Detectives search for leads in death, identity of 'Pogonip Jane' 16 years after her body was found
Posted: 01/10/2010 01:30:45 AM PST
ANTA CRUZ -- In the summer of 1993, someone bludgeoned a teenage girl to death and left her body in a shallow grave in the woods.
Hikers came across her body six months later, but in the 16 years since, no one has claimed the young woman authorities now call "Pogonip Jane," named for the Santa Cruz park where she was found.
Now, new advances in technology coupled with the diligent work of a coroner's unit volunteer give the case new hope, detectives say.
"The case has been bugging me. I really want to give someone's mom closure," said Santa Cruz police Sgt. Loran "Butch" Baker, one of the original officers on the case.
A petite white girl in her late teens, Pogonip Jane had cut her brown hair to a 3-inch chop and painted her fingernails pink. She had a tiny heart tattooed between her left thumb and index finger.
Jane probably had braces as a kid and had a few cavities, which a dentist filled with porcelain, a forensic anthropologist determined.
In the last six months of her life, she traveled the Central Coast between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, according to isotopic hair analysis done at the University of Texas.
But that's where Jane's story ends.
Someone used a metal object -- probably a pipe -- to crush her skull above her right eye. Her naked body was buried under a young tree in a slight ravine about 50 feet from a homeless campsite. At the time, police detectives said the grave looked like it had been a latrine for campers before Jane's body was concealed there.
A grisly discovery
Friends Lauri Duncan and Monika Maier set off for a hike in Pogonip on Jan. 29, 1994, "just kind of being led along the path," Duncan recalled. The friends had attended the Fungus Fair in Santa Cruz and were on the lookout for mushrooms.
As they followed a narrow footpath along a creek not far from UC Santa Cruz, Maier, who was in the lead, found Jane's skeletal remains in the middle of the trail.
Maier turned back and told her friend, "I think I found a body," Duncan said.
"Even though the body was mostly decomposed, it was all still visible," she said. "At that point -- all of a sudden -- it seemed dangerous. ... We just turned back at that point."
They hiked back to the trailhead looking for rangers, but found none. It was the era before cell phones, so they went home to call 911, then returned to the park to wait for police and the coroner, Duncan said.
"It was pretty upsetting," she said.
At a campsite nearby, police found Jane's clothing, a Bible, camping gear and trash. It wasn't clear if she had stayed there, but it seemed they had leads to pursue. Duncan, like many involved in the early stages of the case, thought Jane would be identified quickly.
Instead, Jane was reburied in an unmarked grave at Soquel Cemetery, where she remains today.
"It's just unbelievable" that it's never been resolved, Duncan said.
Someone must miss her
Nationwide, nearly 4,000 young women reported missing match Pogonip Jane's basic description, according to Christopher Smith, a lawyer and volunteer in the corner's unit at the Sheriff's Office.
Jane is not one of them.
Either no one reported her missing or Jane crossed paths with law enforcement at some point after the report but before her death, which would mean she was taken out of the state missing persons system.
"Our instinct is she went unreported -- probably because of drug use or other criminal activity -- by her family, who basically wanted nothing else to do with her," said Smith, who works to identify the 40-odd unclaimed remains, like Jane's, found in the county since the 1960s. "She's just too distinctive to not get picked up."
But there have been glitches along the way.
For more than a decade after Jane's death, investigators believed she was in her early 20s and combed through those missing person reports rather than the ones of teenage girls.
"In those days, they didn't have any way of accurately determining a person's age," Smith said, explaining the estimate is based on the formation of bones and teeth.
In 2009, a forensic anthropologist used cementum analysis -- a new scientific procedure where the tooth is cut and polished -- to count rings in one of Jane's teeth and calculate not only her age, but the time of year she died.
The results allowed detectives to change her estimated age to 17-19 years old and created new interest in an old lead, Smith said.
A young man came to the Sheriff's Office the year Jane was found and said he thought the remains might belong to his teenage sister, but his report wasn't pursued because his sister was too young for the age range investigators were looking at then, according to Smith. In the ensuing years, the brother's name and contact information was lost. All detectives remember is he worked at the now-defunct Baker's Square in Los Gatos. They're trying to locate old payroll records to track his name and find him, Smith said.
Always a possibility
With a better idea of Pogonip Jane's age and where she was in the months before she was killed, as well as an artist's model of what Jane's head and face may have looked like -- based on her bone structure and complete with hair and eyes -- investigators hope new leads will develop.
Sgt. Alan Burt, who leads the coroner's unit, handled the original case 16 years ago. Back then, he thought identifying her would be as simple as asking questions at the homeless shelter and being led to her locker or friends.
It wasn't, but he still has hope for the case.
"I think it's always worth it. I mean, we've gotten 1969 cases done," Burt said. "We're always going to work on those cases that have possibilities."
He theorized Jane was a troubled teen whose parents said "good riddance" when she ran away.
"Maybe somebody noticed that their girlfriend stopped coming to school," Burt said. "We might get lucky and somebody might say, Whatever happened to that girl?'"
Smith is working with the Social Security Administration to run a database search of girls with Jane's demographics to find those who never used their Social Security numbers. He would like to contact their parents to find out what happened to their daughters.
Smith thinks the list may include about 500 names. One could be Jane.
Detectives also have thoughts on who killed Jane, although no one has ever been arrested. They suspect a father-son duo who was in the area around the time she died, according to Smith. Police released little information about them, saying only the son has since died and the father moved to eastern Tennessee, where he is in poor health. Baker said they may interview the father again.
"Without knowing the story ... it's going to be a difficult case to prove," he said, though he added that identifying Jane could go a long way in bringing charges against her killer.
The Sheriff's Office also created a Facebook page for Pogonip Jane and a Web site dedicated to her will be launched soon, Smith said.
"She should not be unidentified," Smith said. "This young person has people out there."
Investigators asked anyone with information about Pogonip Jane's identity or her death to call Baker at 420-5825 or the coroner's unit at 454-2520.
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