Chain of Custody & Physical Discovery
On the night of Friday, May 4, 1984, three young men driving along Old Town Road—a secluded gravel road located off U.S. Route 14 approximately two miles outside Westby in rural Vernon County, Wisconsin—stopped near an illegal dumping turnout. Beneath brush and cedar boughs at the tree line, they observed a clothed human body lying face down on a steep embankment.
Deputies from the Vernon County Sheriff's Department and agents from the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) arrived within thirty minutes, establishing a perimeter. The victim had been placed at the site within 24 to 48 hours of discovery. Weather conditions had preserved the body with minimal postmortem decomposition, but investigators immediately noted severe, deliberate postmortem mutilation designed to defeat identification.
Autopsy Findings & Forensic Pathological Examination
The autopsy was performed by forensic pathologists in Madison, Wisconsin. The victim was an adult White female, estimated between 50 and 65 years of age, measuring approximately 5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 6 inches in height and weighing approximately 150 pounds. She possessed graying brown hair styled in a short perm and had lost all her natural teeth, wearing a full upper denture marked with dental laboratory code numbers that were traced across regional Midwestern dental supply networks without finding a match.
The cause of death was determined to be massive blunt force head trauma. Pathologists identified extensive skull fractures caused by multiple crushing blows with a heavy, blunt object, fracturing the facial skeleton, nasal bridge, and occipital bone. Most critically, both of the victim's hands had been severed at the wrists with surgical or butchery precision using a clean, heavy blade. The hands were completely removed from the scene and never recovered, preventing traditional inked ten-print fingerprint card classification against state and FBI criminal databases.
Attire & Physical Evidence Recovered
Despite the total removal of her hands and facial destruction, the victim was fully dressed in utilitarian clothing consistent with a working-class Midwestern resident:
- Outerwear: A heavy men's-style blue-and-black plaid flannel lumberjack jacket with snap closures.
- Top: A tan or light-yellow collared knit turtleneck sweater beneath a button-down blouse.
- Pants: Blue polyester slacks with an elastic waistband.
- Footwear: Brown leather slip-on shoes with low heels and white socks.
- Eyeglasses: Distinctive tortoiseshell-framed prescription reading glasses found pinned near the victim's collar.
Exhumation & Advanced Genomic Sequencing
In August 2018, Vernon County Sheriff John Spears and cold case investigators exhumed Jane Doe's casket from the Viroqua Cemetery, where she had been laid to rest by community members who purchased her gravestone marked "Jane Doe - Died May 4, 1984." Bone samples were transferred to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and subsequently to independent forensic genomics laboratories for whole-genome SNP microarray extraction. The case is actively supported by the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the DNA Doe Project.