Original subtitles

[ Suspenseful music plays ]

Right here is the crime scene

where Boulder Jane Doe was found.

[ Camera shutter clicking, beeps ]

They realized that this was the body

of a slender young woman.

She was completely naked

and had been battered and bruised and bludgeoned.

[ Camera shutters clicking ] Not only were there no clues

as to who killed her...

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

...there were no clues as to who she was.

"Please give me back my name.

No one knows who I am or how I came to die."

Pettem: Jane Doe was someone´s daughter.

And I thought, "Who is this girl?

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

Oh, I´ll try to figure out who she is."

One of the researchers realized

that there had been a serial killer

in the Boulder area about the right time.

She says, "He lived in Denver,"

and, all of a sudden, I went, "Oh, my gosh!"

Finding out what happened,

my entire family was just in a state of shock.

♫♫

♫♫

[ Piercing bird cry ]

♫♫

Man: Radio check.

Man #2: I´m set.

And speed.

Pettem: Hm.

I don´t know what to do with my arms.

Marker.

My name is Silvia Pettem

and I research and write about Boulder history.

I live west of Boulder, in the mountains.

I came here to go to college and I´ve been here ever since.

That was 50 years ago, so. [ Laughs ]

The spirits came out and then they will return.

Once or twice a year,

the historical society in Boulder

held what was called Meet the Spirits.

Reporter: Amateur actors recount the lives of the people buried here.

People like me would dress up as characters

of people buried in the cemetery.

[ Laughing ] Is it weird to be into spirits?

Oh, I think a lot of people think so.

She was a professor.

I had a big hat and a long skirt

and I was all decked out in my Victorian clothes.

And it was there that I first learned about Jane Doe.

A grave that is always part of Meet the Spirits

belongs to a young murder victim.

She had a small grave marker inscribed simply with...

The actress who portrayed her read the following.

"Please give me back my name.

No one knows who I am or how I came to die.

Battered, beaten, and naked

on the rocky edge of Boulder Creek.

My murderer, whoever he was, was brutal and vicious.

I was too young to die.

Can someone tell me who I am

and return my remains to my family?"

It´s sort of a plea, you know?

You could almost feel like

you have to go out and solve this mystery.

This is something that´s somebody´s family

has been suffering for many, many years.

When I first heard the young girl say,

"Please help me find my name," that just kind of struck me.

And that "Age about 20 years," that hit me, as a mom,

because, at the time, my two daughters were 19 and 23.

I thought, "Who is this girl?"

And I very naively just sort of said,

"Well, I´ll try to figure out who she is."

My main objective was to get her name on her grave,

so that she wouldn´t be just a Jane Doe anymore.

I had no idea what I was getting into. [ Laughs ]

I´d been writing a history column

for the local newspaper, the Daily Camera,

but at the back of my mind was this Jane Doe.

So I threw myself into the era of the ´50s.

I looked at old magazines and watched old movies.

If you ask me, he seems a little odd.

Just kind of got a feel

for what life was like at that time.

So, I had access to the Daily Camera archives.

They had a whole drawer of murder files.

At the very back, under "U,"

there was this unidentified file

and it was full of these newspaper clippings

and I just spread them all out on a table --

it was like a big jigsaw puzzle --

and kind of fit them together

and that was the impetus that got me going.

Jane Doe´s body had been found by two students

from the University of Colorado in early April,

when they were hiking along Boulder Creek.

This was the body of a slender young woman.

She had strawberry blond hair.

She was completely naked.

She had been battered and bruised and bludgeoned.

She had been, probably, there for about a week or more.

They were not able to get any eye color

or fingerprint identification.

They realized that they were dealing with probable homicide.

Pettem: At first, there were very few leads

to who Jane Doe might´ve been.

The Denver newspaper reported

the inquest from the coroner´s office

and it mentioned the name of the pathologist.

His name was Freburn L. James.

I Googled his name and there was only one Freburn L. James

in the entire country.

And so I found a phone number for him

and I just called him up one day and I said,

"Are you the Freburn L. James

who was a pathologist in Boulder?

Because, if you are, we´re trying

to find out something more about this Jane Doe victim."

And he said, "I´ve always wondered about that girl.

I have her autopsy report right here in my living room."

It was like, "Wow."

The pathologist sent a copy of the autopsy report

and it included the fact that

she had an appendectomy scar.

At this point, I felt like we were really

building more of a case file.

I realized I had to approach the Boulder Police Department

and the first detective I spoke with

was Detective Steve Ainsworth.

♫♫

Am I good?

My name is Steve Ainsworth.

I´m a retired homicide detective

for the Boulder County Sheriff´s Office.

When I first met with Silvia,

she had all of her ducks in a row.

She had times, dates, who was involved.

She had all of the newspaper clippings.

She had all of this documentation on this homicide.

Silvia wanted to see if there was anything we could do

to work this case up and see

if we could maybe make some progress on it

because you have two difficulties.

First of all, she was murdered;

and, second of all, we don´t know who she is.

Well, I had already been working cold cases,

so I was interested because this would be

the oldest one that I had worked.

I thought, "Yeah, we can go somewhere on this case."

♫♫

This is Boulder Canyon,

where Boulder Jane Doe was found up here by Boulder Falls.

And the creek runs on this side of the roadway.

I have to visit the crime scene.

Because you kind of have to get --

you get into that mind-set

of what it looked like,

what does it feel like, what does it smell like?

You have to have all of those things in your mind,

so, when you´re reading something about it,

you´re not only visualizing, you can live it

because you´ve already been there.

If you haven´t experienced that, then it´s just words on paper.

♫♫

When I first came up here, I was thinking,

"How did this happen?"

So, this area, in 1954, was a two-track dirt road.

Is a pretty desolate place.

Perfect place for somebody to kill someone

and to dump a body.

Right here is the crime scene

where Boulder Jane Doe was found,

right down here on the creek bed.

There´s a photo from the newspaper on that day

and these are the two young men that discovered the body.

This autopsy report tells us it had been very cold, I think,

so the body was somewhat frozen.

But what´s really interesting is the injuries.

They´re all left-sided and it´s from the cranium

all the way down to the shins.

And that gives me pause as to why there would be

serious injuries just on one side of the body.

What I´m trying to do is correlate that in my mind.

Do these injuries correspond with where she was found?

And they really don´t.

I was pretty sure that she wasn´t thrown over the side

because she would´ve had injuries all all over,

instead of these major ones on the left side.

Something else had to have happened.

She was just left here alone in this desolate place.

It strengthens my resolve to find out who she is

and what happened.

♫♫

[ Suspenseful music plays ]

I knew that we were going to have to do an exhumation,

to not only potentially get DNA,

but also to examine the injuries,

to reconstruct and see, "Okay,

what do these injuries look like?"

We needed to get the sheriff onboard.

♫♫

Pelle: [ Clears throat ]

Man: Second sticks. [ Clack ]

My name is Joe Pelle.

I´m the sheriff for Boulder County, Colorado.

So, although I´ve been a cop a very long time,

I´ve never done an exhumation.

I did not know exactly what was involved with that.

Steve Ainsworth came to me and said that he had received

an email from Silvia Pettem about this case.

Silvia was really interested in seeing if modern technology,

if advances with DNA,

could make a difference in identifying this young lady

and, perhaps, bring some closure to a family.

There was some discussion, initially,

about how it would be funded

and we would need, probably,

several thousand dollars for DNA comparison.

And who would do the exhumation?

I was hesitant to spend tens of thousands of dollars

on something I wasn´t sure was going to pay off.

I said, "If I raise the money myself, would that help?"

I wasn´t sure how I was going to do that,

but I kind of threw it out there and that brought him around.

The remarkable thing about the case is that,

not only were there no clues as to how or who killed her,

there were no clues ever uncovered as to who she was.

We wanted to inform the public

to get interest in the case in the community.

It´s taken half a century, but the community is, again,

pulling together for this unknown victim.

It was really exciting for me

to be part of the press conference

because I felt, for the first time,

like I was a team member.

It was a partnership and it felt really good to be part of that.

Silvia contacted me and talked about the idea

of disinterring her body.

That was a bit of a shock.

I had not had to oversee anything like that before.

My motto is, "Go big or go home."

I don´t want to do an exhumation and then think,

"Okay, now what?"

So, this needs to be national, to get that exposure

because somebody is going to recognize this person.

That´s why I contacted "America´s Most Wanted"

and said, "Hey, this is the deal.

We´ve got this case. It´s 50 years old.

We´d sure like to solve it and you guys could help."

Walsh: Once again, the people of Boulder came through.

Not only did she raise the money,

but Silvia found some forensic experts

who were also willing to help.

I knew that the first person I wanted to call

was Beth Buchholtz,

since she worked for the coroner´s office.

On the day of the exhumation, I am feeling excited.

Not sure what we´re going to discover.

It´s anticipated that the exhumation

would take about two hours.

The coffin would be removed from the grave

and then taken to a lab where the forensic anthropologist

would take a look at Jane Doe.

And that that is not how it happened. [ Laughs ]

I spot a possible bone fragment.

The coffin has disintegrated

and, basically, what we have is skeletal remains.

We realized that it wasn´t going to take

just two hours to do the exhumation.

It became an archeological excavation at that point.

It was eye-opening, what they were doing,

the painstaking work that was taking place.

Beth is laying across the top of the grave on a ladder

and she was just literally sweeping

the soil away from the bones.

Buchholtz: It was painstaking.

[ Beep, camera shutter clicking ]

But we were able to recover

the majority of her skeletal remains.

♫♫

There are 6,500 people buried in the cemetery,

but I had never really

come face-to-face with anybody before,

so, it was moving.

When I first looked into the grave,

I didn´t know what to expect, but there were tufts of hair

and I just felt like I needed a connection.

I´d been thinking about this woman for so many years

and I just reached down and touched a bit of her hair

and it may seem odd to other people,

but, to me, it was just my way of connecting with her.

Once we get the exhumation done,

we take all of the remains, we catalogue them,

we document them, we photograph them.

We were able to get DNA from the molars,

so, we had a full profile from that.

If there´s anybody still living,

like a sibling, that we could get DNA from,

we could try to identify them that way.

We´re looking at the injuries.

We´re looking at the bones

with forensic pathologists.

I had always thought it was weird,

looking at these injuries.

Why are they all on the left side?

And one of them says,

"Those look like bumper fractures."

And I said, "Do you think she was hit by a car?"

And he said, "Well, look at these injuries.

They´re all in the left side.

Why would that be, unless she was hit by a car?"

And I thought, "Oh, my goodness."

Now, you´re going, "Okay, she wasn´t beat up somewhere.

She was probably hit by a car."

But why no clothes, and by whom?

This is the front lobby of the sheriff´s office

with our historical display and down here at the end is

the Jane Doe display cabinet.

A lot of items of interest from the case.

They put the skull back together.

This is the reconstruction of the facial features

and the way they believe Jane Doe would look.

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

Hopefully, what´ll happen is

somebody will recognize this young lady

and bring it to the sheriff´s attention.

It was really important to the investigation

to get Jane Doe´s face out to a national audience

and posting the Jane Doe facial reconstruction

on the Doe Network and also on my own Jane Doe website.

So, her face was going out everywhere.

Our working theory for Jane Doe was she´s probably a runaway

because we don´t have any reports of --

local reports of missing persons that match her description.

We were looking for white females in their 20s,

missing during this period of time.

We were essentially making lists of any young woman

who was missing in 1954

and then we would search for a paper trail.

And, obviously, if she showed up at a later date,

we would rule her out.

That´s where I really brought in the Internet into the search.

The Jane Doe message board

was very helpful in bringing in leads

and also bringing in new researchers.

♫♫

My name is Karen and I live in Michigan.

I used to have a business

that researched and tracked

deadbeat dads that didn´t pay their child support.

I just seem to have a knack for finding people.

I watched "America´s Most Wanted"

and they had a feature on Boulder Jane Doe,

which I found extremely intriguing and interesting

and I wanted to help and I thought I could.

I Googled Silvia Pettem´s name and Silvia´s website came up

and I contacted her and Silvia said,

"We can take all the help we can get."

Pettem: Once I was working with the other researchers,

we compiled this list of missing young women.

All of us spent hours every day,

just going through marriage records,

divorce records, Social Security records --

anything we could find of a paper trail.

When the leads started to come in,

there were times I kind of felt like,

up here on my mountaintop,

it was kind of like a control tower

and everything was flying in and going out.

I thought, with this team, it´d be solved in six months.

[ Laughs ]

I was pretty...

wrong. [ Laughs ]

Several tips came in.

One was a Nebraska lady.

One was a New York lady.

I believe one was from Oklahoma.

They were all in the early 50s, so, could be Boulder Jane Doe.

Yeah, I think, you know, at first,

you just go, "There can´t be that many,"

and then you realize there really are.

[ Film reel rattling ]

[ Beep ]

♫♫

Then you start thinking, "What´s going on?

How come so many are just taking off and going?"

And what I found was,

back in the ´40s, ´50s, even part of the ´60s,

it was very, very easy to change your identity

and get a new name

and take off and have another life.

♫♫

The more I read about women that disappeared in the ´50s,

the more I realized that some of them may have even

had a reason to run away, something they were fleeing,

and maybe they didn´t even want to be found.

♫♫

[ Birds chirping ]

While we were researching,

there were two leads that came in from Denver.

One was a woman that was obviously too heavy

and the other was Katharine Dyer.

After that, we all gathered together

on our computers separately

and just tried to find as much as we possibly could.

We did find that she had been married

and I sent off to the county there for her marriage license.

It listed her birth date and her birthplace

and the name of Farrand as a maiden name.

So, now, we´re all jumping on the last name Farrand.

I went into the different genealogy bases

and I tried to find anything with Katharine Dyer.

Ainsworth: So, when I´m getting leads, obviously, I go through it

and look and see what matches, what doesn´t.

With Katharine Dyer, we actually got some good information.

She had disappeared from Denver,

so that would give her reason to be in Boulder

and she was approximately the same age as Jane Doe would be.

Katharine´s marriage license revealed that she was married

to a man named Jimmie Dyer in Arizona who had died.

He was married three or four times

and I found that one of his other wives lived

in Denver at the time,

so, I managed to contact her and go visit her.

She said that she had a lot of his old photographs

and I brought them all home and spread them out on a table.

And, suddenly, there was a picture

of an attractive young woman standing

at the very edge of the Grand Canyon

and one of them just said, "Katharine."

♫♫

I immediately took the photograph

to the sheriff´s office and they made copies.

[ Whirring ]

We had a face of Katharine.

The fact that she just seemed to disappear into thin air

kind of made it seem more apt that

she was going to be Boulder Jane Doe.

She had had a falling out with her family,

had run away at the time,

and her photo was strikingly similar

to the skull reconstruction.

Sheriff Pelle himself suggested that we do

what was called a superimposition,

where the image of Katharine would be superimposed

on an image of the facial reconstruction

of Boulder Jane Doe.

It was all done on computers,

but they put the image of Katharine

right over the image of the facial reconstruction

and it matched so closely, I was really excited.

I thought, "This has got to be our Jane Doe."

[ Melancholy tune plays ]

We were hoping that, once we figure out who Jane Doe was,

we´d have some more clues as to who killed her.

One of the researchers just put in an email one day and said,

"Have you ever considered Harvey Glatman

as being the possible murderer?"

[ Mouse clicking ]

And I hadn´t ever even heard

of Harvey Glatman.

♫♫

Ainsworth: I had known about Harvey Glatman for a long time.

Just a fascinating case.

He was identified by the FBI

as one of the first serial killers,

but I´m thinking, no, he´s in Southern California.

[ Romantic tune plays ]

♫♫

My name is Rick Jackson.

I´m a retired LAPD homicide detective.

Harvey Glatman was born

in the Bronx area of New York City.

Seemed to be kind of a mama´s boy.

His mom always took care of him,

even after he started getting into trouble.

And, in January 1957, he decides to move to L.A.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] [ Streetcar bell rings ]

He went right to the Hollywood area,

like a half a mile from Paramount Studios.

A lot of beautiful women coming in and out of there.

It was near the modeling agencies.

He had a pretty unique MO.

He would tell his prospective victims he was a photographer.

Back then, there were pulp fiction magazines.

I know one was called True Detective.

It was a lot of photographs,

a lot of them in bondage situations,

women tied up and bound.

And so, when he would broach these women,

he would use that as a gimmick

to get them to start to let him tie them up

and then he would take photographs.

He would then rape and murder them.

All three murder victims in Southern California

were all tied up, bound.

All young.

They range from 19 to 24.

Two of the three were interested in modeling,

you know, wanted to get a chance in the business.

And then the downfall started.

In October, he met Lorraine Vigil

through a modeling agency

and this was her first assignment.

He said he had arranged to have a studio in Anaheim

to photograph her, so we were driving down

and, at some point, he pulled off the road.

He displayed a gun and she fought.

She wasn´t going to get tied up.

And, fortunately for her,

a California Highway Patrol officer was driving on this road

and saw the struggle going on outside of the car.

and that led to Glatman´s arrest.

♫♫

♫♫

[ Melancholy tune plays ]

[ Meows ]

I kind of went back into my research mode here

of local history

and tried to find as much as I possibly could about him.

I get a phone call from Silvia

and she tells me about Harvey Glatman.

Lived in Denver.

He was born in New York,

but his family moved to Denver

when he was a teenager in 1945.

And all of a sudden, I went, "Oh, my gosh!

Are you kidding me?"

Narrator: Only a few minutes away

from Broomfield Heights

are the great recreational areas

of Boulder, Colorado.

[ Suspenseful music plays ]

One of the most startling things

about Harvey Glatman is

that one of his very first arrests came

from a woman that he abducted right here in Boulder.

He kind of kidnapped her off the street

and made her walk up into the mountains and molested her.

Ainsworth: He had taken her up Sunshine Canyon,

which is the next canyon north.

He tied her up and kept her for the night.

Pettem: He served some time in the state penitentiary for that.

And he spent the years 1951 to 1957

living in Denver, actually, with his parents

and it was during that time that Jane Doe´s body was found.

And so, Jane Doe, in looking at the autopsy photographs,

I see this mark on her left wrist area,

so I had a renowned pathologist look at it

and I said, "Do you think that´s a ligature mark?"

And he looked and he said, "Yeah, that´s a ligature mark."

So, that fits with his MO.

So, now, I´m excited about going after Harvey Glatman

and see if we can put the two of them together.

♫♫

[ Birds chirping ]

On both the Jane Doe message board,

as well as the Doe Network,

we posted information that we believed,

at this point in our research,

that Katharine Dyer was probably Jane Doe,

but we still couldn´t find any family members.

All of a sudden, I got an email

and it was from someone I didn´t know.

It just said, "Hi, Silvia.

We have information about Katharine.

You may need to be sitting down when you read this."

Two ladies in Australia,

they had been taking care of this lady, Barbara,

and, now, she was getting ready to go to a nursing home

and they had found stuff in her bedroom

when they were cleaning it out.

They found divorce papers

for a Katharine Dyer and a James Dyer

and they Googled the name and see that it´s this big case.

The email just said, "Katharine is in Australia

she is living in my house.

We have the separation and divorce documents...

We had no idea she was a missing person

until we put her name in a search."

It turned out that Katharine really was alive.

She was living under another name.

She was known as Barbara Thompson.

What we have here is a person that got married,

skipped out on a divorce, moved to Hawaii,

then jumped on a boat

[ Whistle blowing ] and sailed to Australia

and, poof! Gets off the boat and, now, she´s Barbara.

She just kept reinventing herself.

Your stomach just drops.

You just like, "Oh, my God," you know?

"We´re just back at square one."

Once we learned that Katharine Farrand Dyer

was not Jane Doe, it was kind of deflating.

We just didn´t know where to go next.

It was back to the drawing board.

♫♫

[ Birds chirping ]

[ Melancholy tune plays ]

♫♫

Reilly-McNellan: Following the disinterment,

there were a lot of studies that were done --

a DNA, facial reconstruction, and so forth --

but, unfortunately, one lead after another dissolved

and we did want to return the remains to the cemetery.

♫♫

We decided that it was probably time to rebury her.

We had become her extended family.

Reilly-McNellan: It was pretty somber.

We thought, for sure, we would find out who this person was.

Instead, we were burying these unknown remains

of someone that we weren´t able to identify.

[ Alert chimes ]

One day, late at night,

I was just about to go to sleep

and I got an email from a young woman in Wisconsin

and it said, "I think my great-aunt might be Jane Doe."

[ Suspenseful music plays ]

♫♫

Kasper: Dot´s there in the middle.

My name is Michelle Kasper and I´m from Madison, Wisconsin.

As a young child, I pretty much lived with my great-aunt Deanie.

She´s technically my great-aunt,

but she was more of my mother figure.

When I was about 12 years old,

I found a photo album in Deanie´s basement

and so there were all these amazing pictures of Deanie,

my grandmother, and their oldest sister,

looking fabulous as teenagers --

Dot, Bobbie, and Deanie.

Deanie had two older sisters.

Her oldest sister was Dorothy Gay,

also known as Dot,

who I had been told had gone missing

when they were growing up.

This photo is in 1953

and it´s actually the last photograph

of the Howard girls together.

Despite it being a sad photo,

because it´s the last one of them together,

it´s also bittersweet,

the three girls together smiling and happy in front of a new car.

They´re so old.

Dorothy and her sisters all grew up on a farm in Arizona.

There were a lot of stories

of Dot being the boss of the show.

Deanie had mentioned that Dot was

the most rebellious of the three.

She was pretty notorious for running away.

Years later, Dot lied about her age to get married.

That marriage was annulled.

So, when Dot went missing in 1953,

she would´ve been 17, almost 18 years old.

I asked Deanie where she thought Dot might have been

and Deanie said that she thought Dot

had run away and gotten married, again.

Dot wanted a different life.

Dot wanted to have more money

and to not, you know, live on a farm.

She was just a very strong-willed, determined woman.

At the same time, I was also a teenager

who was rebelling and feeling like

Dot and I would´ve gotten along really well.

I had zero investigation experience.

My initial search for Dot really consisted

of me looking up Dorothy Howard, Dorothy Gay Howard,

and looking for phone numbers

for women that had those names and calling them.

Most of them were very kind and would say, you know,

"No, I´m sorry.

It isn´t me."

After I began my search for Dot, a close friend of mine told me

about a website called the Doe Network.

When I expanded my search outside of Arizona,

I was looking at hundreds of listings.

And then I came across Jane Doe number UFC333.

This was a young woman that was found

in Boulder, Colorado, in 1954.

The physical description matched very closely

to the description of what Dot had looked like

at the time she disappeared,

specifically, the height being around 5´4",

her weight being close to 100 pounds.

The Doe Network also listed

that this Jane Doe had a scar from an appendectomy.

I reached out to my great-aunt Deanie

and asked her if she knew if Dot had had any surgeries.

Deanie said yes and that she remembered very clearly

that Dot had had her appendix removed.

And so I start searching Boulder Jane Doe

and I´m getting a lot of hits off of Google

coming back to a woman named Silvia Pettem

and so I sent her an email.

After I got Michelle´s email,

I was so excited, I wrote her back right away.

We immediately started talking on the phone.

Ainsworth: I get an email from Silvia about this Michelle.

She says, "I think we need to follow this up," and I said, "I do, too."

Michelle told me that there was a surviving sister

who lived in Arkansas,

so there would be a way to compare DNA.

So, I sent the Arkansas State Police out

and they were able to get swabs, which I then sent to the lab

which had done the DNA extraction

on the molars from Jane Doe.

And then we waited for the results.

♫♫

[ Bright tune plays ]

The Boulder Jane Doe case became an obsession.

You know, you work very feverishly,

especially when you first start,

then, all of a sudden, it´s four or five years later,

but you don´t let go.

Ainsworth: We were pretty excited about the DNA.

It could be her, but this could just be another dead end.

Pettem: I was just in suspense every day.

It was only a matter of weeks.

It seemed like years. [ Laughs ]

I got a phone call from the lab

and the lab director herself said, "Are you sitting down?"

And I said, [ Laughing ] "Oh, no, it isn´t."

She said, "Yep, that´s her sister."

Holy crap!

I know who she is!

She´s Dorothy Gay Howard.

Jane Doe is Dorothy Gay Howard from Arizona,

a runaway that came to Colorado.

It all matched.

It began in 1996,

when Silvia first heard the story of Jane Doe,

and, in 2009,

we got confirmation that there was a match

and I was very happy for Silvia.

You could´ve knocked me over with a feather.

♫♫

I had a mixture of emotions that day.

I was relieved that we´d finally solved the identity of Jane Doe,

but I was very sad for the family

because they had no idea

that she had suffered such a horrible death.

[ Melancholy tune plays ]

♫♫

I had been wholly unprepared for the feelings

that would come with the identification.

My great-aunt was grieving and, perhaps, feeling some guilt

that, for decades,

she had thought her sister had run away

and, now, she´s learning that her sister wasn´t coming home,

not because she didn´t want to be a part of the family,

but, instead, she had been brutally murdered.

♫♫

Woman: Okay?

Yeah.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] [ Crickets chirping ]

The first time I saw the photograph

of Dorothy Gay Howard,

I mean, she was just glamorous, beautiful.

It was like being reunited with someone in my family

because I had felt that close to her all these years.

But we needed to know more.

I needed to know more.

Ainsworth: Once the DNA comes back and we know who she is,

then I start piecing things together.

I find out that she´s just on the tail end

of her second marriage and she´s 19 years old.

And she has a great-aunt named Ola Mae who lived in Denver.

And I find an address for her aunt

and I look at her and go, "Oh, my!"

So, you go up like a block from Harvey´s house,

a block north, hang a left, and you´re at her house.

He lived about 3.1 miles away from her.

He was in the right place at the right time

to have committed this crime.

[ Siren wailing in distance ]

Ainsworth: Working with the cold case homicide detectives

in Southern California,

I ended up getting a transcript of the interview

between Harvey Glatman and the detectives on the case.

And LAPD asks him about abducting women in Denver

in the early 1950s.

And so they ask him, "Now, these women,

are they all still alive?"

And he said...

Why would he say that?

That ties in with she was hit with a car.

To kind of prove this to myself,

I measured all of the injuries that Dot had on her.

I found out what kind of a car Harvey Glatman was driving.

It was a 1952 Dodge Coronet Clubman Coupe

and I found one fully restored in an establishment in New York.

He sent me the measurements the next day.

Every single one of those measurements corresponded

with the injuries Dot had on her left side.

When I was looking at Harvey Glatman,

one of the murders in Southern California,

he had tied her up and taken her to where they were going to go

and then he made her undress.

Boulder Canyon, at that time,

was way out in the middle of nowhere.

And I theorized he ties Dorothy Gay

and takes the whole ride up there

and then unties her and tells her, "Get undressed."

Dot jumps out of the car.

The direction that she´s going to run is downhill.

She runs downhill.

He goes after her with his car

and he hits her with his car

and she ends up down the embankment on Boulder Creek.

No clothing.

Only pins in her hair.

We´ll never be 100% sure because there´s no DNA

that´s going to be involved in connecting these cases,

but just all those factors and him just being in that area,

having those type of proclivities,

all point toward Glatman.

♫♫

♫♫

The problem is the pieces that are necessary

to actually put a case together, they´re just not there.

[ Melancholy tune plays ]

You know, Harvey´s long gone.

There´s no way to actually physically tie him

into the case or prove it

and I´m not sure we´re ever going to know.

[ Birds chirping ]

For me, who did this to Dot has yet to be answered

and so, for me, there hasn´t been any closure.

♫♫

My family learned just how much

Boulder had loved and cared for her.

My great-aunt Deanie made the decision

that she wanted Dorothy to remain in Boulder.

I was really pleased that the family decided

to leave her in Boulder because she had really

become part of our history.

Thinking back on how long it took

to find the identity of Dorothy, it was a chunk of my life.

And it may sound strange to say it,

but maybe her spirit was contacting me

in some way to carry on this work.

♫♫

The beginning of my search for Dot

was me, as a rebellious teenager,

relating to somebody in my family

who I thought was very similar.

And, at this point, I was 24

and was beginning a life and a family

and was recognizing how much Dot really missed out on.

The emotions were really overwhelming and unexpected,

especially since I had never met Dot,

but I had loved and searched for her all of those years.

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫