FL TIDY ISLAND JANE DOE: WF, 11-20, found on the edge of Sarasota Bay near Tidy Island, FL - 9 Apr 1983

[Romulus]

488UFFL - Unidentified Female

Reconstruction of the decedent.

Date of Discovery: April 9, 1983
Location of Discovery: Tidy Island, Manatee County, Florida
Estimated Date of Death: 1-7 days prior
State of Remains: Unknown; sources differ
Cause of Death: Drowning under unknown circumstances

Physical Description
Estimated Age: 11-20 years old
Race: White, possibly Hispanic and/or Native American
Sex: Female
Height: 5'4" to 5'5"
Weight: 100 to 110 lbs.
Hair Color: Dark brown, shoulder-length
Eye Color: Unknown
Distinguishing Marks/Features: No scars, tattoos or previous injuries. Pierced ears. Small breasts.

Identifiers
Dentals: Not available. Natural teeth, with crowding of the upper and lower teeth, most prominent anteriorly. No fillings in place, but the first molars on the right and left in the lower jaw both had cavitary defects which were smooth-walled, deep and slightly discolored brown-black. The wisdom teeth were not erupted.
Fingerprints: Not available.
DNA: Not available.

Clothing & Personal Items
Clothing: None.
Jewelry: None.
Additional Personal Items: Unknown

Circumstances of Discovery
The female was located by construction workers on the edge of Sarasota Bay, ten feet off Tidy Island, in the Cortez area, on April 9, 1983. She was found in about a foot of water.

Foul play has not been ruled out, although the medical examiner believed her death was accidental. There was, however, an injury to her head and the sheriff's department is treating the case as suspicious.

The location where the female is buried in the Manatee County Cemetery is unknown, as there were no grave markers put in place for indignant burials until 1986. Efforts were made to locate her body in the late 2000s for DNA testing and additional examination, but were unsuccessful.

Investigating Agency(s)
Agency Name: District 12 Medical Examiner
Agency Contact Person: Russell Vega
Agency Phone Number: 1-941-361-6909
Agency E-Mail: N/A
Agency Case Number: 1983-MA-04

Agency Name: Manatee County Sheriff's Office
Agency Contact Person: N/A
Agency Phone Number: 1-941-747-3011
Agency E-Mail: N/A
Agency Case Number: 1983-MA-04

NCIC Case Number: U482585691
NamUs Case Number: 1265
NCMEC Case Number: 1184245

Information Source(s)
NamUs
NCMEC
FLUIDDB
Crime Watchers

488UFFL

#JaneDoe was found floating in the water near Tidy Island in #FLORIDA back in 1983 and we still don't know her name!

Manatee County Jane Doe was a girl or young woman who was found dead in 1983 in Florida. She may have been killed by Christopher Wilder

www.crimewatchers.net

*CLICK THE REPORT BUTTON IF YOU'D LIKE THIS CASE MOVED TO THE GENERAL DISCUSSION AREA TO BE OPENED FOR COMMENTING.

 

[Akoya]

Manatee County Jane Doe

On April 9, 1983 an unidentified female was found in the water approximately 10 feet off the beach on the southwest side of Tidy Island, in Sarasota Bay, Manatee County, FL. It is estimated she had been deceased for about one day.

 

[Akoya]

http://icaremissingpersonscoldcases...female-found-in-1983-in-Manatee-CountyFlorida

Saturday, Mar. 07, 2009

Investigators dig up areas of New Memphis Cemetery, looking for remains of woman killed in 1983

By CARL MARIO NUDI - cnudi@bradenton.com

The woman's nude body was found washed ashore off Tidy Island on April 9, 1983; her identity and how she died were a mystery.

Almost 26 years later, with a renewed effort to solve the case, another mystery surrounds the woman's death: the location of her body.

Investigators spent Thursday and Friday at the New Memphis Cemetery, Manatee County's burial ground for the indigent deceased, searching for Plot 244.


David Winterhalter, director of investigations for the local medical examiner's office, prepares to look into a grave in the Manatee County indigent cemetery in Palmetto Friday, in hopes of finding a Jane Doe drowning victim from 1983. Investigators are treating it as a suspicious death and will send her bones to a forensic lab in Gainesville to extract DNA, and to the FBI registry in hopes of finding a match and an identity.

After excavating several areas with a mechanical backhoe and the back-breaking labor of a work crew from the county jail, investigators from the medical examiner's office and the Manatee County Sheriff's Office decided to stop digging until they have a better idea where the body may have been buried.

"We were unsuccessful in locating the body of Jane Doe," said David Winterhalter, director of investigation for the medical examiner. "We didn't want to disturb any more grave sites than necessary."

Det. Bud Johnson, of the sheriff's office's criminal investigation division, was hoping to obtain bone fragments in order to extract DNA samples and register them with the FBI.

"Technology has grown by leaps and bounds," Johnson said. "We have techniques now we didn't dream of even four or five years ago."

They don't have any new leads, but the Tidy Island incident came up during a review of unsolved cases. According to the Herald archives, construction workers noticed the woman's body floating face down about 30 yards offshore in Sarasota Bay.

By the time deputies arrived, the body of the woman, thought to be in her teens or early 20s, had floated to shore.

An autopsy determined the woman had been dead from two to seven days, and that she may have drowned.

Even though there was a red gash on her head, the medical examiner believed the death was accidental. Nonetheless, until there is a positive identification, Johnson, who has been with the sheriff's office since 1971, said the case will be treated as suspicious.

When they can find the skeleton, it will be sent to the University of Florida Pound Laboratory in Gainesville, where a forensic anthropologist will do tests and extract DNA samples.

The re-examination of the remains may provide new clues on how the woman died, and the DNA will be sent to several registries, including the Florida Unidentified Decedents Database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and the FBI CODIX.

"If we can get her DNA in that database," Winterhalter said, "then maybe we can identify her."

The body hasn't been found because of poor record-keeping methods in the early 1980s, officials contend.

The grave sites were not marked until 1986, said Gladys Rumph, of the county Community Services Department, which overseas the cemetery. Winterhalter is working off a chart that indicated Jane Doe was buried four sites from the end of a row, but there were no markers showing where the first site was located.

The work crews dug several feet down in one area and a long probe was poked into the ground to see if it struck any type of burial container.

Because burial vaults were not used back then, the simple coffins used for the indigent deceased are deteriorated.

Bones were found in one grave site Friday, and Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Wilson A. Broussard Jr. examined them but determined they were not those of Jane Doe. The remains were returned to the grave site and reburied.

Johnson said the exhumation process will be put on hold until they can better identify the location of the grave.

"We need to do more research of the records," he said, "and possibly use ground-penetrating radar."

 

[Akoya]

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.true-crime/uWLxos-4KkU

http://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=47724


Who was buried here?

posted 06/22/01

By JENNIFER SULLIVAN
jennifer...@herald-trib.com

Tugging on the bright orange body bag, the team removed the woman's body
from its Tampa grave. Perhaps now, after 18 years, she could be identified.

As they slid the bag into an ambulance bound for Bradenton last week, the
police and pathologists, some attending their first exhumation, were
hopeful. Perhaps they would finally be able to link the remains found off
Anna Maria Island in 1982 to a Pasco County 16-year-old who had been missing
since April of that year.

But after several hours of comparing Wendy Huggy's dental charts to the
murder victim's skull and mouth, four forensic dentists said the decay and
bone loss were too different.

The room fell silent. Pasco County sheriff's detectives were devastated.

But Wilson Broussard and David Winterhalter of the District 12 Medical
Examiner's Office - now that they're over their initial shock - have started
to view the body with hope.

Both believe they have a chance to use modern technology to help them find
out who their Jane Doe is and who murdered her.

Similarities
Countless eyes have scanned Huggy's case file over the years. She was a
gaunt teen with feathered brown hair and, as her grandmother Paula Richards
describes, "chocolate eyes."
Huggy


On April 7, 1982, she had been at a friend's apartment in Clearwater, and
was expected back at Richards' house in Holiday. She was to have started a
new job at Wendy's the next day. She never came home.
The Pasco Sheriff's Office has continued to mail fliers describing the
teen - the county's only longtime missing child case - to other sheriff's
offices, police departments and medical examiner's offices. The Florida
Department of Law Enforcement has placed a black-and-white photo of Huggy on
its Missing Children Information Clearinghouse Web site.

The photo and short description of Huggy arrived at the District 12 Medical
Examiner's office in April. Looking for a match, Winterhalter, the chief
investigator, thumbed through the short list of unidentified women whose
autopsies had been performed at his office.

Winterhalter was startled by what he found.

A Manatee County Jane Doe found in the Gulf of Mexico in September 1982,
five months after Huggy disappeared, was strikingly similar to the Pasco
County teen. Both women were Caucasian, weighed 110 pounds and had brown
hair.

When Huggy disappeared, she was wearing turquoise jewelry. There were two
silver and turquoise rings on the left hand of the Manatee County body,
which fishermen found 26.5 miles northwest of Longboat Pass.
Winterhalter called authorities in Pasco County.

A few weeks later, Pasco sheriff's Sgt. David Buhs and Detective Robert Hamm
appeared in dentist Barry Lipton's office in Seminole in Pinellas County.

Lipton, when he is not drilling out cavities and pulling teeth, examines the
teeth of murder victims and criminal suspects. The deputies asked him to
compare Huggy's dental chart with the Jane Doe's.

Lipton studied the charts, one filled out by Huggy's Chicago dentist in
1979, and one created by a former Bradenton medical examiner.

"The same teeth Jane Doe has filings in, Wendy Huggy had cavities in," he
said. But Jane Doe had more bone loss.

Pasco investigators decided they had enough evidence to justify an
exhumation.

"Basically, it was the closest we've ever been," Buhs said. "We had a good
feeling about it, although the doctor had some doubts."

A concrete block
At 1:50 p.m. on Sept. 5, 1982, the crew of the fishing boat Smithsonian
radioed a report to the Coast Guard: They had found a body floating in the
Gulf. The fishermen tied a buoy to the corpse so authorities could find it.

When the Coast Guard arrived with a Manatee County sheriff's detective an
hour later, there was no body. After an hour of searching, they realized the
corpse had floated four miles northwest.

According to a sheriff's report, the body was "wrapped in a green bedspread
and a beige, brown and orange afghan."

A white rope had been looped around the woman's chest and waist, and was
tied to a single concrete block. It took five men to pull the body, which
was covered with crabs, out of the water.

The official cause of death listed in the 1982 autopsy report was drowning,
but interviewed on Tuesday, Broussard declined to go into detail about his
findings.

Broussard would only say that the woman "may have been alive when she was
put in the water" and that drowning was "one" of her causes of death.

The 1982 report, turned in by another medical examiner, mentioned no other
injuries to the woman's body. Investigators at the time believed she was in
her late 20s.

The concrete block reminded Hamm, the Pasco detective, of another case. He
wants to talk with St. Petersburg police detectives to see if Jane Doe's
murder could be connected with convicted murderer Oba Chandler.
Wilson Broussard says the bones will be taken next week for examination by
a UF forensic anthropologist.
(STAFF PHOTO/ CAROLYN KASTER)


In 1994, Chandler was convicted of tying Joan Rodgers, 36, and daughters
Christe, 14, and Michelle, 17, to concrete blocks and tossing them into
Tampa Bay.

Chandler is on death row.

The cases appear similar, but the mother and her daughters were stripped
from the waist down, and the Jane Doe was wearing jeans.

Her body was first taken to Manatee Memorial Hospital, but because of the
odor, hospital staff asked that she be moved to a Bradenton funeral home.

Broussard believes the woman could have been dead for three or four days,
possibly floating to the Gulf from Tampa Bay or from as far away as Key
West.

Because the woman was found in international waters, the case was handed
over to the FBI.

The FBI had the hands and head severed from the corpse, and mailed the hands
to its Washington lab for analysis. A scientist at the Smithsonian
Institution examined the skull.

Since neither test yielded a positive identification, the skull and each
hand were wrapped separately in thick plastic wrap, sealed in plastic
storage containers and mailed back to Florida.

They caught up with the rest of the body in Tampa. Because of the stench,
the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner agreed to store the corpse because
Manatee County had no cooler.

In April 1983, Rest Haven Memorial Park staff held a pauper's funeral for
the unidentified woman.

Closure
After the body was exhumed April 13, the remains were sent to the medical
examiner in Bradenton.
Broussard was shocked when he popped open the container holding the woman's
hands.

He had expected to see both hands decomposed, but because the plastic wrap
bound the right hand so tightly, the second layer of skin was still there.

"There was a matter of luck; it took the right environmental conditions,"
Broussard said.

The right hand yielded five fingerprints; by some accounts, they were better
than the ones taken from the soggy body in 1982.

The Manatee County Sheriff's Office entered the new prints into state and
local databases, but didn't find a match. Detectives are working to get them
entered into the databases maintained by other states and the federal
government.

Broussard said the woman's bones will be taken to the University of Florida
next week for examination by a forensic anthropologist.

While Lipton, who spent hours peering at the murder victim's teeth, said he
believes she was in her late 20s or early 30s at the time of her murder, an
anthropologist should be able tell a more precise age after looking at her
bones.

Lipton said that because Broussard insisted on rinsing out the casket and
sifting through the body bag, five teeth that were missing from the 1982
dental chart have been accounted for.

When Lipton and three other dentists reported their findings, the Pasco
detectives were disappointed that Huggy had not been found.

Richards, Huggy's 76-year-old grandmother, said she sympathizes with the
Pasco County investigators.
"I'm amazed they're working so hard on it," said Richards, a retired
foster-care provider still living in Holiday. "Maybe someday we'll have
closure."

Doctors hope they will eventually be able to gather DNA from the bones,
brown hair and body tissue found in the rusted metal casket.

Said Broussard, "The bottom line is that we are hopeful with prints alone,
or with anthropological work-up, that maybe we'll find out who it is."

 

[Akoya]

http://unidentified.wikia.com/wiki/Manatee_County_Jane_Doe

Manatee County Jane Doe

Manatee County Jane Doe was a girl or young woman who was found dead in 1983 in Florida.

She may have been killed by Christopher Wilder

Manatee County Jane Doe

Sex Female
Race White
Location Tidy Island, Florida
Found April 9, 1983
Unidentified for 33 years
Postmortem interval 24 hours
Body condition Decomposed
(Disputed)
Age approximation 11 - 20
Height approximation 5'4 - 5'5
Weight approximation 100 - 110 pounds
Cause of death Not state

 

[Akoya]

http://www.missingkids.org/poster/NCMU/1184245

Jane Doe 1983

On April 9, 1983 an unidentified female was found in the water approximately 10 feet off the beach on the southwest side of Tidy Island, in Sarasota Bay, Manatee County, FL. It is estimated she had been deceased for about one day. The female had brown medium length hair and pierced ears. Her front teeth were crowded and noticeably crooked. No clothes or jewelry were found with this female. The above clay reconstruction depicts what the female may have looked like in life and was provided by the District 12 Medical Examiner's Office.

Manatee County Sheriff's Office (Florida) 1-941-747-3011 and District 12 Medical Examiner's Office (Florida) 1-941-361-6909

 

[Akoya]

 

[Akoya]

Tidy Island

www.tidyisland.org

96 waterfront residences are spread along one mile of Sarasota Bay and our lake on beautifully landscaped grounds. Only 12 more are potentially buildable.