In December 1989, tourists lost in the Arizona desert made a shocking discovery - the body of a woman, naked and bloodied.
Separately, almost 400 miles to the West, two seemingly abandoned baby girls were found in a park restroom, left with no clues as to their origins.
Made just two days apart, the mysteries remained totally unrelated cases for 36 years - a woman killed in the most brutal of fashions, and two children with no traceable family.
But earlier this year, a cold case detective from Arizona was able to identify the woman. The discovery unravelled a series of clues spanning the country, and eventually revealed the heritage of the two girls in what investigators called a “miracle”.
Speaking to USA Today, Detective Lori Miller said the case of the Jane Doe found with her throat slit in the Arizona desert was one of the first she picked up after joining the Mohave County Sheriff's Office in 2019.
She resubmitted fingerprints collected at the time to the FBI and got a possible identification match, a woman named Maria Ortiz of Bakersfield, California. Working together with Bakersfield police, she managed to trace someone listed as a “friend” of Ortiz, who lived in Tennessee.
When she called the woman, she said she didn’t know Maria Ortiz, but she did have a cousin called Marina Ramos, who had been missing since 1989. Ramos, she said, had two young daughters, who also had not been seen for 36 years.
Miller’s unsolved homicide investigation had now become a missing persons case as well. She told USA Today that people told her she would never find the two young girls, who were presumed dead.
"But this was my white whale,” she said. “I never stopped working on it."
Eventually, Miller could trace Ramos’s sister and a daughter, who was five years older than the missing girls and had been raised by her grandmother. Trawling through DNA tests, it was three years before she landed upon the news she had barely dared to hope for - a half-sister, who was one of the girls found on the park restroom floor all those years ago.
"My heart stopped," Miller told USA Today. "I thought, 'Holy cow.'"
The girls, who had been adopted and named Tina and Melissa, were called and informed of their rediscovered identities under the birth names Jasmin and Elizabeth Ramos. They had been told they were adopted as teenagers, but had always assumed their mother had abandoned them, left with no clues about their heritage.
"I told them, 'No,' she had been a victim of a homicide two days prior," Miller said. "That helped give them some comfort."
They are now planning a family reunion with their long-lost relatives after what Ramos’ family called a “miracle”.
But Miller remains determined to trace the killer who left Ramos so cruelly in the desert. Very little evidence was collected at the scene, but there is one lead from the restroom where the baby girls were abandoned.
According to USA Today, days after Ramos was found, witnesses reported seeing two Hispanic men and a Hispanic woman getting out of a black mini pickup truck with the girls and later seeing them leave without them.
"I've gotten the girls, but now I need justice for Marina," Miller said. "I need to find out who did this horrible thing to her."
