It was January 29th, 1994, and two young women—Monika Maeir and Lauri Duncan—were hiking through Pogonip Park in Santa Cruz, California, looking for wild mushrooms in the woods. What they found instead was the partially buried and decomposed remains of an unknown teenage girl.
The victim was white, with short brown hair, pink nail polish, and a tiny tattoo of a heart etched between her left thumb and index finger. She had been bludgeoned to death, apparently with a metal pipe, and her skull was almost completely crushed, making facial reconstruction extremely difficult.
For many years, the girl’s identity remained a mystery; she seemed to match no missing persons on file, and no one came forward to claim her, so she eventually came to be known as Pogonip Jane. A later isotopic analysis of the girl’s hair seemed to indicate that she had traveled between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz shortly before her death.
In 2013, interest in the case was reinvigorated after the lead investigator on the murder, Officer Loran “Butch” Baker, was tragically gunned down along with his partner, Detective Elizabeth Butler, when they attempted to apprehend a suspect in an unrelated sexual assault. Other officers on the force remembered how the Pogonip Jane case had haunted Baker, and renewed their efforts to solve the crime in honor of their fallen comrade.
Through DNA profiling, the victim was finally identified as seventeen-year-old Kori Lamaster, who had run away from her home in Pacifica, California in late December of 1993. Though many sources state that her parents had not filed a missing persons report on Kori until 2007, the website maintained by the family states that Kori had run away from home several times after starting high school, and that missing persons reports had been filed after each of these incidents. At the time of her murder, they seemed unaware that there was not a current report on file, and therefore did not think to file a new one until many years later.
Once Kori’s remains were definitively identified and laid to rest, investigators began trying to discover who might have killed the troubled seventeen-year-old. Their most promising lead concerned a father and son, Wayne and Greg White, who witnesses claim had been seen with Kori before she disappeared. Greg White has since passed away. Wayne White was known to have been living in east Tennessee as of 2015, though some sources assert that he has also died. No other suspects have been publicly named.
Crime Immemorial 