On the morning of September 12th, 1976, a body was discovered near the back gate of a cemetery off Dogwood Road in Woodlawn, Maryland. The victim was a young woman between the ages of fifteen and thirty, who had been beaten, savagely raped, and then strangled to death. Police determined that she had been killed elsewhere and then dumped at the spot where she was found, perhaps from a Ford Econoline van, which a witness saw in the area earlier on the day the remains were recovered.
The woman was partially wrapped in a sheet that was similar to those found in hospitals or inpatient facilities. A blue and white bandanna had been placed over her face, as had a bag that had once contained grass seeds from a company in Lexington, Massachusetts. Part of this bag had also been torn off and stuffed down her throat. Also present near the body was an orange and white bandanna, which had holes cut out where the victim’s eyes and nose would have been. Her hands had been bound behind her back with some sort of bandage.
Though the victim’s ethnicity was not obvious, an examination of the remains determined that the victim had stood about five-foot-six to five-foot-nine inches tall and weighed somewhere around one-hundred-fifty pounds. She had a dark olive complexion, brown eyes, and dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair. An amateur tattoo on her left arm appeared to be the initials JB, JP, or perhaps SS. Additionally, the victim had extensive dental work done sometime in the past, and the quality of the work suggested a fairly affluent background.
Significantly, a very large amount of the drug chlorpromazine was found in the young woman’s system. The presence of this medication—generally used to treat schizophrenia—coupled with the hospital-style sheet and bandages found with the remains suggested to authorities that either the victim or the killer had some involvement with a mental health facility.
Detectives followed up on several other items that had been found with the victim, including two brass keys, one of which was thought to be a house key. Though research concluded the keys had been manufactured in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, no further clues could be drawn from them. Likewise, the grass seed bag found on the victim’s face was traced to a factory in Buffalo, New York, though that particular style of bag had been discontinued several years prior to the victim’s murder.
Later analysis of pollen found on the remains determined that Jane Doe had probably lived in the New York City or Boston area, and had recently been to either Harvard University or the New York Botanical Garden.
In 2015, the investigation took a hopeful turn when an anonymous tip led Baltimore police to a possible identity for the so-called Woodlawn Jane Doe. The tipster claimed that the victim was a teenaged girl of Colombian or Puerto Rican descent who had moved to Boston with her family and lived on Forbes Street in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood, possibly explaining the “JP” tattoo on her arm.
In 2021, though, DNA evidence firmly estalished that the tipster was mistaken, and that the victim was actually sixteen-year-old Margaret Fetterolf, a student at Hayfield Secondary School who had disappeared from her home in Alexandria, Virginia in the late summer of 1975. Her parents had reported her missing in September of that year.
While Margaret has thankfully had her identity restored at long last, the mystery of who murdered her remains unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 