In early summer of 1993, a young woman would be found dead at a Colorado campsite, and her identity remained a mystery for nearly two decades.
It was June 15th, and a hiker walking through the Rainbow Falls Campground in the Pike San Isabel National Forest near Castle Rock, Colorado, spotted the partially-clad body of a young woman dumped in the underbrush.
The victim, later christened Rainbow Falls Doe, was a white female between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five years old with light brown hair that had possibly been dyed blonde. She was about five-foot-seven, with a stocky build, large breasts and wide hips. Other distinguishing features included near-perfect teeth, fingernails that had been cut or bitten very short, and a horizontal scar on her abdomen from a former splenectomy.
When found, Rainbow Falls Doe was clad in a black, short-sleeved Harley-Davidson shirt and several pieces of jewelry, including a gold pinkie ring, a gold necklace with a long black crystal pendant, and another necklace with a pendant depicting a pair of wizard’s hands holding a brown tiger’s eye.
The victim had been murdered by blunt force trauma to the head, probably two to three days prior to her remains being discovered. It was believed she had been killed elsewhere and then dumped at the unmarked campsite. It did not appear as though she was sexually assaulted, and there was no trace of drugs found in her system.
Because of the Harley-Davidson shirt, authorities tried to connect her with a nearby convention of the Vietnam Vets Motorcycle Club that had been going on over the weekend of June 12th and 13th at the Horse Creek Campground, not far from the dump site. This association was never able to be made, however. Witness statements seemed to imply that the victim had told people she was from Louisiana, but later isotopic analysis suggested she was probably from Alaska or Canada. Authorities suspect she might have been a runaway.
Her remains were exhumed in 2012 to extract DNA, but it took until 2020 for her her identity to finally be restored through genealogical matching; the victim was found to be twenty-year-old Becky Redeker, from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Becky had apparently had a somewhat troubled youth, spending time in several group homes, and was reported to have been homeless at around the time she disappeared. Her family had last heard from her sometime in 1992.
As of this writing, the identity of her killer has yet to be uncovered.
Crime Immemorial 