Police have located a teenage girl nearly 50 years after her body was found bound, gagged, wrapped in a tarp and dumped in a Connecticut drainage ditch, officials said Monday.
They said at a news conference that investigators never gave up identifying Jane Doe, who was found in East Haven on August 16, 1975. Without identification, officers injured Block, but continued their investigation into her death by strangulation. In 2022, they exhumed her body from her burial place in the nearby city of Hamden and took a DNA sample. Sent to Identifinders International, a Forensic genetic genealogy service.
Marian Newsom Colette, the victim’s sister, submitted her DNA to GEDmatch, a service that compares DNA data samples from various testing companies. The two samples matched and East Haven police were finally able to come up with a name for Jane Doe: Patricia Meledy Newsom.
Newsom Colette last saw her sister when she was nine years old when she disappeared from her boarding school in the Monticello, New York area. Police said Newsom ran away from school with a friend in 1972 and headed toward Maine.
As the years went by, Newsom launched Colette FindPatriciaNewsom Facebook page. She said during a press conference that she also decided to add her DNA to GEDmatch. An officer in Tennessee, where Colette lives, took a DNA swab.
I traveled to Connecticut to report to the police on Monday. It was a moment of great relief when Colette Newsom received a call from the police about her sister’s identification.
“I always knew in my heart that she was gone,” she said during Monday’s news conference. “And just knowing that other people cared, there was another side that was looking and that I could bring her home.”
East Haven Police
Never quite cold case police, Captain Joseph Murgo said, in 2020 began exploring the possibility of exhuming Newsom’s grave at State Street Cemetery. The cemetery has been inactive since 2010, so there were difficulties locating the teen’s burial site.
Murgo said they located what they believed was the teen’s burial place in June 2022 and exhumed a body. They are devastated when they discover they have exhumed the wrong body. Police said the body that was exhumed was of a man, but they did not identify him afterward.
“We were frustrated and frustrated, but we knew we had to move on,” Murgo said during the news conference.
Murgo said they used a ground penetrating radar service, which scans areas underground and creates high-resolution images of the scanned material, to search for the teen’s coffin and discovered that there were about five times more chests buried in the cemetery than expected. They found the correct number in July 2022.
And the casket was extracted DNA samples Collected and turned over to Identifinders International, a forensic genetic genealogy service. DNA was linked to Newsom Colette’s own sample, allowing police to identify her sister.
Now that Newsom has been identified, Murgo said the police can focus on investigating the murders. Even with no arrests, Newsom-Collette said she has already experienced a major shutdown.
Of the police investigation, she said, “Because whoever did this to my sister, whoever it was, they’re either going to meet their maker soon or they’re going to meet these fine people.” “So either way, it won’t go well for them.”
Investigators and Newsom Colette have asked anyone with information to come forward. They are looking for the friend, the boarding school the teen attended, and anyone else who was at the school during that time to apply. Their parents are not alive to share any information, Newsom-Collette said. Their mother died before the teen’s disappearance, Newsom Colette said, and their father died several years after her disappearance.
“If you know something and you haven’t said anything all these years, we all have reasons for what we do or don’t do,” Newsom-Collette said. “it is time.”
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