On the first day of February 1968, in West Alton, Missouri, a fisherman cast his line into a lake near Highway 67, and reeled in a macabre mystery.
At the end of the man’s hook was an inexpensive black suitcase, sunk in about three feet of water in Lake Alton, four yards from the shore. The suitcase was tied with a length of blue plastic clothesline, whose ends were fastened to a pair of ten-pound barbells that had been used to weigh the bundle down.
Inside the suitcase, heartbreakingly, were the remains of a little blonde girl, aged around three years old. She was clad only in a pair of white underwear. There did not appear to be any signs of violence to the body, making determining cause of death difficult, but obviously it was clear that the child had likely been murdered, probably about a month before the body was discovered.
No other articles of clothing or personal items were found with the remains, and the only other items inside the suitcase were two more ten-pound barbells. The child’s distinguishing characteristics included a small scar above one of her eyes, and the fact that one of her front teeth was abnormally large. Authorities were unable to obtain a viable set of fingerprints.
No progress at all could be made in either determining the identity of the victim, nor that of her killer. Six days after her body was found, she was buried as a Jane Doe in Oak Grove Cemetery.
In 2015, nearly five decades after the little girl was found in Lake Alton, Detective Stephanie Fisk, who had long been intrigued by the crime, reopened the case, and on September 24th of that year, the child’s body was exhumed. A DNA profile was extracted, and a new photographic representation of the victim was generated, in the hopes that Jane Doe West Alton will finally be identified and her murderer brought to justice.
As of this writing, the investigation is still ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 