Thirty years later, advocates say an answer could be near in woman's death

Aug. 2—Fast-moving cars rushed overhead and cicada songs swelled in the Monocacy Valley, nearly eclipsing Kat Johnson's soft voice. She stood at the base of an I-270 embankment, holding a waning candle and gazing at a familiar black-and-white rendering of a woman's face.

Saturday marked 30 years to the day since the woman had been found dead, and her identity remained a mystery.

Twice before, Johnson had found herself here, propping up a tri-fold board in a gravel parking lot and passing out candles to anyone who showed up. Twice before, she'd stood below the highway on the last day of July, recounting the story of Jane Doe just steps from where her decomposing body was discovered.

But on this day, for the first time, Johnson — an advocate for crime victims who has spent decades in the online community of amateur sleuths — had concrete reason for hope.

Maryland State Police have a DNA profile of the victim, spokesperson Elena Russo confirmed. Johnson is convinced the mystery could be solved if that profile is uploaded to a forensic genealogical database, and she's committed to raising the money to make it happen.

"This case could be solved easily," Johnson said.

Police believe the Jane Doe was between the ages of 15 and 29 when she died, and they suspected foul play at the time, according to previous Frederick News-Post reporting. On July 31, 1991, a State Highway Administration worker stumbled across her body while cutting weeds along I-270 at Baker Valley Road within Monocacy National Battlefield.

She was "badly decomposed" at that point, according to the federal National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, lying face-down at the bottom of a 26-foot embankment. Detectives at the time estimated she'd been dead for several weeks. Her exact cause of death isn't known.

Johnson calmly recited the short list of indisputable facts. She was a white female with distinctively protruding front teeth. She wore denim shorts and a tank top. Her hair was brown, and her fingers and toes were painted pink.

For three decades, Jane Doe hasn't left Johnson's mind. She remembers watching the news all those years ago from a Frederick apartment as police reported the discovery for the first time.

Her GoFundMe, with a set goal of $5,000, aims to pay for testing through Texas-based tech company Othram Inc. Its labs specialize in matching forensic DNA samples with genealogical data from sites like GEDMatch, whose original purpose was to aid adoptees searching for their birth parents or people searching for long-lost siblings.

In 2018, GEDMatch led police to identify and subsequently arrest Joseph DeAngelo, the so-called "Golden State Killer" who committed at least 13 murders and 50 rapes across California in the 1970s and 80s. Othram was founded shortly after, and it's since aided law enforcement in cracking cold cases across the country.

"The Maryland State Police is always looking for additional DNA technology being created and genealogy testing to further the investigation," Russo wrote in an email.

She added that "investigators are currently trying to tie this death investigation to multiple other cases throughout the East Coast," but said no suspect has been identified.

In 1995, MSP investigators on the case joined at least six other state agencies in clamoring to question serial killer Sean Goble, according to Frederick News-Post reports from that year. A North Carolina trucker, Goble confessed to murdering three women before discarding their bodies along interstate highways in Virginia, Tennessee and Florida.

Authorities suspect he could have many more victims. Some close followers of the case think Frederick's Jane Doe could be one of them.

Johnson, meanwhile, leans toward a different theory. The location of the body leads her to suspect the killer was local. Someone familiar with the area would be confident enough to dispose of a body along such a busy stretch of highway, she said, because they'd likely know that the road below the nearby overpass ran through quiet farmland.

The case hits close to home for Johnson, now 51 and living in Clarksburg. Had Jane Doe lived, she'd likely be around Johnson's age.

"I've been haunted by this," she said. "I'm at the age where everybody's starting to have grandkids. She should have had all that."

Though Johnson's been enthralled by crime and mystery from a young age, it was Jane Doe's case that first propelled her into the sprawling world of web sleuthing. It began one night about 20 years ago when she'd put her children to bed and taken to one of her favorite hobbies: surfing the internet to research cold cases.

When Johnson stumbled across a page about Jane Doe on the MSP's website, she was shocked that the victim she recalled hearing about on the news had never been identified. And from there, she didn't look back.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Johnson spent countless hours in chat rooms with similarly dedicated strangers. She was among the first members of The Doe Network, a volunteer-run nonprofit that assists law enforcement in matching missing persons cases with unidentified remains.

Johnson, an IT professional, speaks quietly and matter-of-factly about the cases she's worked on. She "likes to fly under the radar," she said.

But she's helped identify eight or nine sets of remains. Over 20 years, she's built a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge of mystery victims' distinctive features, which she can sometimes link together with descriptions of people who disappear.

"If you've seen enough of these cases, you kind of remember stuff," she said. "You're like, 'Oh, I remember somebody in that state, unidentified, with that kind of tattoo.'"

Now, though, she hopes genealogical DNA technology will succeed for Jane Doe where volunteer researchers like herself have failed.

As the sun began to set over an idyllic landscape Saturday evening, painting the surrounding farms and mountains a soft pink, Johnson packed up her tri-fold board and blew out her candle. She was dressed all in black. Gravel crunched under car tires as two of her friends — the only attendees of her vigil — pulled away and headed home.

For a few years there, Johnson said, she had given up on Jane Doe's case.

Not anymore.

"I know they could solve the case if they submit DNA," she said, her voice ringing with hope and something close to certainty. "They're gonna solve it."

Follow Jillian Atelsek on Twitter: @jillian_atelsek