A 1976 cold case has a major breakthrough. A Chicago woman has finally been identified through DNA.
until THU 12:00 AM CDT, Lake County, Southern Cook County, Kane County, Northern Cook County, Eastern Will County, Central Cook County, Grundy County, La Salle County, McHenry County, Northern Will County, DeKalb County, DuPage County, Southern Will County, Kendall County, Porter County, Newton County, Jasper County, Lake CountyHart was 69 years old and last lived in Chicago before her death.
Nearly 50 years after a woman's body was found inside a cardboard box in rural Indiana, investigators have identified her as aannounced that the woman once known as Benton County Jane Doe has been identified as Jane Hart, who was 69 years old when she was killed in 1976. Hart was born in Ohio in 1906, but her last known home before her death was in Chicago.
On Oct. 8, 1976, a farmer found Hart's body inside a small cardboard box in a field near Otterbein, Indiana. She had been shot in the back of the head. Investigators believed the box had been left there about 12 hours before it was discovered, although Hart was believed to have been killed about a week earlier. The Benton County Coroner's Office asked the DNA Doe Project to help solve the case in 2021.
Investigators created a DNA profile and determined the woman had Croatian ancestry. That made the case more difficult because people with Eastern European backgrounds are underrepresented in the DNA databases used by genetic genealogists.
"Without more people of Eastern European descent uploading to the GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNAJustice.org databases we have access to, cases like this will remain tricky to solve," Harmony Vollmer, a DNA Doe Project team co-leader, said in a statement. After three years of research, the team traced Hart's family history from Croatia to Ohio and eventually to Chicago. Investigators then worked with Hart's surviving relatives, who submitted DNA samples that confirmed her identity.
"It was thanks to the assistance of Jane's surviving family that we have been able to confirm her identity," Traci Onders, another DNA Doe Project team co-leader, said in a statement. "Once we had identified Jane as a likely candidate, they assisted by taking DNA tests and uploading their DNA data to GEDmatch.com, the results of which proved Benton County Jane Doe to be their long-lost relative. "
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