Cold case: Slain Connecticut teen identified after nearly 50 years
Police have identified a teenage girl nearly 50 years after her body was found bound, gagged, wrapped in a tarp and dumped in a drainage ditch in Connecticut, officials said Monday.
Investigators never gave up on identifying the Jane Doe, who was found in East Haven on Aug. 16, 1975, they said at a press conference. Without any identification, officers hit a block, but they continued their investigation into her asphyxiation death. In 2022, they exhumed her body from where it was buried in nearby Hamden and took a DNA sample. It was sent to Identifinders International, a forensic genetic genealogy service.
Maryann Newsom Collette, the victim's sister, had submitted her DNA to GEDmatch, a service that compares DNA data samples from different testing companies. The two samples matched and police in East Haven were finally able to put a name to Jane Doe: Patricia Meleady Newsom.
Newsom Collette last saw her sister when she was 9 years old when she went missing from her boarding school in the Monticello, New York area. Newsom ran away from the school with a friend in 1972 and headed toward Maine, police said.
As the years passed, Newsom Collette launched the FindPatriciaNewsom Facebook page. She also decided to take add her DNA to GEDmatch, she said during a press conference. An officer in Tennessee, where Collete lives, took a DNA swab.
She traveled to Connecticut for Monday's police announcement. It was a moment of tremendous relief when Newsom Collete got the call from the police about her sister's identification.
"I always knew in my heart that she was gone," she said during the Monday press conference. "And just knowing that other people cared, that there was another side that was looking and that I could bring her home."
Police, who'd never given up on the cold case, in 2020 began exploring the possibility of exhuming Newsom's grave at State Street Cemetery, East Haven Captain Joseph Murgo said. The cemetery has been defunct since 2010, so there were difficulties in pinpointing where the teen was buried.
In June of 2022, they located what they thought was the teen's burial location and exhumed a body, Murgo said. They were devastated to find they'd exhumed the wrong body. Police said the body exhumed was a male, but they did not further identify him.
"We were frustrated and discouraged, but we knew we had to press on," Murgo said during the press conference.
They used ground penetrating radar service, which scans underground areas and creates high-resolution images of the scanned material, to search for the teen's coffin and discovered there were around five times more caskets buried in the cemetery than anticipated, Murgo said. They found the correct one in July 2022.
The casket was exhumed and DNA samples were collected and turned over to Identifinders International, a forensic genetic genealogy service. The DNA was connected to Newsom Collete's own sample, allowing police to identify her sister.
Now that Newsom has been identified, Murgo said police can focus on the homicide investigation. Even with no arrests made, Newsom Collette said she's already had a lot of closure.
"Because whoever did this to my sister, whoever they are, they're either going to meet their maker soon or they're going to meet these fine folks," she said about the police investigating. "So either way, it's not going to go well for them."
Investigators and Newsom Collette have asked for anyone with information to come forward. They're looking for the friend, the boarding school the teen attended and anyone else who was at the school during that time to come forward. Their parents are not alive to share any information, Newsom Collette said. Their mother died before the teen went missing and their father died several years after she vanished, Newsom Collette said.
"If you knew something and didn't say something for all these years, we all have reasons for what we do or don't do," Newsom Collette said. "Now's the time."
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