New twist in cases of Jane Doe and missing teen
By BEN FINLEY
Bucks County Courier Times
And so, the two mysteries continue.
A DNA test concluded late last month that a pregnant female's body found in Bensalem in 1988 is not that of Tracy Byrd, a 14-year-old Bensalem girl who disappeared in 1983.
Bensalem Detective Chris McMullin was hoping the genetic analysis would connect the two. Instead, it ruled out just one possible fate for two females.
Yet, the DNA test doesn't have to be the end of either story.
Information regarding Tracy and the Jane Doe, including her recently extracted DNA, will be entered into a new national database for the missing and unidentified. The Justice Department created the central database
www.namus.gov last year to help remedy the country's vastly disconnected network for solving such cases.
Also, an amateur cyber sleuth, someone who tries to match photos of missing persons to artist renderings of unidentified bodies, has her eye on the Jane Doe. The layman detective, a retired nurse in Canada, thinks the body could be a Brooklyn, N.Y., woman who disappeared in 1977.
Such folks have gotten it right before, according to Jerry Nance, a supervisor for the forensic assistance unit at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“They send me stuff when they've matched the case of a child,” Nance said. “It's kind of a miracle of the computer age.”
The stories of Tracy and the Jane Doe are among tens of thousands of unsolved police files. But they are emblematic of the massive challenges to solving such cases and the evolving effort to discover the truth.
JANE DOE
A man walking his dog discovered Jane Doe on a January afternoon in 1988. The partially clothed, skeletal remains were submerged in an industrial well on the grounds of a closed distillery, Publickers, off State Road.
The woman was six months pregnant. She was wearing black leather, open-toed platform shoes and Braxton designer jeans. Near her body, police found black mesh stockings, a white patterned pullover dress and a ring with five clear stones and five missing stones.
The forensic science of 1988 deemed her to be white, between 100 and 120 pounds and between the ages of 17 to 23. One to five years passed before the body was discovered, officials said at the time.
Brendalee Ward doesn't put too much faith in the forensic science of the 1980s. The part-time cyber sleuth thinks the body could be that of Audrey Lyn Nerenberg, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn.
Ward, 42, found Bensalem's 1988 Jane Doe by trolling the Web site
www.doenetwork.org, which catalogs some of the country's unidentified dead and missing.
Ward started a group for tracking down missing people,
www.myspace.com/c_o_a_l__t_e_a_m, which has members across the continent trying to link the missing to the nameless bodies.
A diagnosed schizophrenic, Nerenberg last was seen leaving her family's home to buy a pack of cigarettes. She wasn't known to be pregnant. And she was dressed in a tube top, cut-off jean shorts and clear plastic shoes, which isn't what Bensalem's Jane Doe was wearing.
But Ward believes that a significant period of time could've elapsed between Nerenberg's disappearance and her death, explaining the pregnancy, different clothing and estimated duration of the body in the well.
Ward's theory is mainly based on Nerenberg's photo and the artist rendering of the Jane Doe.
“There's something about the eye orbits,” Ward said by telephone from Canada. “Audrey had deep eye orbits, and so did this Jane Doe. And they both have an oval, diamond-shaped face.”
McMullin, the Bensalem detective, and Ward said they're waiting to hear back from the New York City Police Department regarding the case.
Web sleuths such as Ward have made matches before, according to Nance.
“They've identified 40 to 50 people by now . . . just by looking at the Internet,” Nance said of the mouse-clicking bank managers, librarians and otherwise forensic laymen.
According to the Kansas City Star, in 2005, a Mississippi man matched the head of an unidentified man found in Missouri to the case of a missing Iowa man.
The victim was Gregory May of Bellevue, Iowa, a Civil War buff whose body was dismembered and discarded by a man who then stole May's Civil War artifacts, the newspaper reported.
TRACY BYRD
Tracy Byrd vanished in March 1983. She last was seen walking toward Bensalem High School after being dropped off by her mother's boyfriend.
Initially, some people thought the 14-year-old ran away. She was suspended from school and possibly pregnant. She had left home before, for one night, after a fight with her mom.
Despite numerous unverified sightings, the theory wasn't popular among family and close friends who believe Tracy would've contacted at least one person if she ran away. She didn't even attend her mother's funeral.
Six months after Tracy disappeared, her mom vanished. Jean Byrd's body was later found in a Delaware State Park. Her boyfriend pleaded guilty to strangling her. But before police could get anything out of Paul Greenwald about Tracy, he killed himself in his jail cell.
Many of Tracy's family members believe Greenwald killed Tracy.
The newspaper was unsuccessful in reaching Tracy's family for this article. But Dale Byrd, a brother, told the newspaper in March he always believed Greenwald buried Tracy somewhere around Bensalem High School. Greenwald was gone for only about 30 minutes the morning he dropped off Tracy, Byrd said.
McMullin has his own theory about what happened to Tracy. It doesn't involve Greenwald. The detective received some credible information a couple of years ago that points to a Bucks County man as Tracy's killer. The detective won't elaborate more.
Even if someone believed that Tracy is still alive, statistics wouldn't support the theory.
Nance said his National Center for Missing and Exploited Children office has about 800 cases of long-time missing children, those who disappeared between 1947 and 1995. At best, 2 percent are alive, he said.
That's because the most common motivation for kidnapping is sexual assault, which usually leads to the kidnapper killing the kids afterward. Also, if the child runs away, the lifestyle they often fall into puts them at a higher risk of dying, Nance said.
So, if Tracy is dead, will her body ever be found and identified?
“Generally speaking, if you wanted to hide a body pretty well, you wouldn't have to be genius to figure it out,” Nance said about the possibility that Tracy's remains have been recovered, even unknowingly.
The United States has about 100,000 missing persons cases, according to the Justice Department. And, going back to the 1940s, police have found about 40,000 unidentified bodies — 2,000 of them are children, Nance said. Bucks County has six unidentified bodies going back to 1988, the latest information available, according to county Coroner Joseph Campbell.
But even if Tracy is one of those 40,000 found, that doesn't guarantee she'll be identified.
Before the recently created namus system, police used and still use an FBI database, the National Crime Information Center, to try to match the missing to the unidentified.
No law requires government officials to register unidentified bodies into that system or any other. So, despite the tens of thousands of bodies being registered in jurisdictions across the country, the FBI's database contains fewer than 7,000 Jane and John Does, Nance said.
And even among those entries, many files are limited to bits of information like dental records and fingerprints, which often isn't enough, Nance said. For instance, all police had of Tracy was a baby tooth. Now at least, her family's DNA will be available in the new namus system, McMullin said.
The new system essentially offers a blank page for each missing person and unidentified body, onto which officials can enter any number of details, including DNA, photos and artist renderings. The idea is to cross reference the information until a match is found. Much of the site will be open to the public.
Nance hopes the new database will turn around things.
“Everybody should have their name,” he said. “Everybody should be known.”
Ward, the woman from Canada, said: “We will not let these cases go. Someone is looking at them every day.”
Ben Finley can be reached at 215-949-4203 or
bfinley@phillyBurbs.com.
July 7, 2008 6:45 AM
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-07072008-1559534.html
Unknown Circumstances
Age at Disappearance: 18 yrs
Date of Birth: 09/24/1958
Date of Last Contact: 07/15/1977
Race: White
Gender: Female
Height: 5'04"
Weight: 115
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Brown
Missing From: Brooklyn, NY
Notes: Audrey was last seen at her residence in Brookyn, NY. She has a small gap between her top two front teeth. Attached picture is age progressed to 45 years old.
Investigating Police Agency: New York City Police Department
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If you believe that you have seen this person contact NYS MECC at 1-800-346-3543.
http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/missing/info/3250.htm
Investigating Agency
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
New York City Police Department
646-610-6914