So welcome to this week's episode of The Path Went Chili. Ashley is quite busy this week, so she is off, But instead we're going to change our format a little bit and do an episode where I tell Jules all about a case that she's not familiar with. And this one is a little different than the norm because it's technically a solved case, a case that got solved very recently, so the Path is no longer Chili. Well, I'm excited
to hear about this case. You had written it in an email, and I went out of my way to not look at it again and to not google it because the curiosity will get the best of me sometimes. But anytime you're about to tell me about a case, I want it to be a situation where I go in totally blind. So I'm excited to hear all the details. Yeah, and this is not a very well known case. It's only been played on a couple of YouTube channels on podcasts, but it hasn't
got a lot of mainstream publicity. I covered it on The Trail Went Cold about three and a half years ago, and like I said, it has recently been solved and we kind of hit a milestone because the trail went cold. Actually got a shout out at the police press conference, which is a first for us. It was a really exciting moment. That's exciting. Do you know how many cases that you've covered over the years, Like how many years has it been now, like six or seven years? Eight years out?
Oh my god, eight years? That is crazy. But do you know how many have been solved? Slash ones that indirectly or directly you might have had a hand in something. Well, this is the only one I think that I had a hand in where we've gotten acknowledged by the police that they listened to it and kind of used it as an investigative tool. But it's been a lot of cases, like we've released four update episodes talking about
all the cases we've solved and had major developments. And of course the most infamous example is the Janelle Matthews case where we found out that the killer was one but I talked about that on a previous episode. Yeah, that's crazy. And then I remember our Keith Warren episodes. We got some traction on that one, and it seemed to be some involvement from the police resulted from what was it a city council person hearing our recording, Yes it was.
I can't remember his exact position, but the Discovery Plus released a documentary series about the Keith Warren case where the person in question actually said on camera I was listening to a podcast about the case. He didn't say which name it was, but I knew he was referring to us. And just recently, Keith's sister, Sherry Warren, announced that they've officially changed his cause of death from suicide to undetermined, which doesn't mean it's solved, but that is a
big deal because they've been fighting for that for thirty eight years. That made me so happy because I just I love Sherry. I think she's such a brave person and to fight against such adversity and like, really, at the end of the day, that was all she wanted was to say that you don't definitively know that my brother ended his own life, so you can't say that it was suicide. So to have a switch to undetermined was her end
goal. And to know that she reached that and to think that, like, maybe we had some small part in it, because I know the guy who's the he was the fire captain, but he was the EMT on the scene at the time. He was the one who reached out to me and told me that somebody had heard like within those circles and that it was our podcast that was listened to. So that was a really cool feeling right when we were starting out. Amazing. Yeah, and Sherry just posted the letter
she received confirming that they were changing the cause of death. She put it on Twitter, so that's how we know it's official. But it was a very momentous occasion. So this one here took place all the way back in nineteen forty five, so you wouldn't put this high on the list of cases that I would expect to see solved. And what had happened is the granddaughter
of this woman, Mary Jane van Gilder. She had been reaching out to a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels asking if they would cover her grandmother's case.
Obviously, she wasn't alive and never got to know her grandmother before she went missing, but she still wanted to find out answers about what happened to her, and she posted in my Facebook discussion group in the fall of twenty twenty asking if I would cover it, and needless to say, I get to reached out to by families of missing and murdered people all the time, but this was the first time I had heard from someone who had a missing
relative go missing in the nineteen forties, so I was quite surprised by it, but I decided to do it and to smile. Also to my surprise, she put me in touch with a detective who was working on the case.
His name was Adam Turner. He works for the police department in Shelby, Ohio, and need list to say, I did not expect to be contacting a police officer who was working a missing person's case that was seventy five years old at this point, but he is one of the most passionate police officers I've ever seen, and he pretty much had the attitude that even though this is seventy five years old, you should always work unsolved cold cases. It's never too late. So he was trying to get the word out to
see if he could solve this one. The landscape of investigating crimes has changed so much, like I think now you've got a lot of police departments who are willing to reach out to podcasters, even if they do so on the DL and they don't put it out there, like, hey, we've reached out to podcasters and we're hoping to get this story out. I think back in the eighties, the nineties, the early two thousands, it was like they would use psychics and not talk about it, right, It was like
that was their investigative tool. And I feel like now it's podcasters. And so it's really cool that you got to work in tandem with the investigator and to see something like this solved, and to know that the granddaughter has that kind of resolution to truly know what happened to her grandmother, like that's a
really beautiful thing. Oh exactly. And this was a case where no missing person's report was ever officially filed until twenty eighteen, and that's when Adam Turner took over the investigation, and he had the mentality that we have to get every piece of information we have about this case out there because maybe the right person will hear it and they'll come forward. Because he's got nothing to work with. I mean, we don't even we can't even pinpoint an exact moment
when the victim went missing. We have no evidence, no suspects, no eyewitnesses. So he's pretty much working with nothing, but that did not deter him. And I know that some police investigators are very defensive. They do not want to help podcasts. They kind of have the mentality, oh, they're trying to tell us how to do our jobs. They're kind of saying that we can't solve this on ro own. But he had the opposite approach, saying that podcasts and YouTube shows can be a very helpful medium and they
have made a difference in a lot of cases. Oh, I think it's inarguable at this point, especially like the larger the reach that a podcast has, the greater the difference that they can make. You've got a huge listener base, and then you see lots of other podcasts like I hate to use the example of Crime Junkie because it's such an obvious one, but what they've been able to do with their platform to help victims and to help victims' families
is pretty inspiring. And even like people like Meggie Freelan who cover wrongful conviction cases and to be able to get people to listen to these cases, which are often those of racial minorities, and it makes a huge difference, and that is like just an invaluable tool in the toolbox of investigators if they're willing
to utilize podcasters. Oh yeah, and another example of wrongful convictions. We did an episode a while back of the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain where a man named Dennis Perry was wrongfully convicted of the crime, and Undisclosed covered it and even invited me to be a guest on it. And back in twenty twenty, they finally did do DNA testing and had Dennis exonerated and he
was released, but he was pretty much in a hopeless situation. And I don't think this ever would have happened if Undisclosed hadn't to have covered the case and uncovered a lot of new information. So let's start talking about Mary Jane van Gilder. She originally hailed from mary In County, West Virginia. She got married at a very young age she was only seventeen years old to her husband, James Van Gilder, and they had a total of five children.
Badly, they also had two stillborn children because Mary Jane gave birth to a pair of twins in nineteen thirty five but wound up losing them. From what everyone has heard, Mary Jane's marriage to James was not a happy one because he was alleged to be an alcoholic and was supposedly abusive towards her. We really don't know this for sure. It's a lot of hearsay because there are just so few firsthand witnesses who are actually around and are still alive to share
the story. So these are just kind of allegations we don't know they are true. But by the end of nineteen forty three, when Mary Jane was thirty two years old, she finally decided to separate from James. They've been living in a rural area in Marion County, but she decided to move into an apartment in the town of Fairmont and got a job at a local restaurant.
And as you can imagine, this was a pretty big deal because women were a lot more reluctant to separate from their husbands back in nineteen forty three.
Well, I think that speaks to the fact that her marriage must have been truly, truly unhappy, and if there was domestic violence in the marriage, and you also have to think that this is a woman who was contending with a major, major trauma of having birth two babies that died like those twins died, and the thing, now we understand the psychology of that's so much better. But back in those days, it would just be like you
better move on, right. And I don't know what they would do in hospitals for the grieving process, if they would give them the bodies or they let them have time. I know now they do, but back then they may have just taken them away and been like, we'll never speak of them, or we won't name them. And I think that that could weigh so heavily. And when you don't have that support system and you have a partner who is an alcoholic, who is potentially violent, I can't even imagine the
toll that that would take, especially when you're raising five children. That's a lot of mouths to feed. So for her to walk away and say I'm done, I would rather support myself and my babies than have you in my life, I think that is a bold move and it truly speaks to the
state of their marriage exactly. And I mentioned that she got married at age seventeen, which might seem mind blowing today, but it was far more common back then for women to get married before they even left thirteen years But here's
kind of another strange story. I don't know exactly when they found this out, but it turned out that one of Mary Jane's children, I think the youngest one, was not actually James's, because she had an extramarial affair with a man named Delbert Calgar, who had I think done work on the family's property. And James apparently found out about this, and to his credit, he still wound up raising the child even though he found out it wasn't his.
Well, what makes the story even crazier is that after Mary Jane went missing and they got divorced, James wound up getting remarried to Delbert's sister, Virginia Calgar, and they went on to have more children. So it's kind of a weird thing that you would get married to the sister of a man who was like the unofficial father of one of your children and had an affair
with your wife, you married your adopted son's aunt. Like it's a little it is, yeah, I mean, we don't know many specific details about what this was like because there are very few firsthand witnesses, but as far as you know, James and Virginia did stay married I think for as long as they both were alive, so I guess it was a happier marriage than his one to Mary Jane in the long run. Even though Mary Jane was living in an apartment in town, all the five children still stayed on the
property with James and she still kept in touch. But at some point in early nineteen forty four, she decided to travel over two hundred and fifty miles to the town of Shelby, Ohio, and surprisingly, she did not tell anyone she was going to do this beforehand. She did not even tell her children, and they only found out about it when she started sending letters to
them saying that, Hey, I'm now moving in another state. I've got a job with the Shelby Army Air Force Depot manufacturing aircraft supplies because World War Two was still going on. But I know that everyone was taken by complete surprise because she just decided to relocate and start living on her own without telling it anyone. Do we know if she was an impulsive person, if this
would be typical or atypical type of behavior. I mean, it seems at the time, and I don't want to characterize somebody leaving their husband as being impulsive, but at that time period, it could be described as such because it would be like, what are you going to do and how are you
going to support your children? And from the sounds of it, she was walking away not being able to have her children living with her, and for a mother, that would be really difficult, especially knowing you're leaving your children
with an alcoholic. If we're to believe that he truly was an alcoholic, somebody with a substance use disorder, we would say nowadays it is something that would be really difficult to grapple with because you're doing what's best for you, because you're trying to protect yourself, but you will then have to worry about your children being in that environment and not being with you. So it's a really complex situation. It is, yeah, because we don't really know her
mindset when she did that. As you know that, even though James was alleged to be abusive towards Mary Jane, I haven't heard any stories about him being abusive towards his children. I mean, as possible he was, and we just don't know that information, but I haven't heard anything about him being so bad that his children wanted to estrange from them. So maybe Mary Jane thought that things would be okay if he left the children for him to raise.
But she stayed in Shelby, Ohio for about a year, and she did start staying in contact with her children, particularly your oldest daughter Anime, who was thirteen years old at the time. She would send them letters,
clothing, and war bonds. But by the time nineteen forty five year old around, things got a bit unusual where Mary Jane suddenly wrote to Anime and said, could you please send me back the war bonds, which kind of implies that maybe she needed money badly at that point, and I think a couple weeks later she did mail one war bond worth twenty five dollars back to Anime, but this would turn out to be the last contact they ever had.
In February of nineteen forty five, Mayor Jane officially filed a petition for divorce, accusing her husband of extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty. And we know that that same month she requested a transfer into the labor equipment pool at the Shelby Army Air Force Depot to get a job as a high lift
and fork operator. But then on March the eighth, she just abruptly quit her job, and we didn't know the reasons because they just kind of looked at her original personnel file and all she wrote for reasons was added household duties. And this was the last time she was confirmed to be alive because after she quit her job, she caught off all contact with her husband and her children and they never heard from her again. And I know that in November
of that year, James filed for divorce. He responded to the divorce petition, but because Mary Jane and her lawyer never responded the petition, the divorce was granted and he was awarded full custody of all five of their children. Wow, I mean everything pre Internet seems like it was so much easier for people to just disappear and to have there be not like its accountability on the part of law enforcement, because nobody's going in and being like, hey,
this person is missing. But it's just people can slip through the cracks so much easier. And I've got to say, I think it's so interesting that she was going to have a job as like a forklift operator. I love that Mary Jane was challenging gender norms at the time. Because that would be a job that would be like an atypical job for a woman, would it not at that time? Oh, definitely not no, And she it sounded like she had a good performance there while working at the depot, and it
was just a very unusual situation. She was a single woman living on her own in a town she was not familiar with working a man's job. And that's the thing is that because there were so few people who by the time this case got publicity, who were still alive to share their experiences with Mary Jane while she was living in Shelby, we really don't know all that much about her life there, but it sounds like she was doing pretty well for
herself. But they all knew that because the war was coming to an end, that the depot was probably going to start laying off people eventually. So they had theories at the time that maybe she just knew that her days were numbered so she decided to quit anyway. But she pretty much just disappeared after that, and they could not find any paper trail for her. And when
you say laying off people, you really mean laying off women. Yeah, probably, Yeah, they would probably even the first people to be laid off because the men were all out there fighting the war, so they hired a lot of women. But once they returned home, then those jobs would go to them. Probably. Yeah. So by the time the nineteen fifties rolled around, Anime was in her twenty she became an adult, so she started
wanting to find out what happened to her missing mother. But the problem is that, as you know, a lot of the time, many decades ago, the police were reluctant to file missing persons reports if there was no hard evidence of foul play. They would often give off the excuse that they just decided to run away on their own, and they were an adult, so they had a right to do so if they wanted to cut off all contact.
But another night may here was just jurisdictional issues because she was a resident of West Virginia, she was living in Ohio, and who was going to handle the missing person's report? I mean, she presumably left Ohio, but nobody really knew for certain. They couldn't track that down, and Anime even at one point wrote to the FBI seeing if they could assist him, but they said, we do not have the jurisdiction to over an open investigation because
this is not a federal crime. We don't know if she was kidnapped and brought over state lines, so there was pretty much nothing they could do. They could not get an official investigation launched, so everyone just kind of moved on with their lives, where James got remarried and had more children, and all the children grew up, and I know that this was one of those things that the family just never spoke about, where James was reluctant to talk
about his missing ex wife. They knew it was a bad sign though. When Mary Jane's mother passed away in nineteen sixty three, when she didn't show up to attend the funeral, they thought, Okay, this is bad. She's either dead or she wants nothing to do with her family at all. If she's not going to resurface to attend her own mother's funeral, what a nightmare for the family. It sounds like a real legal game of hot potato.
It's like not it not it not it Like we're not going to take the case, and we're not going to and the jurisdictional issues end up happening where nobody takes it. Nobody's looking into it rather than deciding Okay, well maybe we should look at Ohio and see who was she associated with, who was she close to, did she have a significant other, was she dating anyone? Any entanglements? Could they not have looked into that? And then if they had an idea of maybe where she went from there, then they
could figure out who would then investigate from there. But it feels like the family was failed here in that somebody should have looked into it somewhere along the way. And then I'm sure everybody at her mother's funeral were probably expecting that she would stroll up and that you'd see her and it would be like this big reunion, like, oh, we've gone so long without seeing you, where have you been? And everyone's tearful but so happy to be reunited.
And then when she doesn't show up, it's like the hard reality hits. She's probably never coming back. Yeah, And that's pretty much how they felt. And I know that James died in nineteen eighty five, he never got to find out what happened to Mary Jane. And shortly thereafter the family's home
burned down because of a chimney fire. And what was sad is that this destroyed all the letters that Mary Jane had sent to Anime over the years, so they literally had no documentation for and we're pretty much just going by Anime's memories about what she said. So when they opened an investigation like decades later, it's not like they could look at any of the old letters for clues and stuff to try to figure out what might have happened to her. It's
just really unfortunate when it comes to house fires. Back before, you know, we could scan documents or put pictures online and they'd be stored in the cloud. Nowadays, we've got copies of everything. Like if you've got a hard copy of something like you might have it in like a file cabinet.
But for the most part, we've got everything online digitally. So I mean, if like the Internet crashes were all screwed, yeah, but when it comes down to those things like pictures and stuff, we're pretty much covered. If there's a fire, we've got a backup. But back then, if your house burned down, all of your memories could burn down with it. And when your mother's she's gone, she's disappeared, and it seems like the
probability is she's most likely to cease because she hasn't shown back up. To think that all of her letters are then gone, like that little bit of your mother that you can hold onto and you can actually touch, it's something tangible, and then to have that just turned to dust, I can't even imagine how Anime felt. Oh yeah, it was very tragic for and thankfully they did preserve a few old photos so they were able to use them when
they launched the missing persons and investigation decades later. But I have heard a missing person's investigations where literally there are no surviving photos or maybe one faded out photo of the victim. It's kind of sad when you go to the Charlie Project and see a profile for someone who went missing like several decades ago, and you can barely make out their face on the photograph and you realize that's literally all that exists of them now. That's just so sad as you can
imagine. Because there was not an official missing person's investigation, this didn't get any newspaper coverage at all. But it was not until two thousand and four when one of Mary Jane's granddaughters was able to get an article published about her disappearance in the Plymouth Journal in Ohio, and they said, if there was anyone who remembers my grandmother from their time living in Shelby, please come forward.
And sure enough, she actually received a letter from a guy named William King, who had lived in Shelby in nineteen forties and was only thirteen years old at the time, and he said that his father and two brothers had worked with Mary Jane at the Army Air Force Stepo and their family were friends with her. She often come over to have dinner with them and stuff.
He didn't really have any insights about why she went missing. But it's pretty crazy to think that William King is the only person who has ever shared his story of his first hand experiences with Mary Jane during her one year living in Shelby, because that's because he was a kid at the time. But pretty much by that point everyone else who had interacted with her had passed on, so there was just no one who could offer any insight into stuff like did
she have any relationships, was she dating anyone? How is her mood? And because William was so young, he didn't really have much insight into that. But it's just so crazy to think that he is pretty much the sole
account of Mary Jane's time living in Shelby. It's eerie, almost right to think that she was there and all of these people interacted with her, But then all of these people are gone, they're most likely deceased, and the only person that remembers her is someone who was literally a child at the time, and she came over to their house, like thank god that he actually read this article and was like, okay, I'm going to write a letter
to her daughter. It was to Anime, right, it was actually a granddaughter named Misty to Missy, and luckily the Misty had that connection to know that somebody knew your grandmother and to know that she was there and she touched people's lives. I think that there's there's something the concrete about that, right, there's something real, Like she turns from being this ghost into being like a person that's tangible that you can like reach out and touch, and you
in essence, he's like fleshed her out. I'm sure for Misty exactly, yeah, because it would have been crazy to think, you're wondering yourself, what was she even in Shelby that entire time, Like we have no witnesses to confirm that. But and this was another lucky break because I know that when they launched a missing person's investigation, they wanted to find her military records
from this time period. But you may have heard, like during the nineteen seventies that a lot of the military records for World War Two were kept at the National Personnel Records Center in Over in Missouri. But then there was like a huge fire which destroyed approximately sixteen to eighteen million military personnel records. So there was a big fear that they were never going to find Mary Jane's record.
But during his investigation, Adam Turner learned that even though a lot of the military records were at this facility, the civilian personnel records for World War Two were actually kept the National Archives in Saint Louis, and he was able to retrieve it. And this is the only reason we have this information about her time at the depot and her promotion to a forklift operator and a decision to leave in March of nineteen forty five, because when he started the investigation,
he had nothing but a bunch of photographs. But as I'm going to say later on, this military record would contain a clue that eventually led to the case being resolved. Adam Turner like, let me just give credit where credits due. He sounds like, are real bad at Yes he is, Yes, he is amazing, Like he is the ultimate example of a police officer who gives one hundred ten percent to every case he covers, no matter
how old it is. And he finally got assigned to the case in April of twenty eighteen, because that's when Mary James's granddaughter, Mindy Wilson finally decided, let's try to get a missing person's report file. Let's see if we
can find out what happened to her. And I also got to give a lot of credit to Lance Combs, who is the chief of the Shelby Police Department, because he allowed it. He pretty much decided some police chiefs would probably say, we're not going to waste time and resources on a missing person's case that's over seventy years old, but he gave permission for Adam Turner to take it on and use whatever resources he had to kind of look at it.
And Adam like, of course, because he's an active detective, he had a lot of other work to do, so he often did a lot of investigating for Mary Jane's case on his own time and used his own money to create his own travel expenses to do stuff to work on the case, but because he knew that it would be very difficult to balance this with his other work while he was on the job, but he said he became very passionate about it and says that if there's any evidence out there, I'll find
it and I'll try to get this case solved. I just love to hear it because we cover so many cases where law enforcement just everything is a mess, whether it's the coroner or the police or the prosecutors. We're often dealing with unsolved cases, and a lot of times that can be things like the police just not doing their jobs, some kind of misconduct. There can be
allegations of conspiracies. We run the full gamut. So to actually hear that we've got investigators, we've got a chief of police, we've got we've got Adam Turner, and we've got Lance Combs, the chief of police, who actually really seem to care about Misty and her plight and really want to get Mary Jane's case solved. I just love to see it because we don't see
it that often when we cover cases. Yeah, I was about to say that though we've done so many cases on this podcast where one of the main reasons they are still unsolved is because of bad police work or lazy police work, or a corruption. But it just kind of blew my mind to see this guy get so passionate about solving a case that most other officers would be like, I'm not touching this one because I've got nothing to work with. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of police chiefs would look at it and be
like, well, what's our payout for this? Right, this isn't a recent case, so you're not going to have public pressure in the way that you would if it was a murder or disappearance of somebody that had happened recently. So to go, Okay, we're going to do this solely for the fact that, sure, you get to close a case if you solve it, but they had to know the probability was low going into it. You're really and truly doing it for the family. So that just speaks so highly
of this whole police department. Oh exactly. And also, even if they don't solve it, they're just ensuring that Mary Jane has not been lost to history because since he took on the investigation, her profile page was finally being added to websites like the Charlie Project, the Dough Network, and NamUs.
Because if you did a Google search on Mary Jane van Gilder pre twenty eighteen, you probably would have gotten nothing, but at least now when you do a search for you were seeing her photograph and all her statistics on the missing
Person's website, so you knew that people remembered her. Of course, because Adam Turner did not have a lot to work with, he tried looking through any leads that he could, and that involved going through the find Grave website to see could there be any candidates here who were buried anywhere or any Jane does who have a potential to possibly be Mary Jane, And he came across this Jane Doe, who was found dead in Preble County, Ohio on May
the twenty fifth, nineteen sixty eight. Her skull had been found in a wooded area by a group of children and they eventually found her decomposed body nearby, but the coroner cannot determine the exact cause of death, but the victim was estimated to be between thirty to fifty years old, and the victim they thought that she had been dead for about ten to fifteen years, and they have theorized that maybe she was buried in a shallow grave because before they discovered
the remains, there had been a heavy rainstorm, so it could have caused the remains to surface and wash up, and that's how she was finally found.
But because she cannot be identified, the victim was buried as a Jane Doe in the town of Eton, and because Eaton is not all that far from Shelby, and there were some compelling similarities between the Jane Doe and Mary Jane, Officer Turner contacted the Preble County Coroner's office to see if they can make arrangements to exhume the remains and extract DNA, and he pretty much, Adam pretty much had the mindset that it's a long shot. It may not
be Mary Jane. But even if if this lea turns out to go nowhere, we're going to exume a Jane Doe and potentially identify her and offer a potential resolution for another family. So this is totally worthwhile. I'd love to see it. It's nice to see that. Adam Turner is like, okay, well, if we get the resolution that we want, that we can tell Misty, this is what happened to your grandmother, then great. But if not, there's another family out there who doesn't know where their loved one
went. And if we can find DNA that matches and we can let them know, then we get to give closure or resolution to someone. And I think after so many years, because it's been so many years, you're going to be giving it to like grandchildren, and there would always be that lore within a family of what happened to Grandma, you know, like everybody would talk about it, and whether or not it would be like a secret that we aren't supposed to bring it up because it upsets people, or it's something
that's talked about openly. No matter the way the family communicates it, it's something that's going to hang really heavy over a family. So to be able to actually have some answers, it would be such a powerful thing, oh exactly. And in this case it would eventually turn out that there were answers
for two families, which is quite amazing. So the exit mation took place in August of twenty nineteen, and what was crazy is that when they opened the casket, they found some remains, but the skull and the mandible were missing, and no one knew what they were. But it was theorized that they had been donated to a local public school, as apparently this was a
common practice for remains found back during that time period. But I don't know if they ever did find the skull, but they were hoping that they would take DNA and compare it from the DNA from Mary Jane's surviving relatives. But unfortunately, because the remains were so degraded after all this time, the DNA
strand was broken. So when I released my Trail Went Cold episode back in September of twenty twenty, this was still in a holding pattern because they didn't have enough viable DNA evidence, so we didn't know if they were getting able to be able to determine if this Jane Doe was Mary Jane. And spoiler alert, it did not turn out to be Mary Jane. But we have
a two for one special here because this victim was also eventually identified. Well, at least you've got some closure here and to be able to get a resolution on who this person is to be able to let them rest in peace and let their family know what happened. That is a huge, huge accomplishment. So Adam Turner must have been really happy. Although it's not the case that he wanted to solve with Mary Jane, I'm sure that he was elated
that somebody's getting a resolution. Oh yeah, because from my conversations with him, he is very passionate about identifying decendents John and Jane does. He just thinks it's so sad that there can be people buried and you don't know who they are, and their families out there may not have been able to figure
out what happened to him. And he even told me that this cemetery where the Preble County Jane Doe is buried, he thinks that there might be some decedents buried under there who don't have any grave markers or tombstones and have just been lost to history. And that just made me think, like, how many unidentified people are buried throughout the United States that we don't even know about
because they have no grave marker? Oh yeah, and like Popper's graves, and would they stack people in certain places we just don't know And I think it's such a beautiful thing to be able to give somebody back their identity after it's been lost and nobody knows for sure what happens, you know, after we die. But if somebody is sticking around and wondering, like am I ever going to be discovered? Are they ever going to know? It's me? Well, my family ever know what happened to me? At least then
their spirit can rest easy, exactly. And as we're going to find out here, somebody was identified who had been lost to history for a really long time, but now their memory has finally been preserved. Well, it was not until twenty twenty two when the Shelby Police Department got in contact with an organization called Moxie Forensic Investigations, who specialize in providing investigative genetic genealogy services. And as you know, genetic genealogy has led to the identification of so many
John and Jane does over the past six years. And it was sent to a place called inter Mountain Forensics, a DNA testing laboratory located in Salt Lake City, Utah. And they pretty much were the type of people where even though the DNA strand had been broken on these remains, they said, we can't do it. If there's anyone who can still manage to extract a DNA sample from degraded remains, it would be them, and the procedure would cost
five thousand dollars. But the full funding was actually provided by business called Criminal Coffee Company, which is run by Stephanie Harlow and Derek Lavassar from the Crime Weekly podcast and YouTube show. And I know you've listened to them, right, Oh yeah, I've heard them talk about Preble County dough To on their podcast. But I think this is a different person. Where they thought it was a woman, that it was actually a man. Yep, that would
be correct. It's the same one, the same one. Yep. Okay,
okay, yep. They were able to finally extract some usable DNA and build a DNA profile, and early on they had found some male DNA on the remains and they figured, well, it might have been there through cross contamination, or it might have belonged to Jane Doe's killer, But nope, that was because the Jane Doe was actually a John Doe, as gender had been misidentified because this was the late nineteen sixties and forensics were not as advanced,
and I guess the coroner mistakenly thought that this victim was a female because of its small stature and it even the corner even said that we believe the victim might have been pregnant and given birth to a child at one point. But as we're about to find out, they could not have been more wrong. Wow, that is crazy because I wasn't really aware of the details of the case, but I've heard Derek and Stephanie talk about it in different episodes
and how it used to be called she was called Preble Penny. Yes, well they formally thought was as she he was called Preble Penny, but is now called Preble p and that through Criminal Coffee they were able to fund that. So just again talking about podcasts are able to make a difference through their outreach and through their fundraising. It's just it's so incredible. Good for Derek and Stephanie. Yeah, this was excellent. This is one of their crowning
achievements. So was officially announced. They had a press conference in November of twenty twenty three where the Preble County Penny or Preble County John Doe was officially identified as a young man named Albert Alan Frost, and as you can imagine, Albert was completely lost to history. He had never been reported missing. He had just one of those people that just vanished off the face of the earth. But here's his backstory. He was originally born in Hamilton, Ohio,
in nineteen thirty five and was the youngest of eight children. He was a veteran who served in the military. He was apparently very proud of it because he would wear his army jacket around virtually all the time. But he was also known as a shy but very rebellious individual who was kind of a drifter. He would just kind of jump from place to place where he would go and stay with the relative for a while and crash with them, and then he would just move on his way. So he pretty much lived a
transient lifestyle. And one of his relatives, let me just see here, his grand niece, said that in retrospect, she thinks that Albert might have been on the autism spectrum because he was so shy and socially awkward with people. But back in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, nobody knew what autism was. So he went diagnosed and they just kind of thought, well, here's a odd little Albert, kind of the black sheep of the family,
just doing his own thing. Well, we think of like mental health where we're at now versus the way people were treated back then. There was little empathy and little understanding for medical professionals. I mean, unless you were fortunate enough to have access to like the greatest psychological care at the time. But even if you're going to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, chances are good that you aren't going to be properly diagnosed, nor are you going to get the
support that you need. But where we're at now is such a different place. So to be able to look back and to think how people must have suffered if they were dealing with autism, spec and disorder or any other diagnosis, to be able to to not have that ability to have people understand you in that way, and to have that sense of community that people have access
to now. There's plenty of different groups. You can talk to people that are very similar to you in that they are dealing with the same types of disorders and they just didn't have that back then. So to be labeled as you know, odd Albert, which I think a lot of family members were back then. They are just quote unquote crazy or like the unhinged one.
And I think that that was typical, like every family had a quote unquote crazy person, and they were just people with likely dealing with mental illness. It just weren't properly diagnosed. So this is a good time to bring an in to part one. Join us again next week when we release part two about the unexplained disappearance of Mary Jane van Gilder Vin, do you want to
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