It was a little past nine p.m. on the night of November 1st, 1980, when a truck driver making his way past the Sam Houston National Forest near Huntsville, Texas saw the nude body of a young girl lying about six yards off the shoulder of Interstate Highway 45.
The victim was a white female aged somewhere between fourteen and eighteen years old, standing around five-foot-six and weighing approximately one-hundred-five to one-hundred-twenty pounds. She had light, reddish-brown hair cut to shoulder length, hazel eyes, and appeared well-nourished and in excellent health, leading detectives to believe that she came from a middle- to upper-middle-class family that took exceptional care of her.
Unique characteristics included an inverted right nipple, and a vertical scar near her right eyebrow. Her fingernails were unpainted, but her toenails bore pink polish, and though her clothes were never found, a pair of red and brown sandals that the girl had reportedly been carrying with her was found at the scene. She also wore a distinctive blue or brown glass pendant on a thin gold chain around her neck.
Just as in the case of Arroyo Grande Jane Doe (later identified as Tammy Terrell), this victim had endured an unimaginable ordeal before her death. She had been viciously raped and sodomized with some unknown blunt object, and scraps of her pantyhose and underwear were found lodged in her vagina. She had also been brutally beaten about the face and body, and her right shoulder bore a deep bite mark. The coroner believed that the girl had been killed by ligature strangulation, perhaps with her own pantyhose. He also reported that she had only been dead for about six hours when her remains were discovered.
After authorities released a description of the victim—dubbed Walker County Jane Doe—to the public, a few witnesses came forward who claimed to have seen the girl in the hours before her death. Two employees of the Hitch ‘n’ Post Truck Stop and the manager of a Gulf gas station all told police that they had seen a girl matching Walker County Jane Doe’s description on October 31st, the day before her body was found. They independently reported that the girl had been wearing a scruffy yellow top, jeans, and a white knit sweater, and carried a pair of red and brown sandals in her hand.
The gas station manager further informed investigators that the girl had gotten out of a blue 1973 or 1974 Chevy Caprice and had then come into the station and asked him for directions to the Ellis Prison Farm. Afterward, the girl left the station on foot and started making her way north.
Later that same day, a waitress at the truck stop said that the girl had asked her for directions to the prison farm as well, and told police that she had drawn the girl a map. The waitress stated that the girl spoke of a friend that she was meeting at the prison farm, and told the waitress that she was nineteen years old, which the waitress did not believe, suspecting that the girl was possibly a runaway. During the course of the conversation, the waitress claimed that the girl said she came from either Aransas Pass or Rockport, Texas, though inquiries in both locations yielded no clues as to the mysterious girl’s identity. Likewise, an examination of inmates at the Ellis Prison Farm failed to shake loose any relevant information.
The body of Walker County Jane Doe was exhumed in 1999, at which time a DNA sample was obtained. The case was reopened in November of 2015, after which a handful of theories about the girl and her killer began swirling around.
One of the most persistent emerged only a month after the case was reopened, and posited that Walker County Jane Doe was actually a runaway from Corpus Christi, Texas by the name of Cathleen or Kathleen. This possible lead stemmed from a brother and sister who, while looking through old photographs from their childhood, discovered a picture of themselves and a girl they had met at a motel in Beeville, Texas in the summer of 1980. They recalled that this girl was living in the motel with an unknown couple at the time, that she closely matched the description of Walker County Jane Doe, and that she had allegedly told them that she wanted to go meet a friend of hers who was incarcerated at Sugarland Prison.
It was also hypothesized that Walker County Jane Doe was slain by the same perpetrator who murdered the then-unidentified victim known as Orange Socks (identified in 2019 as Debra Louise Jackson) in Georgetown, Texas in October of 1979. And just as in that case, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas was put forward as a person of interest, though authorities claimed that the bite mark found on Walker County Jane Doe’s shoulder did not match Lucas’s dental records.
There was further speculation that Walker County Jane Doe could have been the victim of an unknown serial killer who was believed to have murdered at least three other women in 1980 and dumped all of their bodies along Interstate 45.
Finally, in November of 2021, authorities announced that Walker County Jane Doe was actually fourteen-year-old Sherri Jarvis, nicknamed Tati, who had run away from Stillwater, Minnesota in 1980. The last contact with her family was in August of that year, when she had written a letter to her mother from Denver, Colorado, expressing a wish to eventually come back home. Sherri, a troubled teenager with a history of truancy, had been removed from her home at the age of thirteen and was placed in state custody shortly before running away.
Though the identity of her killer is still a mystery, investigators have some new, promising leads to follow now that the victim has been identified. The case remains open as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 