Human beings are not conditioned to react to a gruesome homicide scene. Those who come across bodies during the normal course of life display a wide range of emotion shock, disbelief, confusion, horror, fear, and of course guilt. When I began to focus my career on missing people long ago, what unnerved me most was that a loved one had vanished and family members were left to wonder, to wait, to suffer, not knowing
what happened or where they were. You would think, as I used to, that the discovery of a body resolves a small part of the emotional puzzle surrounding a missing person. But that's not always the reality. So you come upon on the skull, you and your husband. Your husband sees the skull, you walk over to it. What is your first thought? What are you thinking?
We didn't know really what to think.
If you recall at the end of the previous episode, Randy and Linda Grohler happened upon the skull and remains of a young woman just up the road from their Anderson, Missouri home.
I'll tell you what it looked like if somebody had set a skull off in museum's jailp on the ground it was just as shiny as could be, just as bleached out as it all could be.
And were there any clothes or were there any ligatures around the neck or head or body of the.
Skull was detached from the body, and the rib cage was detached from the body.
You know.
The only clothes that was on the body that we found was where the pelvis and legs were in ten shoes it had. She had tennis shoes on. Heclass cable around her neck, but her hands we didn't move anything until after the corner got there. But the hands were tied to the rope looked like clothesline rope.
And how did this make the both of you feel when you it settled into you that you had found a body.
Well, it was disturbing to me, but you know I had been in the martuary business before, so I wasn't too upset. My wife, Linda, she got real upset about it. Matter of fact, she had she had to go to the doctor and get medication to help her sleep at night.
Tell me about that, Linda, what was troubling you?
They thought that she was dumped there and we couldn't help her.
That here is somebody's daughter sister mother, and nobody knows she's there. She's missing.
And the part that bothered me for years was, I somebody did reporter missing, You know, if you got a child and you.
As I listened to the Rollers described their experience, the bindings they mentioned jumped out at me. Although it was a point of contention among law enforcement, one could argue that bindings could have been part of the Dana Stidham crime scene.
It was kind of like a clothesline rope and stuff like that. It was different times.
Finding the skull and remains of a young woman so close to their home had jogged the memory.
For the Rollers.
And then we got to think of this bones in our front, all right, This is the part that really bothers me. Our dog at Siberian Husky had brought part of.
Her home with him.
We thought it was dear bones. We didn't look at it closely, but I think it was what part of her vertebrate we're backbone rhythm, the bottom over?
Is there anything else that you remember?
When the sheriff and the coroner were up there, the corner happened to be Gayl Duncan. At the time. I remember Gail telling me that This is not going to be a problem identifying the body because of the extensive dental work.
That plausible offhand comment about Jane Doe's teeth and her eventual identity will turn out to be the understatement of this case and send law enforcement on a thirty year quest to identify her. Previously on Paper.
Ghosts, he went down there and he took something from a little dead girl, and I didn't like it.
It seems to check all the boxes for a sexual predator going into the store with a hood on their face, standing behind the women, sneaking up behind them in some cases groping them.
But I went back there with him and we saw the skull, and then on further looking we can see the rest of the body.
My name is em William Phelps. I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than forty true crime books. This is season four of Pay for Ghosts the Ozarks.
This road here that we just turned off of would have been US seventy one Highway, So this road here would have been so much busier.
Okay, have heard.
Justice Oscar Tally Road in Anderson, Missouri was a bit confusing for this new englander trudging through the Ozarks in early twenty twenty three, searching for answers in two decades old cold cases. I met Detective Lorie Howard and her partner, Detective Ronda Wise, from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office out at the crime scene.
Hi, how are you, Detective Lorie Howard? How's it going?
You know I might not be the best person to ask.
I have no idea.
You've been busy, huh.
I have been so busy, so busy.
And the word Laurie Howard is one of the most dedicated investigators I have ever had the privilege of calling a friend. She's disciplined, resolute, and laser focused on making sure murder victims have a voice. Detective Howard picked up the Oscar Tally Road Jane Docase about fifteen years ago. Do you think there's possibility it can be solved?
I know it will.
I'm not tooting my horn here, but I'm not out to give up on it, and I have reason to believe that it will be solved.
Oscar Tally is what I would call a backcountry road. There are a lot of these throughout the Ozas, unpaved name streets surrounded by vast forests thickly settled on both sides. Lorie Howard and Ronda Wise work under current McDonald County, Missouri elected Sheriff Rob Evenson. The grit and persistence they display to work a case and stick with it despite
barriers is a skill not all law enforcement possesses. As the years passed after Jane Doe was found, the course of events surrounding this case can only be described as bizarre. After I pulled up to where Jane Doe's remains were found by the grollers, Detective Howard jumped in my vehicle and put me right into the mindset of the killer. She is hunting, all right.
So the working theory is more than likely they would have.
Come from this direction, the direction that we came off of the main highway.
Far off the main highway.
Oh yeah, the whole road looked essentially really really narrow. It's been widened since then. If you go with my theory, he would have come from that side and come out this way and gone out this way. Either way, whether you're a neighbor here or whether you're a neighbor here, this sits in an area that's echoe because there's a park with some water down here, so this truck would have been.
Loud at the time.
I mean, you hear birds, so a really loud, mufflered truck would be heard by all of these people.
There's that mention of a truck again, which figures so prominently in Danis Stidham's case. As we chatted, a man came walking out of the woods toward us. Laurie knew exactly who he was, A guy whose name I have to bleep out, she shouted, calling him by his name, making his way to the vehicle he couldn't hear as we continued talking.
So this guy hay stuff.
People come out here and look, we've been out here a lot at times, and he's just not crazy about it. We have people that think he did it.
There was a Mac truck without a trailer parked nearby.
I'm not one of them, but you know, but there's people that can say that he's had something to do with it because he's a little hinky.
He's a trucker. Truckers are the largest number of serial killers in the country.
They are.
But I'm not sold.
The man was just a few yards from my vehicle.
He's getting ready to probably show you there was an old, abandoned house, creepy as hell, and that's where they would play. But more importantly, what I'm going to show you is going to be this concrete pad which was in front of that garage, which is where she was like.
He stood now at the window on Lori's side and demanded to know what we were doing.
Well, I'm Detective Howard, so it's nice to meet you.
I'm Matthew. Matthew okay, So I explained to him that we.
Were just The guy was cautious and preoccupied with why we were out there, but he also mentioned he might have some information. He said he knew Randy and Linda Grohler very well, that couple up the road who found Jane Doe. We stepped out of the vehicle and stood together as Laurie and the guy started to discuss people in the area they both knew. I gave them the space to speak privately and pulled Detective Ronda Wise aside
for a little chat. What's it about the cold case work that attracts you to it.
I've been saying this a lot in the last couple of days.
It doesn't matter.
Who solves the cold case, as long as it gets solved so that that family can have that closure.
Perfect.
You know, as Ronda and I talked, Laurie walked over with a surprised look on her face. The curious dude she was speaking to apparently had something.
Laurie, we good here.
You think I want you to talk to this man?
Okay.
I had no idea that he had something to offer. But he was here the night that he heard this. He was down the road where the party was taking place. He can validate there was a party. He can validate that the kids said there was a scream. He can validate what happened to me.
Back in nineteen ninety three, kids reported that they heard a female scream on Halloween night, and that's not exactly evidence of a murder, which was why law enforcement back then had not given much weight to the statements. But this new witness, who just appeared as I was at the Jane Doe crime scene with detectives Laurie Howard and Ronda Wise, seemed to corroborate the information. I walked over to the man and asked him to start at the.
Beginning, and I won't use your name.
Okay, Okay, So it's Halloween night and what happens.
A bunch of us kids are just having a party at a house there, and one of the couples left and came started up the hill, heard a scream, came back down, told us a couple guys walked up here. We didn't hear nothing.
After that, And did anybody hear a truck.
Just to see what was going on?
Okay? Okay?
And nobody saw a vehicle leave anything like that.
It had been several minutes, so the truck had probably had already been gone. They heard a scream and it freaked them out, and they went back down because it's dark up here.
A ten year old boy who lived on Oscar Tally RoadHead reported coming across Jane Doe's body on November three, about a month before she was found, closer to that Halloween night date. He told his parents, but they rode it off as a Halloween prank. Then those three additional young witnesses, two boys and a girl at a Halloween party nearby, reported hearing a truck drive down Oscar Tally and stop before hearing a woman's scream and the truck then taking off in a hurry. For Laurie Howard, it
all now made sense. So it was a terrifying scream. Yeah, it wasn't some like they're playing volleyball or something.
It was a it was a shriek.
So that's the second person that has I didn't know existed, and we know that it was around Halloween, which we suppositioned, but he can tell us for sure that it was a Halloween party going on.
According to the official report written on December second, nineteen ninety, Jane Doe was found in high grass twenty feet off Oscar Tally Road near an old Rundown barn. Binder twine, electrical cord, nylon rope, and paracord were used to restrain her. She wore blue jeans and a denim jacket. She was thought to be between twenty and thirty years old. Her upper rib cage was found near the porch of the barn,
dragged there, likely by wild animals. Those bindings were significant and appeared to be important to Jane Doe's killer, maybe even his signature. Here's former Sheriff Don Slessman, who investigated the case in the years after Jane Doe's body was discovered.
See they had a towel wrapped around her head and they had attached that with electrical wire single strand electrical wire with the insulation on it. That don't make sense in poachords just a much crazy.
And was she hogtie hands and.
Feet, a towel around her head.
Yeah, after a towel around.
Her head, around her face as well, or just.
Her head her face so she couldn't finally see.
Yeah, that's interesting.
With the electrical cord, the bendable electrical cord with the.
Copper in it, right, Yeah, the solid copper center and then it had the good black insulation you know, like you were a house with. But it looked like they just a grab player they could and tie her up with it. M four five different things. And the para cord you know back in those days paara cord is something not everybody.
Had unless you were in the military.
Yeah.
For investigators in the case, those very particular bindings at the gene Do crime scene brought to mind one particular serial killer of record, Dennis Rader, self proclaimed to bind, torture, kill his victims. You might also know him as B. T. K. In early twenty twenty three, detective Laurie Howard went out to speak with Rader the first of many visits specifically about Jane Doe. In fact, the night before I met with Ronda and Laurie at Jane Doe's crime scene, they
brought btk's daughter, Kerry Rawson and interviewed him again. The Sheriff's office in Pahuska, Oklahoma had created a task force looking into the forty seven year old cold case murder of Cynthia don Kinney and additional cold cases, including Detective Howard's Jane Doe. The sheriff was kind of stuck on linking BTK Laurie's oscar tally Jane Doe. I sent some frustration from Laurie and Ronda not to mention disagreement with where Sheriff Eddie Verdon of Osage County was with BTK
and Jane Doe. Ronda and Laurie saw no evidence connecting BTK directly to their Jane Doe, and the more they spoke to Rader about it, the more they felt Osage County was only interested in closing cases, not solving murders, and BTK seemed like as good a scapegoat as any. Still, it didn't mean that Detective Howard wasn't looking at Raider as a serious suspect in Jane Doe's case.
Early on, I would have been remiss if I had not said I have to see Dennis Raider aka BTK because of the bindings. They're massive, it's overkill. It's obviously something that's important to the crime.
How many different bindings are we talking about? How many different types of twine attire.
Six and eight and essentially you're gonna have coax cable, You're gonna have parachute cord, nylon cord, which is like a camping type of cord, raided rope. We call this yellow cord that we're looking at here. That would be like a tree trimmer type of cord. You also have what we refer to as baling twine. It's a type of sisle twine that you might see in hay bails.
All of that was used on her.
All of it was used on both for our wrists and her feet and then tied together with a shoelace.
Well, that's pretty significant. I think it is.
Significant, and BTK thought it was significant. He's meticulous.
That is not meticulous.
That is not meticulous.
That's very unorganized.
This would be indicative of somebody who tighter left her, came back tighter, lefter came back.
Possibly for quite.
A while, I wondered what BTK thought about all this new attention directed at him.
He was very anxious to see his name plastered all over the media again. He said, I don't have very much longer to live, and he said I can see the headlines now BTK gives last confession and all of this kind of thing.
Wow.
So what I heard was BTK could not yet be ruled out of Oscar Tally Jane Doe's murder.
What I would say about that is, I do believe wholeheartedly that there are other victims in Kansas, and more than likely parts of Oklahoma, you know that are close to Kansas. But really that was his thomping grounds. I can put him in Missouri, I can put him in Southwest Missouri. But what I don't think he was ever alone there. I believe that every time he came to Southwest Missouri he was with his family and it was as a fishing trip.
I had heard BTK was very ill, so I asked Laurie about it.
I mean, he was animated and the person that I saw when they wheeled him in, because he's now in a wheelchair. He has scoliosis, he's doubled over, he doesn't walk well. Yes, cellulitis in both legs. He's got kind of an ashen appearance. And by his own account, he said, I probably won't live that much longer.
The Oscar tally Jane doe murder felt somewhat disorganized, not to mention outside btk's comfort zone of a confined space such as a house. Plus, if we're comparing Jane Doe's murder with Dana Stidhams as potentially being linked, BTK could mostly be excluded from Dana's case based on how she went missing, the multiple sightings of her after, and where she was found. So what did BTK have to say about Jane Doe's case specifically?
And so when I would put, you know, his work in front of him, I'll say it was a code, and I was asking him about his own code. He would become very animated and excited. He'd go, oh, look at that, that's mine, you know, And we'd go over what the code meant and what he wrote and how he wrote it, and you know, how the codes were written out. He was very forthcoming on all of his work.
And then when we would, I would slide over some of his journal entries that had projects, his different projects and things.
BTK was known to use the word project for his murders, and.
I would say, you know, hey, what about this, and hey, tell me about it. He had no problems talking about the ten that he'd already killed, and even some of the journal entries that weren't that we know of, he
would explain them. So every time I would put a piece of paper in front him, he was overjoyed that I had his work, and I had one project in particular that I had mentioned to him, and you know, he was just a totally different person, and he said, nobody's ever asked me about that, and he was very excited about it, which leads me to believe that's probably a potential victim.
Laurie then showed BTK a photo of the bindings used on Jane Doe.
No animation, nothing. He literally almost had a look of disgust on his face, and it was what he said was that's overkill. I don't know why anybody would do that. So it was almost like he had a lack of respect for the work that he was looking at.
I cannot undersell the incredible amount of bindings found at this crime scene, but it's the parachord and ropes that most interested me at that time. Would have been very hard to find and purchase if you were not in the military. Jack Lenny, the new suspect and Dani's case I mentioned in the last episode, had done a long
stint in the military. He also lived in between Bellavista, Arkansas, and Anderson, Missouri, and was known to come up into Anderson at times, and he drove a truck with the discovery of Jane Doe not far from the Danastidham crime scene in Bella Vista. The BCSO took notice. By then, the BCSO had latched onto the guy I'm calling Jack Lenny.
Here's Lieutenant Hunter Petray, who begins by explaining why the bcso's case against their chief suspect, Mike McMillan went stagnant and the focus turned to Lenny.
Part of the problems physical evidence DNA witnesses. You know, you have to realize in law enforcement that sometimes you can arrest people and you think your case looks good, but you have to also think about the prosecutor's office. They have to be able to get a jury to convict somebody. So you don't just want to arrest somebody if you don't think the case is good and you don't think that the case is going to make it
through prosecution. You know, from everything, there's just not enough at this point in time to.
Make an arrest.
And it's complicated because there are other people associated with this case that are good for it as well, like as far when I say good for it, I mean as far as their history and their sexually harassing people.
And I bleeped it out, but Hunter portray mentioned Lenny by his real name and also made a valid point regarding Lenny's behaviors around women. Let's call them the suspects because I'm not going to name him. I'm gonna knock on his door Friday, but I'm not going to name him unless he talks to me. Okay, but jeez, that fucker looks like I mean.
You know, we talked early on about a little bit of victimology, but you know, you also have to think about suspectology going back and looking at his history. He just made comments at Walmart at other places of.
Employment to females.
So I'm talking sexual advances and sexual harassment, and he would come into Phillips there more Dana worked and other females that work there and make those comments to them.
This type of misogynistic criminal treatment of women was common and sadly normalized back in the eighties and nineties. Sexual harassment, cat calling, demoralizing and abusive as it was, was barely frowned upon back then. But what Hunter Portray tells me next Pruce, the sexual harassment Lenny had been allowed to get away with was next level.
There was also a female in Bentonville and she was actually driving to work and he got in behind her and almost ran her off the road and followed her all the way up to the parking lot there at Phillips where she ran inside, and she pretty much penned it as that was.
You know, he made comments when.
He was interviewed as far as was it possible that he may have stopped Dana, Well, maybe you know she had a flat tire or something like that, which again circumstantial, but we know that Dana had a low tire. He also made comments of somebody had a seat belt or something that was hanging out the door or something. He would just stop people and not that he just would, but that he had in the past stopped.
People for things.
He's one of those guys that, you know, by his own admission, would could talk to anybody. He kind of played it off as far as comments that they were harmless that I just you know, I think he made one comment to a girl, had she ever been eight? Which has sexual you know in the windows there, but he referred to it as well. She just took it wrong. I was talking about her age, you know, comments like that.
Another thing we weren't aware of or knew much about in the eighties was gaslighting. Didn't he show up at a store once in a ski mask?
He showed up outside and made a comment, but he was wearing like a ski mask, and they asked him about that, and he says, yeah, you know, if it's cold outside and sometimes I wear a ski mask. But it's not like I was trying to rob anybody or anything like that.
Let's talk about what he drove at the time. He drove a station wagon and a truck, right.
A few different vehicles, you know, And he was kind of looked at initially because he worked.
For the company Lieutenant Petray Mentions here conducted work all over Bella Vista and up toward the Missouri border where Jane Doe was discovered. Lenny, in his forties, then living alone, traveled all over those areas. And I should know this was at a time when Dana Stidham worked at Phillips. You see, Lenny knew her from going into that store for breakfast and lunch nearly every day.
They did find some maps in his vehicle, but yeah, he would have known the area like good because they worked there.
Those maps, I might add, were marked with a pen in areas where Dana was seen during the time she was missing.
And he was an army guy too, right, the military.
Yeah, And in fact, I think even when he was doing some stuff, he would still do some weekend stuff with the military.
Sheriff Don told me the other day, he said, yeah, he went down went down to Panami. Yeah, track that Panama allegation included Lenny beating a sex worker. Do you think Dana's case is connected to those cases?
Well, I can't rule it out.
And here's why I say that is, so you have Dana. In summer of eighty nine, we had another case that we call a bone woman, which we've now identified. Oh, you have Yeah, that was in February of ninety. There was another individual first part of ninety that was just a couple of miles away from where Dana was found, off that same road. And then of course you had the one just across the line there in McDonald County. All of this stuff within a year, like four homicides
within a one year period. Now, bone woman, we've been able to identify and we pretty much we've closed it out. We have a suspect, but the suspect's dead. We're pretty sure that he did it, so we've closed that case out. Don't think it's connected to the others. But when you get that many homicides in that short of a period, and also within that condensed area, you can't rule it out.
I asked about any similarities the BCSO found in Dana's and Jane Doe's cases and if they considered the bindings important within that scope.
Yeah, she was bound for certain.
For sure.
We can't say that Dana was. We've got some red twine, that's all we got. Possibly maybe, but you know, the crime lab, the Emmy's office couldn't get any connection that that stuff had.
Been used as any type of ligature or anything, So maybe I don't know.
You know, when you start talking about Dana's case and when you start looking at victimology, you know, Dana, you look at low, moderate, high risk. To me, when I look at this case and put everything together, Dana is or was high low to modern risk. And I say that just because of the lifestyle. But the lifestyle was that of a teenager that runs around. Yeah, they party at times, you know, they drink at times, But by no means was her risk what I would consider high risk.
When you start talking about high risk, you start talking about prostitutes.
So when you look at.
Dana, I don't see that same similarity.
Remember Brandon Howard, the journalist you've heard in previous episodes. He had gotten hold of some information about one of Lenny's ex wives and eventually wound up speaking to her.
I remember her bringing up the fact they never found Dana's purse. That was brought up unprompted, which stood out to me because a year or so later she mentions that this suspect might have had female purses at his mother's house.
His ex wife insinuated that he had a fetish for purses and he collected them. If you recall, although the contents of Dana's purse were found, her large, unique denim bag was not.
She also mentions that they met hitchhiking in the early eighties and that they struck up a relationship. That's pretty much it that She tells Binton County, Well, not only did they meet hitchhiking, but he made sexual advances fairly quickly in the vehicle.
Linny's ex wife went on to say she knows her ex husband killed Dana, but doesn't think there is any way for law enforcement to prove it. She mentioned finding blood in a station wagon they owned, and remembered him cleaning it and throwing his clothes away afterward. The way she put it, he covered his ass when it came to Dana. But get this, she was also there on the Lenny flunked a polygraph and when he came out of the room quote, he had a look on his
face like he knew he was caught. The oscar Talie Jane Doe took on a different name not long after her remains were discovered. It was clear early on that identifying Jane Doe was going to take time and technology, if it was even possible. So clear in fact, a detective said in passing one day, only by the grace of God, will you identify her? From that moment on, she became Grace Doe, which is an important moment in
this case. The name Jane Doe is such a common reference that it fails to conjure emotion or personalize in an unidentified murder victim. Jane Doe suggests a more societal need to help. But place another name in front of
Doe and suddenly there's an emotional connection. Based on the state of decomposition, the only option to identify her was to send dental X rays in for comparison, considering there were several missing girls in the area fitting her general description, in particular twenty one year old Patricia Ann Smith from Glencoe, Oklahoma, and thirty four year old Trevor Ann Castile from Springfield, Missouri. Within two weeks, both tests came back negative, no match.
Not knowing the identity of Grace Doe made finding her killer that much more difficult, and, as Detective Lorie Howard explains, when she came aboard in two thousand and seven, she started literally from scratch without a body.
Couldn't find her. I couldn't find the evidence. I couldn't find skeletal remains. I didn't have a report, so essentially I still just had a story. Years later, driving people absolutely crazy, I called the Emmy's office.
I called Columbia. I made various trips to North Carolina. I went all over the place, and then one day.
I got a phone call from the Emmy's office in Colombia.
And she said, Okay, I found her.
So I immediately made a trip back up to Columbia, Murray and I retreat her skeletal remains.
The first goal was to get a facial reconstruction done so they had some idea of what she might have looked like. This would also allow the Sheriff's department to reach out publicly. While I was in Missouri, I met with Sheriff Rob Evenson from the McDonald County Sheriff's Office. Grace Stowe's murder is Evenson's case.
And when she's found, what happens. What was the most difficult thing about it?
The most difficult thing about it, this goes on for nearly thirty years, was to get an identification of who the remains belonged or who.
She was, So you have a young woman her exact age a guess found off the side of a secluded backcountry road with houses and farms spread sporadically all over the place. Nobody knows who she is. There are no missing person reports linked to her, and she had been out in the elements for about two.
Months, and so she went nearly thirty years without having a name to go with those remains.
So it's hard to work a case if you're in an investigator when you don't have an ID.
And my previous employment identity detective for about nine years, so I've worked a fair number of homicides, and of course that is the first thing besides your immediate crime scene, that's the first thing that you need to do is get your victim identified. Your victimology usually leads you to your suspects and it leads you to the solution of the case.
Okay, so her case goes cold because they can't identify her. So there's really nothing you can do, right, I mean, you can send DNA out, but at the time DNA is in its infancy.
That's correct. Of course, technology has changed so much over the most recent few years, so new opportunities, new tools every year, things get better and better with DNA technology. Of course, Laurie worked on this in her off time, in her downtime when she wasn't working on something else, and just kept trying and kept trying, and kept try ryan, and eventually she was able to get with somebody with a laboratory that was able to extract that DNA.
Extracting DNA from advanced decomposed remains is not as simple as taking a hair or tissue sample and sending it off to the lab for a profile. It's a complicated scientific process with many different variables involved, chief among them the funding to get the DNA to a place where it's scientifically possible to even create a profile. Here's Lorie Howard again.
I needed to get DNA in the system, and that was actually harder than it sounds.
What I had was a fingernail. I had some hair.
So I was talking to North Texas Health and Human Sciences in Texas and I was pretty much begging them to take a fingernail and they said, you know, I don't think I don't think it's going to work. It doesn't mean our protocol speak. They're funded, and how they're funded sometimes requires them to have a particular way of receiving evidence. But they eventually said, okay, let's just see if we can get some mitochondrial DNA, and I sent
them part of a fingernail. The mitochondrial DNA went into the system but wasn't very helpful.
Of course, McDonald County's goal was to submit Gracetow's DNA to all the ancestry genealogical forensic databases, with the hope that someone with a connection to Grace was in one of those databases.
I kept saying, can you please go back and look and see if you have a Janeo? And they just repeatedly said, no, I don't think we have anything that meets what you're giving us. It was a matter of figuring out what my best source of DNA might be, and ultimately I took her mandible and I sat one evening and extracted her teeth because I knew the molars would probably be my best source.
Now she had really good teeth. She did, she did, and what did that tell you?
I spoke to the forensick orthodonist and he basically said, this woman was well cared for. But that was kind of a dichotomy for people that aren't in the system are not reported as a missing person. So I had a hard time figuring out she was either loved and had a good life and was well taken care of, versus she's not in the system, nobody's recorded or missing.
Is she a runaway? So it tells you a lot about the care generally speaking, but.
In her case that that wasn't the case because she actually.
Grew up in foster care.
Another major hurdle, gray Stow had been bounced from home to home. None of these families would have a blood DNA connection to her. That other possibility of an expensive facial reconstruc dirouction gnawed at Lorie. She needed to know what this woman might have looked like, even more importantly, getting that image out onto social media and the Internet to see if anyone recognized her.
So ultimately what happened is I I asked Victoria Livewood Forensic Reconstruction, it's out of Canada, to help me. And I was very upfront and said I can't pay you. I'm asking you for a lot and I really need it. And Victoria was gracious and the best person to work with, and she said I'll do it. But then the problem became you can't just ship a skeletal remains over the border. So I ran up against an I how am I
going to do this? And so I called our local hospital in Neoshio, Missouri, and I spoke with some on the board and I said, I'm about to ask you something and I don't want you to tell me no. And he said, oh, dear, and he said okay. And I said, I really want to bring a skull and mandible into you of a deceased person, a homicide victim, and I'm asking you to take MRI an MRI photos you know of the skull and mandible and give me some images for free.
And he said, oh, oh, okay, I see.
And I said, please, I have no funds, I'm working with very limited funds, but I have.
To do this.
And so he said, if you will bring her in in the middle of the night, you know, midnight till one o'clock, in a box covered, I don't want any anybody to touch this, I don't want to know you're here.
Essentially, just do what you have to do and I'll set it up.
And he did.
And so what I didn't know at the time was that's never been done before.
They wound up using over three hundred images out of what were hundreds of thousands.
And then I sent them, of course digitally to Canada, and she had never worked that way either, so it took a long time. She said, what do you think the color of the eyes, the hair. We went back and forth for a really long time. Clothing, and to Victoria's credit, she said, this was the eighties, tell me what this jean jacket looked like. She searched and found the identical clothing for the most part that she was wearing,
and for I'm going to say probably two years. We went back and forth with this process, and true to form, one day I come in and I open up and I'm looking at my emails, and it says, Laurie met Grace and there she was, there, her Grace.
And so what did she look like to you when you saw that? And then she who was she?
She looked exactly like I thought she would look like. I didn't know her, but Yana knew her, and she looked exactly like what I thought she would look like. And I just knew this was really who she is.
And I was so comfortable with it that I immediately start calling media and said, hey, I want her everywhere.
The reconstruction by Victoria Linwood, which is available online with a quick Google search, depicts a woman with brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. She appears to be in her late twenties early thirties.
Now when does she get identified?
The answer to that is forensic genealogy.
Submitting Grace's DNA into the forensic genealogy databases and thus paying for it fell on Sheriff Rob Evenson's office.
Well, we have to give credit to Mike Hall. Mike was the former sheriff and he was sheriff until the end of twenty twenty. And while he was in office, he did keep Grace's case alive and he was able to get hooked up with a lab that where he was able to submit her DNA profile and this lab was able to do some of this forensic genealogy and came up with a possible familial match.
The company involved, Oathram, was able to extract DNA from Grace Doe's remains and more significantly, create a profile that was September twenty twenty. By January twenty twenty one, Oathram called the McDonald County Sheriff's office. They had a match. Grace Doe is Shawna Garber, and yet identifying Shauna produced an entire new set of difficulties because though they had a name, when Shauna was in her early teens, she disappeared from any public record. She simply had no history.
What's more, the life Shauna ran from and the one she ran toward turned out to complicate Detective Laurie Howard's murder investigation even further.
I think it was KU Medcenter. At first she was in the hospital near to Pete. I think it was to Peka, and then she was transferred to the KU Medcenter. Was she sick, No, she was burned.
How was she burned?
Our mother Ford lighting fluid on her.
And lit a match.
If you're enjoying Paper Ghosts, check out my other podcasts, Crossing the Line with m William Phelps and White Eagle wherever you get your favorite shows. Coming up next on Paper Ghosts.
Well, first, he chose his own moniker, Find them, torture them, kill them.
Bet.
She was removed from several foster homes because our mother would interfere, to the point she even threatened to kill one foster family's kids. Our mother was an evil, vindictive spawn Accoult.
I just remember being in the basement of this individual's house and there had to been like over one hundred spools of different chords.
It just was pretty ominous.
Paper Ghost Season four is written and executive produced by me and William Phelps. Script consulting by Rose Baci, sound design by Matt Russell, executive production by Catherine Law, and audio editing and mixing by Brandon Dicker Takaboom Productions. The series theme and four four to two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Won.