Madison Woman's Persistence Solves a Half-Century Mystery

Madison Woman's Persistence Solves a Half-Century Mystery
Wisconsin State Journal
Sandy Cullen | scullen[at] madison [dot] com | 608-252-6137 | Posted: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 9:00 pm

After years of searching, a Madison woman is being credited with solving the 56-year-old mystery of her great-aunt's disappearance from Phoenix - and identifying the woman known as the "Boulder Jane Doe," whose nude and battered body was found in a remote Colorado canyon more than half a century ago.

Michelle Fowler, 24, a student at Madison Area Technical College, grew up knowing about the disappearance of her great aunt, Dot, whose face she saw in the photo albums of her missing relative's sister.

When she was 16, Fowler began looking for her missing relative, making random phone calls to people with the same name.

"I don't think that I ever expected to find her," Fowler said.

Her breakthrough began when Madison friend Simeon Stala told her about his efforts to find his sister, Sonnet, who has been missing for six years. Stala led Fowler to the online Doe Network for missing persons, where last December she found Jane Doe 433UFCP - the Boulder Jane Doe found April 8, 1954, eight miles west of Boulder.

"My gut said this is Dot," Fowler said .

Though a facial reconstruction "really didn't look like" her missing aunt, Fowler said, both had perfect teeth and an appendectomy scar.

Twelve days ago, DNA testing confirmed that Fowler's missing relative, Dorothy Gay Howard, is the Boulder Jane Doe, believed to be one of the first victims of serial killer Harvey Glatman, who was executed in California in 1959 after confessing to three murders.

"It's incredible," said Det. Steve Ainsworth of the Boulder County Sheriff's Office, which reopened its investigation in 2004 at the urging of Boulder historian Silvia Pettem, who recently published a book about the case.

Without Fowler, Ainsworth said, "We may have come across something, but it would have been stumbling across something."

The revelation stunned Howard's sister, R. Marlene Ashman of Mena, Ark., the only surviving immediate family member, whose DNA was used to confirm the identity of the Boulder Jane Doe.

"It was quite shocking," Ashman, 69, said Tuesday. "When I gave my DNA, I really didn't believe it was her."

Ashman said she was 13 in the fall of 1953 when she last saw her sister, who had been working as a nanny and told her that she would take her to the movies the following week. When her sister never showed up, Ashman said, her family contacted the people she was working for and were told she no longer worked there and was gone.

Their father continued to pay the premiums on his missing daughter's life insurance policy, believing she would one day return, until his death in February 1985, she said.

Ashman said she is grateful to Fowler for her years of searching.

"It's a closure of sorts," Ashman said, adding that what "hurts more than anything" is how her sister died.

Ainsworth said Howard suffered blunt force trauma to the left side of her body consistent with being hit by a car.

It is not known if she was sexually assaulted, said Ainsworth, who theorizes that Howard might have escaped from Glatman, who then struck her with his car, sending her body down the canyon.

It is not known how Howard ended up near Boulder, said Ainsworth, who is continuing his investigation.

"There's thousands of people who have cared about this victim," said Pettem, whose book about the case is titled "Someone's Daughter, In Search of Justice for Jane Doe."

"She's such a part of Boulder's history."