On September 1, 1974, seventeen-year-old Linda Pagano vanished from her stepfather's apartment in Akron, Ohio, following an argument. Five months later, on February 5, 1975, two boys walking along the Rocky River Parkway in Mill Stream Run Reservation in Strongsville, Cuyahoga County, discovered a partial human skull. Because the skull was logged as an unidentified John Doe in municipal coroner archives, Linda Pagano remained listed as an active missing teenager for more than four decades.
The Misclassified Decedent & The 42-Year Divide
In 1975, Cuyahoga County coroner technicians mistakenly recorded the partial skull as belonging to an unidentified young male. The skeletal element was placed into an anatomical storage vault and sat without modern examination for decades.
Meanwhile, thirty miles south in Summit County, Akron Police detectives treated Linda Pagano's disappearance as an unresolved missing person case. Her family never stopped searching, placing commemorative announcements in local newspapers year after year. The jurisdictional boundary between Summit and Cuyahoga counties—combined with the erroneous sex classification—prevented cross-comparison.
| Date / Period | Jurisdiction / Entity | Forensic Event & Chain-of-Custody Record |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 1, 1974 | Akron, Summit Co., OH | Seventeen-year-old Linda Pagano disappears following family dispute. |
| Feb 5, 1975 | Strongsville, Cuyahoga Co. | Partial skull found in parkway; erroneously logged as unidentified male. |
| 2014 | Cuyahoga Co. Medical Examiner | College student intern Christina Scates discovers un-indexed skull record in files. |
| 2016 | CCMEO / NamUs | Skull re-examined; determined to be female; entered into NamUs as UP2212. |
| July 2018 | Ohio BCI / DNA Doe Project | Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA match confirms skull is Linda Pagano; family notified. |