The Valencia County Sheriff’s Office (VCSO) got a call to a property on Rio Communities Boulevard in Los Lunas, New Mexico, on July 16, 2022. At the site, they found human remains under a tree. The police quickly collected the remains and began investigations into who they might belong to — and they only got to the bottom of it this year thanks to a non-profit DNA company.
Law & Order might have taught most people otherwise, but believe it or not, unsolved deaths don’t usually take 45 minutes to solve. So maybe it’s high time we all gave the Los Angeles Police Department some patience to properly solve that D4vd case.
For this particular case, besides the remains, all the VCSO had to go on was a backpack with clothes, a water bottle, and a diary. Unfortunately, the diary didn’t offer any insight into who the person might be, and that’s when the case went cold. Sometimes cases like this even go decades without answers for the police.
That’s when the VCSO turned to a non-profit called the DNA Doe Project. The organization assists police departments by forming comprehensive DNA profiles of victims who died and went unidentified. They have a vast databank they can cross-check to determine exactly who a person could be based solely on their DNA.
According to People, a member of the organization named Lisa Ivany gave insight into their process, saying, “It didn’t take us long to figure out that Los Lunas Jane Doe had connections to both Illinois and Tennessee. However, we could also tell that she likely had recent ancestors from outside the U.S., especially as a number of her DNA matches were from Europe.”
Members of the law enforcement community are calling this new advancement a powerful tool in finally closing cold cases. So many have gone unsolved simply because the police could not figure out who exactly died, and sometimes the scene even contained two or more DNA profiles suggesting foul play. But with so many people submitting their DNA to organizations like 23andMe, a global network of patterns is slowly forming — showing law enforcement exactly who is related to whom.
The remains were identified as belonging to an individual named Lisa Marie Vernon, who died three years ago at age 56. Through learning her identity, the police were able to piece together the circumstances that led to her disappearance. They formally closed the case without any criminal investigation, having determined there was no foul play involved in her death.
The family was informed and finally able to gain closure over their lost loved one. In situations like this, what matters most is that the family can finally get answers about where their relative disappeared all those years ago. But for the police, this new development could mean decades-old cold cases may finally be revisited.
No case is ever truly unsolvable — sometimes, it’s just a matter of waiting for technology to solve yesterday’s mysteries. Valencia County Sheriff Denise Virgil said the new technology will help bring families “long-awaited answers.”
