Listverse: No Longer a Mystery Part One

mysteries and true crime. Back in April of twenty thirteen, I wrote an article titled ten Mysterious Cases Involving Unidentified People, where I talked about a bunch of John and Jane Does who at the time were unidentified. Well, as you probably know, in the past several years, we've seen a rise of genetic genealogy where a lot of these victims

have finally got their identities back. And for a long time they had actually identified nine out of the ten victims from my original list, and there was only one hold out. But just very recently they finally identified the tenth entry on the list. So officially all ten of the victims on this list have officially been identified and

got their names back. So Jules and I came up with the idea that we should do a series of episodes about this where I go over the list each case one by one, I share all the details about it, and then I'll reveal the details about how they eventually came to be identified. So I'll be reading the writeup of each case and then Jewles and Ashley will give your thoughts, and then I will share the details of how they were identified, and then they will do the

same thing again. Do you have any thoughts you want to give before we start?

the state of Arkansas on creative writing projects. And helping little ones fall back in love with reading.

their own genre to pull from. It was so moving and inspiring.

and are looking forward to hearing your thoughts. So I'll start going down the list now, number ten, little miss Panasafki. And here is the original write up that I did for list fers on February the nineteenth nineteen seventy one in Sumter County, Florida, the decomposed body of a young woman was discovered beneath the bridge in Lake Panasafki. She was believed to be in her early twenties and had been strangled to death with a man's belt, which was

still wrapped around her throat. She had no identification, and since no one ever came forward to claim her body, she was nicknamed little Miss Panasafki and laid to rest in the area. Years later, her body was zoomed in an attempt to identify her. One of the most curious discoveries they made was that a form of surgery called the Watson Jones technique had been performed on her ankle.

She had extensive dental work, and a recent study of the lead isotopes in her teeth has led to the theory that she may have been a residence of Labriy on a fishing port near Athens, Greece. It is also believed that she had given birth to a child that one point. In spite of these very distinct clues, her real identity has yet to be uncovered.

And so in these cases where there is a host of evidence, and then to know that this was in the seventies and it wasn't even she wasn't even identified until a couple of weeks ago, it really blows my mind because we've had decades to look back at some very grounded evidence to one just say, who is little

miss Panasovski. So I'm very interested to hear more. I briefly remember doing this Patreon, but I would love to hear more about what happened to this young lady and what her remains were eventually identified.

them to identify her for a long long time. And what was interesting is that one of the reasons I felt there was a hold up and identification is because of this theory that she was originally from Greece, because Europe does not have the same laws for genetic genealogy, and for a while, they theorized that she might have been an exchange student who was sent over to the United States to work and probably had no living relatives there, which meant that even if you entered her DNA into

a genealogy system in North America, it might not match any relatives in Europe. But surprisingly the isotope tests analysis that they performed which made them think that she was from Greece, it turns out it was completely wrong, because it was announced that she had been originally born in

Maine and was an American citizen. They finally made the announcement on October twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, the Sumter County Sheriff's Office announced that little miss Panasofki had been identified as Marine Minor Rowan, who went by the nickname Cookie, which is how they referred to her and I like

I said. She was originally born in Maine and had been living in Florida at the time of her disappearance with her husband, Charles Emery Rowan, who went by the name Henry, as well as her two children, so they were at least right at that part that she had

given birth to a child at one point. But it turned out that because of the embalming fluid they had used in her body, that it probably affected the isotope testing and that's why it had this wrong false positive, making everyone believe that she was from this fishing village in Greece. And it turned out that they didn't actually have a full DNA profile for because she had been buried for so many years the evidence had deteriorated, so

they actually identified her old school with fingerprints. It turned out that she had actually been arrested at one point. I think for shoplifting, but because she was originally discovered in the nineteen seventies when technology wasn't all that great,

they weren't able to make a match. But in recent years they had done this updated nash Old fingerprint database with all these digital copies of old fingerprints from arrest records which had been entered into the system, and they wound up trying little miss Panasofki's prints entered them into the system, and it wound up being matched to Marine Cookie Rowan, who had been arrested shortly before her murder, and that's how they were able to finally identify her.

formally declare him as a suspect. It's still an act of Homa side investigation. And I haven't heard anything from the two children yet. I think they've been staying out there the spotlight thus far, so I have no idea how they reacted when their mother went missing. I have to wonder perhaps if maybe Emory just told them that she ran away or something like that, and they had no idea that she was dead until very recently.

and in recent years they identified her. And of course she was in a bad marriage and her estranged husband pretty much never reported or missing, and even though he died several years ago and will never be charged by the they did a new investigation and pretty much concluded that, yeah, all the evidence points towards her husband having been the killers, so we're closing the investigation and are confident that he

was the one who was responsible. So I have to wonder if upon further investigation, they're going to do the same thing with Emery Rowan, and that even though he's deceased, they're going to say, yeah, we're pretty confident that he murdered Cookie and we can close the investigation.

his kids. So there's a woman who I maybe don't like, but she helps me raise my children. To not report her sends off huge red flags. Almost screams like I wanted her gone so that I don't have to fight for my kids. I don't have to share my kids, I don't have to give her money. And so that's a very very very strong probability that he had something to do with it because he didn't report it.

to their mother. So and of course, back in the seventies, if there was no direct evidence of foul play, it was sometimes really hard to file a missing person's report, And because her family lived in Maine at the time and she was murdered in Florida, I'm sure there were a whole bunch of jurisdictional issues that prevented them from reporting or missing as well.

So one more thing I wanted to mention is that I became familiar with this case when it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries back in the early nineteen nineties. And I have to give it a lot of credit to the Sumter County sheriff at that time, his name was Jamie Adams, because she had pretty much been forgotten about after her body was found. She was buried in a

pauper's grave. But then when Jamie Adams was elected Sumter County Sheriff, he was looking through the old files read about little miss Panasofki and he actually said during his Unsold Mysteries interview, as a daddy and a granddaddy myself, I couldn't stand the idea of this young woman having a granddaddy or daddy who didn't know where she was.

So he took the initiative to exhume her after twenty years, and that's where they got the DNA, the fingerprints, all the forensic evidence, and paved the way for her being identified. And sadly, Jamie Adams passed away in twenty twenty two, so he didn't live long enough to finally see Cookie get her name back, but he gets all the credit in the world because otherwise, if he had not taken the initiative to exhume her, she probably would have been

completely forgotten history. So our next case on this list is one that Jules and I actually covered on a Patreon miniso just a couple months ago, and that's this Sumter County mystery couple. So I'm going to read the write up right now. It's another Sumter County, this one in South Carolina instead of Florida. But on August the ninth, nineteen seventy six, the bodies of a young man and woman, both believed to be between eighteen and twenty two years old,

were found on a secluded dirt road. They had both been shot to death, and a local resident claimed they heard the sounds of gunshots and a vehicle speeding off shortly before the victims were found. Neither the male nor the female had any identification or money on them. Even though they had no money. The victims both wore fairly expensive looking jewelry and had extensive dental work. Months later, a witness came forward who believed he had crossed paths

with the couple at a campground. He said the male claimed that his name was Jock and he was traveling through the US because he had been disowned by his father, who was a prominent doctor in Canada. Not much is known about the female, but the authorities have speculated that the couple may have actually been brother and sister. In spite of these leads, no one has ever come forward to claim the victim's bodies, and the identity of their killer is also unknown.

it was the same people that they saw. But two things that I remember stuck out to me, and that was the expense of dental work. As we all know, dental work doesn't come cheap, so that would speak to people that were cared for when they were younger. And since they were fairly young, then wasn't like they were outside sleeping rough or at least if they were, it wasn't for a long period of time. And then another

thing was the motivation for the crime. So we know that they didn't have any money found on them, but the fact that they were wearing rather expensive looking jewelry I thought was really interesting. So it made me think was there another motive? Was rape the motive? Was there something else? Because are you in such a hurry that

you're just going to take the money? If you're on a secluded dirt road, I would think that that would provide you with enough cover in order to be able to take the money out of the wallets and then also take the jewelry.

nice jewelry. You can tell that these are people that are not quote throwaways or runaways that you would see in other traditional cases where identity is really hard to discover because they don't have things like don't work, they don't have records of medical care. But these individuals did.

You could tell that someone had taken care of them and that they were getting help and living a seemingly normal life, and then all of a sudden you find their deceased bodies, like jewels said, with jewelry still on them. I have to go with what she was saying where it looks like something else motivated this. Maybe there was a ploy to say give me all your money, and so the kids are emptying their pockets and give cash. But then that really wasn't the intent, and so whatever

crime was really the purpose happens after that fact. But it wouldn't take you more than two minutes to slip rings and bracelets off of somebody or a watch off of the man and they just left that. So it's a very very intriguing case. Are there two families that failed to identify and report that they're looking for these two young people.

identify them. On January of twenty twenty one, they held a press conference and announced that the victims were twenty nine year old James Paul Fruned and twenty four year old Pamela May Buckley, who were not from Canada. And what's also weird is that once the families found out about the identification, they both claimed I didn't even know

the other, Like James's family did not know Pamela. Pamela's family did not know James, and so They still a big mystery about how these two originally met because they were from completely different states. So James Froun was born in Fitsburg, Massachusetts and lived most of his life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So I still don't know the lead about the guy who claimed his name was Jock. I'm presuming maybe the campground owner was mistaken and talked to a completely different person,

or perhaps James was lying about his background. But it turned out that James in nineteen sixty five had gotten married to a woman named Sherry Lean Albright, and the couple had one child together before they filed for divorce. And it sounds like james family pretty much last heard from him in December of nineteen seventy five, as you get the impression he might have been traveling the country and just stopped contacting his family because as far as anyone can tell, he did not have any ties to

South Carolina. And as for Pamela Buckley, she was born in Redwood County, Minnesota, and spent most of her life living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and in the early nineteen seventies she had actually been part of a folk band called Sun Lending, which toured around the West coast in the Midwest, and she got married to a man named Gary Clifford Canal in nineteen seventy two, and they eventually

separated and divorced. And much like James, it sounds like Pamela's family last heard from her in late nineteen seventy five before she broke off all of contact, and they just assumed that maybe they were off somewhere living their own life, because back in the seventies it was really hard to file a missing person's report because of jurisdictional reasons if you didn't know where they were at that time, if they didn't have a fixed address, Because it just

sounds like they were traveling the country living kind of a nomadic lifestyle before they wound up murdered. And it seems like James and Pamela at some point Cross Pass Baby came a couple and then started traveling together before they were murdered together in Sumter County, South Carolina.

you know, recognize. However, their sketches were distributed widely. There were several people that perhaps mistakenly were describing that they had interactions with this couple, and so there was a lot of attention around these two deceased individuals and down the road, Henry Lee Lucas was actually some when they started to suspect could he have been involved, because even though he falsely confessed to so many crimes, he had been linked to a couple other murders in Somethner County

around that same time, and so there's been almost a lure around what happened to these two, saying is it even possible they're linked to a serial killer?

their bodies to see if it's them. And they actually left them there for about a year before they finally realized, okay, they're starting to decompose, now we should finally bury them. But hundreds of people like came to look at their bodies and they still couldn't be identified. So I can only assume that James and Pamela's families never heard about this because they lived in totally different states. But I can't imagine something like that happening now.

the right place. You'd never see anybody doing that today where you take the bodies out and they're on display, because today you would have too many like Lukilus who are like big true crime fanatics, and they would come and see the bodies and it would be barry macabre and it wouldn't have the right type of vibe or energy around it. But at the time, it sounds like they were using like really creative measures in order to

try to give these two decendents their identities back. And unfortunately, like you said, word wouldn't have gone to their families because they live so far away.

and cast them off immediately. They made an effort to try to get them identified, and of course we have the ring with JPF with the initials, and when the witness thought that they interacted with the man and thought that their name was Jacques, it's reasonable to assume that maybe the J stood for Jacques, But of course now we know it stood for James. But it just goes to show how much more frustrating it was to identify these people during the nineteen seventies when technology was a

lot more primitive. So this is technically still a half

solved mystery because their murderer has never been identified. And in December of nineteen seventy six they actually had a pretty promising lead when a truck driver named Lonnie George Henry was pulled over for a DUI and they found to three point fifty seven caliber revolver in his possession with serial numbers scratched off, which looked suspicious, and when it was sent for ballistics testing, it seemed to show that it was the same murder weapon used to shoot

James and Pamela, and Henry kept changing his story about

where he got the gun. He claimed he bought it from a truck driver and that the serial numbers were already scratched off, but investigators looked at the serial number and discovered that Henry's brother had actually given it to him for a Christmas gift years earlier, and he swore that the serial numbers were still there and that Henry must have scratched them off at a later time when he was given a polygraph test, and even though there were some questions where the reading showed that he was

being untruthful, when they flat out asked him if he killed the couple, Henry said no, and the polygraph seemed to indicate that he was telling the truth about that.

The main reason they were unable to charge him is that he seemed to have a fairly strong alibi because he was visiting his wife in a hospital in the town of money Row, North Carolina, on the date when the couple were believed to have been murdered, and that was and the hospital was about one hundred miles away, so they just never had enough evidence to link him to the crime scene in spite of him having this gun with the serial number scratched off, and he passed

away in nineteen eighty two, so obviously the murder investigation is still open, so if Lonnie George Henry was guilty of this crime, they will never be able to charge him, but it'll be interesting to see if they can find any new evidence that clears or links him definitively to

these murders. So we do know that ballistic testing is not one hundred percent reliable, So I am going to give Henry the benefit of the doubt and maybe think that maybe they screwed up on their original testing and that the gun he possessed was not the murder weapon, because I have seen other cases where the ballistic tests turned out to be faulty and wound up implicating an innocent person. So who knows that could have been a

complete red herring. What are your thoughts? Do you think that Lonnie George Henry seems like a good suspect.

about that and ended up murdering them. I think that there's a lot of different scenarios where it could have still been sexually motivated. We just didn't see the evidence of rape.

had been strangled, shot in the neck, and dismembered. One of the suitcases contained her arms and legs, and her eyes, nose, and breasts had also been removed. It's estimated that the killer made a failed attempt to toss the suitcases into the river, causing two of them to break open on impact. As if the crime wasn't vicious enough, the woman was also pregnant, as a full term female fetus was also

found amongst the remains. A potentially significant clue was some letters and numbers written in ink on the victim's left hand, possibly a license plate number, but authorities were never able to figure out their meeting. Over thirty five years later, the victim is buried in a grave under the name Beth Doe, but no one has ever been able to determine her identity or find out who killed her in such a cruel fashion.

wanted to dismember them and get rid of them. I could see that being somebody who may not know about who she is, but they want to just get rid of the body and try to not have their selves identified. But when they start removing pieces of her, like her you said, her breast, her eyes things like that. It seems so brutal that they just want to destroy what she looks like, disfigure her, take intimate pieces away from her body, and wasn't motivated because of this child that

was about to be born. That they didn't want this child, that it was perhaps the result of an affair or something else, right, they don't want the responsibility of this child. It seems so heartless and so purposeful that there was an intent behind it, and the person who killed her knew her very well.

They say a fetus, and I find that confusing. And they also don't give as insofar as I know, or the information that's provided, the baby in name, which makes me think that somehow they believe the baby wasn't yet born. I'm like a little confused by this. Robin. Can you shed any light?

So they did put the fetus together inside her body parts and of course, the moment you see that, you're automatically thinking domestic homicide, that to this victim was killed by someone who knew her and possibly did not want this child.

closed doors or just a family issue. Children are society's responsibility and women have you know, the more rights and more recognition, and so I think that has also changed the way that there's more attention paid to children and unbortant children now is that that's you know, children have become a larger global responsibility and not just well, that's your responsibil.

twenty twenty one. They identified Beth as an Evelon Cologne, And what makes it even sadder is that she was only fifteen years old at the time she was murdered, and she was originally hailed from Jersey City, New Jersey, and surprise, surprise, it turned out that the prime suspect was her former partner, a man named Luis Sierra, who was nineteen years old at the time, and he actually got arrested a very short time after Evelyn was identified.

It was made possible, of course, by forensic genealogy, as her DNA was entered into a genealogical database and was

eventually matched to her biological nephew. So the story goes that Evelyn became pregnant with Louise's child in nineteen seventy six, but sometime after they moved into an apartment together, they both just seemed to vanish without explanation from Jersey City, and in January of nineteen seventy seven, a couple weeks after the remains were found, Evelyn's family received an anonymous letter informing them that Evelyn and Louise had moved to

Connecticut together, and oddly, they said that she had recently given birth to a baby boy that they named Louis Junior, even though the fetus was for a female. And of course, Louis eventually admitted that he was the one who wrote the letter as a form of diversion or something like that, And it's kind of weird that he came up with this fantasy where he says that they gave birth to

a baby boy. So it might be a thing where he was angry that she was having a girl didn't want a daughter, and that could have been a motivation for the homicide. But here's the real frustrating part of this is Louise has continually denied invoton Evelyn's murder. He was locked away for a couple of years awaiting trial, but investigators found evidence which showed that Evelyn's murder took place in Jersey City, New Jersey, rather than Pennsylvania where

she was found. So Luis's defense asked for the charges to be dismissed due to jurisdictional issues, and the court agreed to do so in March of twenty twenty four, and Luis is currently out on bail and new charges have still not been filed. He's a free man walking around somewhere because it's up to now New Jersey rather than Pennsylvania to try this case. And until they get their act together and finally filed charges, Luise is still going to be walking around and this case will still

remain officially unsolved. So I don't know what the holdup is because it's been nearly two years since they made this decision and they have not filed charges again.

being pregnant. Now, maybe gender wasn't revealed, But it's interesting because why would he even include that detail in the letter if they didn't know about the pregnancy, And if they did know about the pregnancy and just didn't know the gender, because sometimes families don't find out and especially in the seventies, right, that wasn't as common. But if you gave it the you said a boy was born,

that would throw detectives off. Well, it can't be her because there was a little girl found with her, So I could see both ways. But I could also see if they didn't know about the pregnancy, just leave it out. Why would he want to even mention the baby.

his mind. So I doubt they knew the gender of the baby in nineteen seventy six, So I think He probably just had thought about this, decided to add it into the letter, thought it was really specific and it would be something that she would include. But it seems pretty likely that, like you said, nineteen seventy six, they wouldn't have known. And I also looked up the age of consent in seventy six in Jersey and it was also sixteen, so it would have been statutory rape.

with statutory rape. I don't want to raise this child, so I'm just going to murder them and then her body out to a different state, which is a strategy that technically worked, because that's the only reason that he's still not in jail right now is because of the jurisdictional issues. And I did look them up on Find a Grave and they now list the baby child as Emily Grace Cologne, So it looks like Balbo, that was going to be your name, Emily, so that's how they're

referring to her now. But unfortunately she just never got a chance. And of course that it doesn't seem like a lot of mystery here about who was responsible for this crime and why it took place, but it is just kind of a tragedy now that even though like Evelyn and Emily have got their names back and we know who likely killed them, we still have not seen

full justice. So since we've talked a lot about the cases we've already discussed, we're going to be making this a three part series, So we've covered entries ten through eight on this episode, and next week we're going to cover our next couple entries. So join us for part two of our three part series about ten no longer mysterious cases involving identified people.

ten dollar tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsalved 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 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.