctive lavender-colored knit sweater, leading investigators and true-crime media to refer to the unidentified victim as "Lavender Doe."
Autopsy & Forensic Pathology
An autopsy performed at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas revealed that the decedent was a young White or Hispanic female, estimated between 17 and 25 years old, measuring 5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 4 inches and weighing approximately 100 to 110 pounds. She possessed reddish-brown or auburn hair.
Forensic pathology established that the victim died of violent homicidal asphyxiation prior to being set on fire. Soot was absent from her trachea and lungs, proving she was deceased before the thermal destruction occurred. Seminal fluid was collected and preserved for future STR and nuclear DNA analysis. She was cataloged in NamUs as UP1405.
The DNA Doe Project Resolution
In 2018, Gregg County Sheriff's Lieutenant Eddie Clark submitted biological samples from Lavender Doe to the DNA Doe Project. Despite severe fire and heat damage, modern extraction protocols yielded high-quality SNP genomic data, which was uploaded to GEDmatch.
Lead genealogists Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick and Dr. Margaret Press identified close family connections in Arkansas and Florida. In January 2019, after thirteen years of anonymous burial in a pauper's grave in Longview, Texas, she was officially identified as 21-year-old Dana Lynn Dodd, who had vanished from Jacksonville, Florida in 2006.