Morgan County Jane Doe Has Had a DNA Profile Since 2007. She Still Does Not Have a Name.

A red-haired woman was strangled and left below a West Virginia lovers’ lane in 1950. In 2007, investigators dug her up to collect DNA. They got a profile. They did not get a name. West Virginia now has the system that could give her one.

The Woman Below the Road

Let me tell you what stopped me about this case. It is not the 76 years. Plenty of cases are older. It is that someone already did the hard part. They got a court order, opened a grave, recovered bone, and produced a DNA profile. And then the case stopped exactly where the technology of 2007 stopped.

Here is the documented record. On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 10, 1950, Benjamin Mills of Hancock, Maryland, was hunting mushrooms along a little-used stretch of old U.S. 522 just inside West Virginia. Locals called the road a lovers’ lane. It sat about three-tenths of a mile from the Maryland line and a couple hundred feet from the Potomac. Below the road, at the foot of an embankment, Mills found the body of a woman with red hair. She was nude. Searchers combed the area for hours and found nothing: no clothing, no jewelry, not even the indentation a ring leaves on a finger.

Two Martinsburg physicians performed the autopsy overnight at Hunter Funeral Home in Berkeley Springs. A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of strangulation and a broken neck. The doctors also found three separate concussions and bruising to her head and face. They found no evidence of rape. Decades later, Morgan County Prosecutor S.D. Helsley still remembered the autopsy room and told the Morgan Messenger there was “a strong smell of tobacco.”

She was about 35, though later estimates widened to 30 to 50. She stood about 5 feet 5 inches and weighed 125 to 130 pounds. Laboratory tests confirmed her red hair was natural. Her teeth were her own. She wore a size 4½ narrow shoe, and one heel was blistered, as if she had been walking. She carried a body’s worth of history: a W-shaped scar in the center of her forehead, a Y-shaped scar on her right wrist, a 10-inch hysterectomy scar, a 4-inch appendectomy scar, a strawberry birthmark on her calf, and freckles across her hands and forearms. Her hands were noticeably small.

The next day, Morgan County Sheriff Paul Munson and State Police Trooper Charles Burke carried her fingerprints to the FBI. They were not in the criminal files. The Doe Network now lists her prints as no longer available.

Seven Women Who Were Not Her

The 1950 investigation was not lazy. State Police, the Morgan County sheriff, Maryland State Police, Washington County, Maryland, prosecutors, Hancock police, and the FBI all worked it. Burke led for West Virginia. What the investigators did not have was a name, so they spent years trying on other women’s names to see if one fit.

A former county commissioner said he had picked up a red-haired, chain-smoking hitchhiker near Altoona, Pennsylvania, who said she was headed to marry a truck driver. He dropped her in Bedford, and she complained about a blistered heel. A bus driver said a red-haired woman with a one-way ticket from Columbus, Ohio, got off in Hancock at 1:35 a.m. on May 5. That lead took investigators to Columbus and then to Lottie Gibson, 31, an Akron native. In July 1950, her relatives reported she was alive and living in Michigan, and she came to Hancock to show Maryland authorities in person.

The list kept growing. A Virginia woman thought to be the victim turned up alive in Florida in 1951. Another candidate was excluded in 1955. In 1974, when State Police Cpl. Don Sharp reopened the case, a partial fingerprint comparison with a missing woman came back inconclusive. Candidates were ruled out because their hair was dyed or because they wore dentures. The only person ever taken into custody, a 31-year-old man who claimed he had seen the body a day early, admitted he made the story up and passed two polygraph tests.

On May 23, 1950, Hunter Funeral Home buried her in the Potter’s Field. Flowers appeared on the grave on Christmas Day 1950 and again at Easter. Police traced the Easter roses to an elderly woman who simply felt sorry for her. The grave has no marker.

What the 2007 DNA Was Built to Do

The exhumation happened because of one family. A private investigator in Utah was working for the elderly daughters of Elizabeth Ann “Anna” Bouslog Davis, a redhead born in Illinois in 1902 who had appendectomy and hysterectomy scars and was last heard from in California in the early 1940s. Swiger said photo superimposition lined up her jaw and hairline with the Jane Doe. That was enough to justify opening the grave.

On August 22, 2007, State Police troopers began digging in the Potter’s Field. When remains appeared, the FBI’s Pittsburgh team took over. They found more than they expected: a second set of bones, probably male, in the same grave, which no cemetery record accounted for. Investigators bagged the remains separately as Individual 1 and Individual 2.

It took almost two years to get results. In 2009, the Morgan Messenger reported that the University of North Texas lab found no link to the Davis family or the second family that had come forward. Four years later, Swiger told the Associated Press the profile could still identify her. “It’s just a matter of doing the DNA to show a kinship,” he said.

That sentence is the whole problem. A kinship test needs a relative to compare against. A DNA profile sitting in a missing-persons database only produces a hit if someone in her family has walked into a police station and given a reference sample for a missing woman. If she was a traveler, as investigators believed from the start, or if her family never reported her, or if everyone who would have reported her died decades ago, that sample does not exist.

Investigative genetic genealogy removed that ceiling in 2018. Instead of waiting for a relative to come forward, it compares hundreds of thousands of genetic markers against public genealogy databases to find second, third, and fourth cousins, then builds family trees until a candidate appears. It is how most long-unidentified Does in this country now get their names back. It does not need anyone to have reported her missing. It needs a usable sample and someone willing to submit it.

West Virginia Built the System. Is She In It?

Since 2024, West Virginia has assembled nearly every piece this case needs. Its Forensic Genealogy Commission brings together the State Police, the State Police Forensic Laboratory, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the Marshall University Forensic Science Center, the WV Fusion Center, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Institute, and the WV Intelligence Exchange. In December 2025, Marshall reported the Commission had processed samples from more than 32 cases and made two identifications within three months. On October 5, 2026, Marshall announced a $2.5 million Department of Justice grant, backed by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, to expand its ability to generate the SNP profiles genetic genealogy depends on.

State law points in the same direction. W. Va. Code § 15-3D-7 requires the medical examiner to submit identifying information on unidentified remains to NamUs and the State Police and to pursue mitochondrial or nuclear DNA testing. W. Va. Code § 15A-12-9 directs the Fusion Center to maintain a database of every cold case, including unidentified remains, with a field for whether reference DNA from the victim exists.

Read those statutes against this case and the gaps show up fast. The medical examiner duties attach to remains in the medical examiner’s custody. This was a 1950 coroner’s case, and the woman was reburied, so no medical examiner file clearly owns her. The Fusion Center statute says agencies “may provide” most of the information, not that they must. A newer law requiring permanent retention of evidence covers missing-person cases, not unidentified-remains homicides like this one. And the medical examiner’s office is already stretched. A 2021 legislative audit found 49 unidentified bodies in frozen storage there, with deaths dating to 1977. In 2023, the office’s chief administrator told lawmakers “our performance is not satisfactory” on autopsy turnaround.

There is also a quieter problem with the public record itself. The State Police cold case page lists her case as June 1950, with an older age range and no contact name. She was found in May. That page is the first place a relative, a genealogist, or a reporter would look. A wrong month on a 76-year-old case is a small error. It is also a signal of how much attention the file is getting.

What Getting Her Name Back Would Take

None of this requires new law or new science. It requires someone to pick up the file.

I keep thinking about that blistered heel. She was walking somewhere. Somebody, somewhere, expected her to arrive, or wondered for years why she never wrote back. In 1950, the only way to find that person was to guess her name. In 2026, the guessing is optional. West Virginia has the lab, the commission, and the federal money. She has a DNA profile and a grave with no name on it. The distance between those two things is a submission form.