Authorities have identified the body of an Arizona woman who was strangled and left in a trunk in St. Petersburg, Fla., more than 50 years ago, seeking public help to identify the killer and find her daughters. the police announced. Tuesday.
Police used genetic genealogy to identify Sylvia June Atherton (long known as “Trunk Lady” because of where her body was found) as a victim of the St. Petersburg City Police. called The city’s “oldest and most infamous unsolved case”.
Police said Atherton, a mother of five from Tucson, Arizona, was 41 when she died in 1969. On Halloween day, in the wooded area behind the restaurant at 4200 South 34th Street, he was found partially clothed and wrapped in a large plastic bag in the trunk of a black steamer in what the police called a “Western style.” Two police officers found her body strangled with a “bolo tie”. Petersburg Police Department said in a Facebook post. She also had “a visible wound on her head,” according to the police department’s Facebook post.
Witnesses said two white men left the trunk after carrying it from a pickup truck, Deputy Chief Michael Kovachev told reporters on Tuesday.
Kovachev added that the trunk was the property of Atherton and her husband Scott Brown. Brown died in Las Vegas in 1999, leaving no mention of his wife in court records, according to a police Facebook post. Kovachev also said he had not reported her missing and did not list her in her bankruptcy records.
“You see there reasoning that we need to fill a gap,” he said, adding that police are still relying on the public to provide any information they may have. He added that he was asking for help.
Atherton’s body was exhumed in February 2010 from a local grave (where she was buried as “Jane Doe”) using degraded tooth and bone samples, authorities said. Multiple efforts over the years by investigative authorities to identify him had failed.
“Especially in older cases, DNA was not considered,” Kovachev said. told NBC affiliate WFLA in Tampa.. “Evidence preservation was never as well thought out as the way we do it today.”
but The emergence of genetic genealogy — used to identify Several victim, and Suspect, has brought new opportunities to investigators working on unsolved cases in recent years. (The St. Petersburg police department also announced on Tuesday that it had identified the death suspect in the 1997 murder of then-18-year-old Richard Evans.)
Petersburg police detectives found the original untested Atherton hair sample taken during the autopsy and sent it to a Texas laboratory earlier this year, police said. The samples gave her a DNA profile, investigators went through her DNA database to identify her relatives, and finally took DNA samples from several of her children to confirm her identity. obtained.
One of Atherton’s daughters, Shiren Gates of California, told investigators that her mother left herself and her brother with her father in Tucson as she left for Chicago with her husband, Brown. She has a five-year-old daughter, Kimberly Ann Brown. her adult son Gary Sullivan; An adult daughter, Donna, and her husband, David Lyndhurst.
Police are still pursuing Kimberly and Donna and believe they “may have further information about the incident,” said a statement Tuesday.
Gates, who was 9 years old at the time of his mother’s murder, told WFLA that his mother’s fate remained a mystery until she was identified.
“We had no idea what happened to her,” she said.
This article was originally published NBC News.com
