Authorities have identified the remains of an Arizona woman who was strangled to death and left in a trunk in Florida more than 50 years ago and are seeking the public's help in identifying her killer and finding her daughters, police say.
Authorities have identified the remains of an Arizona woman who was strangled to death and left in a trunk in St. Petersburg, Florida, more than 50 years ago, and are now seeking the public's help in identifying her killer and finding her daughters, police announced Tuesday.
Police used genetic genealogy to identify Sylvia June Atherton — long known as the 'Trunk Lady' due to where her body was found — as the victim of what the St. Petersburg Police DepartmentAtherton, a mother of five from Tucson, Arizona, was 41 at the time of her death in 1969, police said.
Witnesses said two white men left the trunk in the area after carrying it from a pickup truck, Assistant Chief Michael Kovacsev told reporters Tuesday.The trunk was the property of Atherton and her husband, Scott Brown, Kovacsev added. Brown died in 1999 in Las Vegas without leaving any mention of a wife in court records, police said in the Facebook post. He also did not report her missing and did not list her on bankruptcy records, Kovacsev said.
“You can see there’s some inferences there that we have to kind of fill in the gaps,” he said, adding that police are still seeking the public's help in bringing forward any information they may have. Atherton's body was exhumed from a local grave — where she was buried as “Jane Doe” — in February 2010 as part of what authorities said were multiple unsuccessful efforts by investigators over the years to identify the remains using degraded teeth and bone samples.. “Preservation of evidence wasn’t necessarily as well thought of as well thought of as the way we do things today.”
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