The Castaway - Chapter 5

Boxing up the Shelly Phillips case was depressing. A year of hard work was just pulled out from under me in a single phone call. Not only was I back to having an unidentified 12-to-15 year old murder victim, but Shelly Phillips went back to being a missing person. What made it worse was now she was classified as a, "voluntarily missing adult," because she was a runaway who had since turned 18. That was the lowest priority she could be in, which meant nobody was ever going to look for her.

I boxed up all the notes and information I gathered on Shelly Phillips and the two Marines in the faded blue Oldsmobile and I shipped it to San Diego PD. It was their case now. I turned my attention back on trying to identify little Janie Doe.

I contacted the producers of the television show America's Most Wanted and asked about a possible broadcast of this story. Maybe somebody would remember this 5' 7" blonde in a purple Le Tigre polo shirt. The TV producers decided that it would be a great story, but only if we had a picture of Janie Doe to put on TV. They felt the story would only tug at America's heart strings if they could see the girl's face and make a personal connection. Think about those late-night commercials with the starving children in Africa. It's those sad little faces staring into the camera that makes people dive for their checkbooks.

I contacted the Coroner's Office and requested a Forensic Reconstruction of the skull. That's when an artist builds one of those clay molds around the existing skull in an attempt to re-create what the victim actually looked like. Like everything else in Government, the request took 2 months to get approved, but the skull was eventually shipped off to the artist so he could begin his work.

The forensics lab was carefully examining Janie Doe's remains for any evidence they could possibly locate. The only two clothing items found with the bones were the shirt and bra. This part bothered me every time I thought about it. That means she wasn't clothed from the waist down when her body was put in the duffle bag and tossed over the cliff. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how this poor girl spent her last remaining hours alive. Some sick bastard putting his filthy hands on her little body and breathing whiskey in her face as he forced himself on her. The images were painful but they keep me moving forward.

The other items located inside the duffle bag with Janie Doe's remains were interesting:

1. One blue, electric blanket. It appeared the body had been rolled up in this blanket and then stuffed into the duffle bag.

2. One piece of cotton rope about 15" long tied into a circle. It was extremely frayed and degraded. It was probably used as a ligature for strangulation.

3. One thin piece of nylon rope tied onto the metal eyelet of the duffle bag, probably used to secure the bag closed before it deteriorated and came apart. The knot used to secure this rope to the eyelet was significant. A fancy knot tied by someone with nautical experience.

4. Orange and brown carpet fibers. DOJ told me the polyester fiber blend was the type commonly used in residential carpets.

5. Black carpet fibers. The type commonly used in automotive carpets, interior and trunk lining.

6. Black and white cat hairs.

7. Numerous blonde hairs belonging to the victim.

This was everything I had. This was all I had to work with. Without knowing the identity of the victim I couldn't even start an investigation. I couldn't use her DNA to identify her from the NCMEC database because there is no database for the DNA of missing persons. DOJ only keeps the DNA of convicted felons on file.

Months went by, and then a year, with no word about the Forensic reconstruction of the face. It turned out the man who was hired to do the work had been on family medical leave. His wife was dying of cancer. It took me several more months just to get the skull returned to the Coroner's Office so I could look for someone else to do the job.

Apparently there was nobody else. You see, it's the responsibility of the Coroner's Office to identify any unidentified bodies, not the Sheriff's Department. So no matter how badly I wanted this done and how many people I called and yelled at, the Coroner's Office was just on cruise control and in no apparent hurry to get Janie Doe identified. There are litterally dozens of bodies in cold storage at the morgue waiting to be identified. And the Deputy Coroner who was in charge of the Janie Doe case had recently retired. This case just went cold. I had dozens of other cases to tend to so I put the Janie Doe case on the shelf next to my desk. And that's where it sat without any hope for another three years.

Every month I called the Coroner's Office and asked about Janie Doe. Every month I got the same answer - excuses about being short-staffed and extremely busy. I always knew what they were going to say, but I called anyway. I wasn't going to let them forget about her. I wasn't going to let Janie remain a number on a body bag.

One day I came across a website for Dr. Henry Lee, the Forensics Expert who is widely known for his work on high-profile cases such as JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Peterson, and O.J. Simpson. Dr. Lee has a Forensics Institute in Connecticut at the University of New Haven. I called Dr. Lee and asked him if he would be willing to take a look at this case. Dr. Lee invited me to present my case and all of the evidence to his Forensics class as an active case assignment. Dr. Lee told me he would oversee the investigation by his class and guide them in their work.

I boxed up the files and the evidence and I flew to New Haven, Connecticut to present my case. This was January 2007, four-and-a-half years after finding Janie Doe's remains on that hillside. I spent three days with Dr. Lee and a class of very intelligent, up and coming Forensic Technicians. They gave me some really good ideas and I learned about some new procedures being used in the field of DNA science. I was going to leave Connecticut with some hope of breathing new life into this case again.

On the last day I was there, as I was saying my goodbyes, I got a call on my cell phone. It was the Coroner's Office back home. Janie Doe had been positively identied by a match of the dental records... again. I withheld any excitement this time because I was duped the last time. I told the Deputy Coroner on the telephone that I wanted a DNA confirmation of the parents scheduled immediately.

I flew back home to California and found an envelope from the Coroner's Office sitting on my desk. I didn't want to open it because I knew the identity of another little girl was inside. I didn't want to get my hopes up again without the DNA match. I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope.

Rebecca Novell was a 13-year-old girl from Oceanside, California who was reported as a runaway in 1986. The name was immediately familiar to me. I pulled out my list of the original 12 names that I submitted to DOJ with the dental records over four years ago. The results I had received from DOJ four years ago was that #11, Shelly Phillips, was a match. Turned out she was not. I shook my head in disbelief as I looked at the list and saw the name Rebecca Novell in the #1 spot. They had Rebecca's name the first time and they matched the dental records to the wrong person.

I knew the only way to get a DNA match on Rebecca was to locate and visit her parents. That meant I was going to have to tell another mother that her missing child from 21 years ago had been located... and she wasn't coming home.

Here we go again.