On July 15th, 1982, a gravedigger named George Kise at the Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown Township, New Jersey spotted something strange in a ravine at the rear of the graveyard. Upon closer inspection, he found that it was the corpse of what appeared to be a teenage girl whose face was so badly beaten and mutilated that she was unrecognizable.
The victim, initially given the appellation Princess Doe, was white, thought to be between fourteen and eighteen years old, stood around five-foot-two and weighed approximately one-hundred-five pounds. She had brown, shoulder-length hair, but her eye color could not be determined due to the extensive trauma to the face. The pathologist also noted that her two front teeth were noticeably darker than the others.
When discovered, Princess Doe was clad in a red, short-sleeved V-neck sweater and an ankle-length peasant skirt, though neither shoes nor undergarments were ever found. There was a gold cross necklace tangled in her hair, and oddly, her fingernails were painted red, but only on her right hand. She otherwise had no significant identifying marks.
The autopsy estimated that Princess Doe had been dead for between one to three weeks. Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, but as the body had lain outdoors for so long in the stifling heat and humidity of the summer, it was never conclusively proven whether she had been sexually assaulted, or whether there was any trace of drugs in her system. Due to the presence of defensive wounds on her hands and arms, it was assumed that she had fought back against her attacker.
In the years following her discovery, there were several theories floating around as to who Princess Doe was and who might have killed her. One persistent hypothesis held that she was actually Diane Dye, a teenager from San Jose, California who had gone missing in late July of 1979. Some law enforcement officers were so certain that Princess Doe was Diane Dye that they announced it at a 2003 press conference. However, other officers, as well as the Dye family, never believed that Princess Doe was Diane, and indeed, a later DNA comparison ruled this identification out.
Various other investigators put forward the possibilities that she may have been a runaway who had been working in Ocean City, Maryland under an assumed name, or perhaps that she was a truck-stop prostitute in the New Jersey area, though neither of these claims were ever substantiated. From an isotopic analysis of her teeth and clothing, it appeared that the girl had spent some time in the Midwest or Northeast, and perhaps Arizona, though the most solidly backed theory is that she was probably from Long Island, New York. Several witnesses came forward after photos of her clothing were released to the public and stated that they had seen clothing very similar to hers in a particular store in Long Island, and one woman even claimed to have seen Princess Doe alive in a shop across the street from the cemetery about two days before it was thought she was murdered.
As far as suspects in the murder went, the strongest candidate was a man named Arthur Kinlaw, whose name came to the attention of detectives in 1999 after his wife Donna was arrested in California for attempted welfare fraud. Donna reportedly told police that Arthur had murdered two women in 1982, crimes for which he was later convicted. She also stated that he had murdered a prostitute earlier that year, and that in July, he had brought a teenage girl to their home who was later killed in a cemetery. Donna could not provide enough details about this particular homicide to confirm that it was Princess Doe, and a sketch she later produced of the girl her husband had brought home did not resemble the sketch of the unknown victim.
The people of Blairstown chipped in and laid the young girl to rest six months after her body was found, under a headstone reading, “Missing From Home, Dead Among Strangers, Remembered By All.” And in 2012, on the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of her remains, a memorial service was held in the community.
A decade later, on July 15th, 2022, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children announced that they had definitively identified Princess Doe through DNA as seventeen-year-old Dawn Olanick, who had been living with her mother and sister in Bohemia, Long Island, New York until the summer of 1982, when her mother asked her to leave the house. According to Dawn’s brother Robert, no one in the family ever heard from Dawn again after she left.
Following the identification, Arthur Kinlaw was reinvestigated as a suspect, and he was subsequently arrested and charged with the homicide. At this writing, he remains incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York while investigators attempt to reconstruct Dawn Olanick’s final days and gather enough evidence to convict Kinlaw of her murder.
Crime Immemorial 