Human Remains Identified as Betty Walraven After 65 Years

[Nut44x4]

This is unreal........

Betty Walraven: Human Remains Identified After 65 Years


08/ 5/11 12:30 PM ET
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The San Bernardino County coroner's office says a family DNA match shows the bones found scattered in the Mojave Desert near Baker in 1971 are those of Betty Walraven, an Orange County woman killed in May 1946.
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The coroner's office says in a news release that a DNA profile worked up by the state justice department lab in Richmond helped investigators make the identification.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/05/betty-walraven-human-remains_n_919467.html



Solving one mystery opens the books on another crime
Bones found in the Mojave Desert are traced painstakingly, and a dead man's forgotten confession points to a murder.


 ::snipping2::

Walraven went missing. Her relatives called the FBI, but she was never to be heard from again.

A quarter of a century later, a man hunting for fossils stumbled upon some scattered bones in the Mojave Desert near Baker in San Bernardino County, a feral landscape that hides its secrets well.

It would take years for those unidentified bones to be linked to a murder confession given by a career criminal in Santa Ana.

But only recently, through a DNA match, would the two come together to put an end to one 60-year-old mystery — and perhaps lead to another.

Authorities announced Friday that the remains are those of Beddie Walraven. The news comes after years of painstaking work by San Bernardino County coroner's investigators and scientists at the state attorney general's DNA laboratory in Richmond.
 ::snipping2::
In December 2005, highly degraded biological samples from the bones were sent to the state lab; it took scientists five years to develop a usable DNA profile. Meanwhile, coroner's investigators found two relatives of Walraven who provided DNA.
 ::snipping2:: MORE
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-desert-mystery-20110806,0,6800864.story?track=rss

[Nut44x4]

and regarding the unnamed woman....mentioned in post#1 here:
http://helpfindthemissing.org/forum/showthread.php?p=879771&highlight=Walraven#post879771

Updated: Oct. 2, 2011 9:28 a.m.
Old bones? Old guilt? New mysterySanta Ana detectives close file on a historic cold case that dates back to a fatal 1946 love triangle and skeletal remains found in the desert in 1971.

SANTA ANA – Jean "Kitty" Hodges lay dying.
The year was 1994, and Kitty, 77, was lapsing in and out of consciousness in a nursing home in Grants Pass, Ore.

In her prime, the fair-skinned brunette had no problem attracting men, including her ex-husband, Liskie T. "Terry" Mabry.
But by the time she suffered the stroke that would kill her, Kitty was living alone, in a filthy house she shared with 87 cats. And during the older woman's final moments, it was left to her granddaughter, Becky Herrera, to pray for her grandmother's soul.
"At the end," Herrera says, "all she talked about was that she wanted to know Jesus before she died."
On her deathbed, Kitty was seeking some measure of redemption — for a past with Mabry that was as dark as any desert night.
SNIPPED much more
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/mabry-319769-kitty-walraven.html

[Sister]

After so many, many years . . . the truth finally comes to the surface.
May the Walraven family feel some type of relief after all these years.

[KittyMom]

This is proof that no matter how much time passes, your crimes will eventually be known and your victims given justice.  Kitty may have never gone to a prison with bars, but she certainly lived a prison life in her own mind.  I'd bet Terry's life wasn't a bed of roses either.