She Remained Unidentified for 37 Years

Have you heard of Ohio’s Buckskin Girl case? Despite being found only hours after her death in 1981, the identity of a young woman found in a roadside ditch in Miami County, Ohio, remained unknown for decades. Citizen sleuths created websites about the woman. Others created a Wikipedia page about her. In 2009, forensic anthropologist, Dr. Beth Murray, Delhi native and professor at Mount St. Joseph University, became involved with cold case initiatives through her work with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). In conjunction with the Miami County Sheriff’s Office and the DNA Doe Project, Dr. Murray helped solve the case in 2018. It was the world’s first publicly-announced identification using forensic genetic genealogy. Dr. Murray will present a history of the case and explain how genetic genealogy uses ancestry to find leads to identify unknown persons.