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RSS Can forensic advances ID victim after 38 years in Galloway Twp. cold case?
By EMILY PREVITI Staff Writer, 609-272-7221
Posted: Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Galloway Township Police are asking for help on a cold case after advances in DNA technology helped them develop composite images of a girl whose badly decomposed body was found in a wooded area off the Garden State Parkway in 1971.
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP - New technology and a police detective's passion have revived the search for answers in a 38-year-old unsolved homicide.
Three hunters discovered a decomposing body in the woods east of the Garden State Parkway in Galloway Township on Dec. 6, 1971. Through the following years, police canvassed local motels and chased tips in and out of the state.
Forensic work determined she was a petite teenage girl with light brown hair and perfect teeth. But how she died and who may have caused her death remained unknown.
Detective Donna Buccafurni has been chipping away at the case during rare moments of downtime during the past four months, taking advantage of modern forensics tools.
"The detectives at the time did a lot of work," she said Tuesday as she flipped through the hundreds of plastic sleeves in a red binder.
Investigation reports written on a manual typewriter give way to hundreds of letters, many with photos, locks of hair and dental records attached, from families wondering whether the body belonged to their missing daughter.
Investigators reached out to media all over the country. It is likely the girl did not live nearby, because her description did not match that of any of the local missing persons, Buccafurni said.
Her body might have been dumped by someone driving along the Garden State Parkway, who was long gone by the time the body was found, an estimated six or more months after she was believed to have died, according to Lt. Shawn Mildren of the Galloway police.
Black and white photos of the scene 37 years ago show remains barely discernible from the leaves. The skull sits eight feet away from the rest. Animals likely moved it, Buccafurni said.
After an autopsy, which determined the girl might have been strangled, police took the remains to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where an anthropologist studied them to help a composite artist come up with a sketch.
Despite their efforts and national media attention, the case was still unsolved in 2002 when another detective re-examined the case, hoping advances in DNA and forensic imaging could revive the investigation.
Nothing came of that attempt because the officer could not locate the girl's remains, figuring they were destroyed by a fire at the police station during the 1980s.
When Buccafurni picked up the file four months ago, she called the Smithsonian. The remains were still there.
Buccafurni enlisted the aid of a forensic anthropologist from the Smithsonian and a forensic artist from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They returned a more comprehensive description of the victim.
Buccafurni plans to have the remains sent to the New Jersey State Police Crime Lab, where technicians will check a DNA sample against a database in hopes that her parents submitted samples of their DNA.
"If not, at least she's in there, if anything else ever comes up," Buccafurni said.
Buccafurni's work has already closed another cold case.
One woman wrote repeatedly over the years, so Buccafurni contacted police in Dayton, Ohio, to tell them the body might be the woman's 16-year-old daughter, who had run away. They found out the pair had reunited more than a decade ago and moved to Virginia, so Dayton police could close that case, Buccafurni said.
Buccafurni, whose father, John Higbee, served 27 years on the Galloway force, has long held a particular curiosity about unsolved cases. In addition to this case, she wants to probe unsolved homicides dating back as far as the 1950s.
"I have four others, but I focused on this one mainly because I am a mother," said Buccafurni, who has a 2-year-old daughter and 7-month-old son. "As a police officer, of course I'll continue to investigate, but there's some poor family out there. Just to bring them closure would be nice."
