Authorities said human remains buried for decades in a California cemetery marked “Jane Doe” have been identified as Christine Lister, a missing Navajo woman from northern Arizona. Lister’s family said they received an “explicit” letter written to her from an anonymous person years after she disappeared.
The Madera County Sheriff’s Office has not publicly released the cause of Lester’s death because it does not want to jeopardize the investigation, CBS affiliate KPHO-TV reports. reported Wed.
Officials with the sheriff’s office near Fresno said a woman was found dead on the side of a country road in 1987 but could not be identified at the time. The body was exhumed in 2020 to create a DNA profile that authorities were able to match to Lester’s siblings earlier this year.
Lister’s family received the remains on Monday. Her siblings are planning a procession on Friday to escort the remains from Flagstaff to a family cemetery in the Navajo Nation, where memorial services will be held — 36 years to the date of her disappearance and on a day dedicated to awareness of the missing and dead. Indigenous people all over the world.
Almost there 1,500 missing American Indians and Alaska Natives It is included in the database of the National Crime Information Center, according to the Ministry of the Interior.
Twenty-four-year-old Lester told her family that she was planning to hitchhike—a common practice in the Navajo Nation—from Indian Wells to Flagstaff Center in May 1987 to buy gifts for Mother’s Day. Her brothers said they did not know if she had made it there.
“We always had this hope that she would come through that door and introduce her family,” the brother, Herbert Rockwell, told KPHO.
Lister’s siblings said they cherished the good memories they had of her while she was alive.
“I’d just like to say ‘Welcome home, Kristen, Shady,’ which means big sister,” Rockwell said.
Her siblings told the station that they had no idea who killed her but received a strange message written to Christine more than five years after she disappeared.
“To this day we don’t know who wrote it. She left in ’87, and the letter was written again in ’92 or ’93. And that was really weird because she didn’t have a boyfriend that we know of,” Rockwell told KPHO. “It was kind of blunt. I don’t think Kristen would ever do some of the things this guy mentioned. To me that was…he knew something about Kristen.”
The station reported that this letter is now in the hands of the authorities.
The Madera County Sheriff’s Office is asking anyone with information about the Lester murder to contact the Madera County Sheriff’s Office at 559-675-7770.
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