The still-unknown girl was bludgeoned to death beyond recognition and dumped on debris just outside a Blairstown burial ground 30 years ago today
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30 years later, Princess Doe's unsolved murder still pushes investigators to find answers
By Richard Khavkine/The Star-Ledger
on July 15, 2012 at 8:15 AM
She wore a simple short-sleeved, candy-apple-red top and an ankle-length wraparound skirt.
Her brown hair was down to her shoulders, and the fingernails on her right hand were polished red.
She looked as young as 14, but she could have been 18.
Her crucifix, ornate and singular, hung from a beaded, 14-karat gold chain draped around her neck.
She was bludgeoned to death beyond recognition and dumped on debris just outside a Blairstown burial ground, 30 years ago today.
She was buried there a few months later, under a majestic maple tree, about 100 feet from where a caretaker at the Cedar Ridge Cemetery stumbled upon her body.
She is still without a proper name.
"She was somebody’s daughter, maybe someone’s sibling. She had friends. She walked this Earth," said Stephen Speirs Jr., a lieutenant with the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office, and since 1999 the lead investigator into the girl’s death.
Speirs, 50, stood a few feet from her grave site last week. He was expressing both hope that she would be identified and frustration that, three decades after her killing, she was still unknown. And that her killer could still be walking this Earth.
"You find out who she is, you find out who did this," said now-retired Blairstown Lt. Eric Kranz, who led the initial investigation into the killing.
Despite dozens of leads, many tantalizing, that ultimately proved false or inconclusive, both men are more confident now than ever that the girl — who Kranz named "Princess Doe" in the hopes she would not become another forever-anonymous Jane — will be identified.
"I would be shocked if we don’t get closure," said Kranz, 65, who left the police department in 1985.
Last week, he was putting up notices announcing today’s noontime memorial service for Princess Doe. Kranz said he still thinks of her "every day, every waking hour."
Very little is known about the girl. A post-mortem determined she was Caucasian and non-Hispanic. She had double piercings through her left ear and bore no surgical scars, birthmarks or tattoos. She was well-nourished, and she didn’t appear to have been homeless.
But she could have been nearly anyone, and come from nearly anywhere.
"We can’t narrow in," Speirs said, as traffic rumbled past on nearby Route 94 and crows cawed from perches in the cemetery’s trees. "It’s been hard to tell."
The chances of catching a killer typically start to diminish after about 48 hours. But enabled by breakthroughs in forensic science, evidence collected three decades ago might just be starting to yield clues.
"In a case like this," Speirs said, "time is on my side. There’s so many more things I can do."
On Friday, Speirs received a half-dozen sketches based on a CT scan of the girl’s skull.
"This is what she would have looked like before she was murdered," he said.
Recently, Speirs had the girl’s sweater top and patterned skirt put on a mannequin that duplicated Princess Doe’s 5-foot, 2-inch, 105-pound frame.
"It almost came to life," he said. "It spoke to me; I think it will speak to the public."
Last week, a forensics lab in Utah received 40 strands of the girl’s hair. Those locks contain the chemical composition of the water the girl was drinking for as long as her hair was growing.
Because chemicals in water vary slightly and in predictable patterns according to a particular combination of geography and climate, "we know where to expect to find that isotope in a landscape," said Lesley Chesson, an analytical chemist with IsoForensics Services in Salt Lake City.
By the end of the month or in early August, Chesson will have helped Speirs map out Princess Doe’s whereabouts week by week for about a year before her death.
"We can take our resources and saturate that region," he said.
And yet more testing of crime-scene DNA — almost a cliché in criminal inquiries now but not even on the investigative radar 30 years ago — will soon be under way, he said.
Where an accurate profile being done in the mid-1980s might have required drops of blood, said Dixie Peters, the technical leader at the missing-persons unit at the University of North Texas’ Health Science Center in Fort Worth, "now we need something very, very small."
In the coming weeks, Speirs will address just such a package to Peters’ unit: "We may have some trace (DNA) that was not contributed by the victim," he said.
Through the decades, forensics analyses have eliminated dozens of leads and possible matches.
It’s disappointing, but you’re whittling it down," said Speirs, who will retire from the prosecutor’s office at the end of the month but will stay close to the investigation.
But for all of what science can determine, he said, the best ally he might have is someone’s conscience.
"Somebody may decide, 'It’s time for me to talk,'" he said.
Or maybe the memory of someone who might have known the girl will be jarred by renewed attention to the case.
The investigation into Princess Doe’s death has reached far beyond this quaint, rural corner of the state, where green rolling hills lead to the Delaware Water Gap.
Kranz said that because of his inquiries to police jurisdictions throughout the country, 27 disappearances and three murders were solved as investigations were reinvigorated in dozens of missing-persons cases.
But a solution to the case that matters most to the two detectives has remained frustratingly elusive.
After the initial investigation into Princess Doe’s death concluded, township residents paid for her burial and a simple headstone.
"Missing from home," the engraving reads. "Dead among strangers / Remembered by all / Born ? — Found July 15, 1982."
Speirs and Kranz just want to add a name.
Jerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerWarren County Prosecutor's Office Lieutenant of Detectives Stephen Speirs is seen at the grave site of Princess Doe in the Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown.
Photos provided by the Warren County Prosecutor's Office show the outfit Princess Doe was wearing, along with her necklace (inset).
Richard Raska/The Star-Ledger A 1983 Star-Ledger photo shows the fresh grave of Princess Doe.
