A human body buried in a California cemetery for decades and marked as ‘Jane Doe’ has been identified as Christine Lester, a Navajo woman who went missing in northern Arizona. officials said. Lester’s family said they received an “obvious” letter addressed to her from an anonymous person years after she went missing.
Madera County Sheriff’s Office not publicly disclosing Lester’s cause of death because it doesn’t want to jeopardize investigation, says CBS affiliate KPHO-TV report on wednesday.
Officials at the sheriff’s office near Fresno said a woman’s body was found next to a local county road in 1987 but could not be identified at the time. Her remains were exhumed in 2020 and DNA profiled. Authorities were able to match her with one of Lester’s brothers earlier this year.
Lester’s family received the remains on Monday. Her siblings are planning a march to escort the remains from Flagstaff to her Nation’s family cemetery on Friday, a day designated to raise awareness of the missing and the murdered. A memorial service will be held there. indigenous peoples around the world.
there is roughly 1,500 missing Native Americans and Alaska Natives It is included in the National Crime Information Center database, according to the Department of the Interior.
Lester, then 24, told his family that he planned to hitchhike (a common practice in the Navajo Nation) from Indian Wells to the Flagstaff Mall in May 1987 to buy gifts for Mother’s Day. Did. She doesn’t know if she made it there, her brother said.
“We always hoped she would come through that door and introduce us to her family,” brother Herbert Rockwell told KPHO.
Lester’s siblings said they cherished the happy memories they had with her when Lester was alive.
“I just want to say, ‘Welcome back, Christine, Shady, this means sister,'” Rockwell said.
Her brother told the station they didn’t know who killed her, but more than five years after she went missing, she received a strange letter written to Christine.
“To this day we don’t know who wrote it. She left in ’87 and the letter was written back in ’92 or ’93. She never had a boyfriend that we know of, so this was really weird,” Rockwell told KPHO. “It was kind of blatant. I don’t think Christine would do some of the things this guy said. To me it was… he knew something about Christine.”
The letter is now in the hands of authorities, the agency said.
The Madera County Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with information about Lester’s murder to call the Madera County Sheriff’s Office at 559-675-7770.
