On the morning of July 15, 1982, gravedigger George Kees was working at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey, when he spotted a cross pendant lying on the ground. He followed the trail it left.
At the bottom of a slope behind the cemetery, he found the body of a young woman. Her face had been beaten so severely that she was unrecognizable. She had no identification. No one had reported her missing.
She wore a V-neck shirt and a red floral dress. The nails on her right hand were painted red. The nails on her left hand were not. She had been dead for five to ten days. She was seventeen years old, but learning that took forty years.
Police checked her fingerprints against millions of records. They searched hundreds of missing persons files. There was no match.
Lieutenant Eric Kranz, the first officer on the scene, gave her a name: “Princess Doe.” He dressed a mannequin in her clothes and displayed it publicly. HBO made a documentary about her. America’s Most Wanted featured her case. The whole country knew her. But no one recognized her.
On June 30, 1983, FBI Director William Webster personally entered her into the National Crime Information Center system. She became the first unidentified victim in the history of the federal database.
The Blairstown community paid for her burial themselves. Her headstone read: “Princess Doe, away from family, died among strangers, remembered by all.” She was buried a few meters from where her body was found.
Meanwhile, in Long Island, her family had no idea she was dead. They only knew she left home in the summer of 1982 and never returned.
Her killer confessed from prison in 2005. He wrote to the prosecutor and said he killed the unidentified woman in Blairstown. But because the victim still had no name, the confession could not be used for prosecution.
Think about that for a moment. The killer confessed. But the law was powerless because no one knew who she was.
It took forty years, a 200-milligram molar, and next-generation DNA technology before the unknown girl could finally be called by her real name.
This is the story of the longest cold case in NCIC history. The story of a seventeen-year-old girl killed and left in a strange cemetery. And the story of the people who never gave up over four decades.
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Cedar Ridge Cemetery runs along Route 94 in Blairstown, Warren County, in northwestern New Jersey near the Pennsylvania border. It is a quiet rural area, a small town where people know each other and no one expects something terrible to happen.
George Kees was working as a gravedigger at Cedar Ridge. On the morning of July 15, 1982, he was working in the northern part of the cemetery when he saw a cross pendant on the ground. He bent down to pick it up, then looked toward the steep bank leading to the stream below.
That’s when he saw her.
The body of a young woman lay on her back in a wooded area at the far edge of the cemetery, just above the stream bank. She had been dead for five to ten days. The body had begun to decompose, but that wasn’t what shocked everyone.
Her face had been struck with a blunt object so violently that it was completely unrecognizable. There were multiple fractures to the facial bones and skull.
Dr. Orah Sela Linaris, a forensic pathologist at the Edwin H. Albano Institute of Forensic Science in Newark, performed the autopsy on July 16. The cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma to the face and head, causing multiple skull and facial injuries.
Someone had deliberately destroyed her face so that no one could identify her. This was not an ordinary murder. It was an erasure of identity.
She wore a V-neck shirt and a red floral dress. Her right fingernails were painted red. Her left fingernails were unpainted. This detail puzzled investigators for years.
There were no tattoos, birthmarks, or old scars on her body. No identification documents. No wallet. No keys. Nothing except the clothes she wore and the cross pendant.
Lieutenant Eric Kranz of the Blairstown Police Department was the first law enforcement officer to arrive at the scene, accompanied by members of the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office and the New Jersey State Police.
Kranz looked at the body of the unknown girl and realized this would be the hardest case of his career.
The immediate goal was to identify the victim. No identity, no case. No case, no justice.
Fingerprints were collected during the autopsy and checked against records at the New Jersey State Police Identification Bureau. There were no matches.
Dental records were sent to forensic dentist Dr. Haskell Askin in Brick, New Jersey, to be stored and compared with future missing persons reports. There were no results.
Kranz searched through hundreds of missing persons files from neighboring states. No one matched the description. This girl seemed to not exist in any system. No one was looking for her. No one called to ask about her. No one came to claim her.
Kranz decided to give her a name. He called her “Princess Doe” to distinguish her from the thousands of other unidentified bodies across America. The name stuck for forty years.
Kranz did everything he could. He brought a display mannequin, dressed it in the clothes she was wearing, and displayed it publicly, hoping someone would recognize her. He contacted newspapers throughout the region. Photos of Princess Doe’s clothing were published in New Jersey and New York papers.
Then came the first lead.
A woman named Ann Marie Latimer called police after seeing the clothing photos in the newspaper. She said she clearly remembered seeing a girl wearing the exact same clothes buying cigarettes from a store near the cemetery on July 13, 1982, two days before the body was found.
This meant Princess Doe was alive in the Blairstown area at least days before her death. She wasn’t killed elsewhere and dumped here. She was already here.
But where did she come from? And who was she with?
Other small leads followed. A woman called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and said she worked at a lodge near Blairstown when a young girl stayed there. The girl mentioned that her father was a dentist.
A similar lead came from Ocean City, Maryland, where the girl may have worked as a hotel maid under assumed names. The clothing she wore was traced to Long Island, New York.
But none of these leads led to a specific identity. Every path led to a dead end.
Then the case went cold. Not because Kranz gave up, but because he had nothing new to pursue.
Princess Doe remained in the wooded area behind the cemetery, and no one knew who she was.
—
If the police couldn’t identify her, the Blairstown community decided she would not be treated as nameless forever.
A few months after the body was found, residents raised money themselves to buy a coffin, a plot of land, and a headstone for the girl they had never met.
On January 22, 1983, Princess Doe was officially buried at Cedar Ridge Cemetery. George Kees, the gravedigger who found her, dug her grave. She was buried just a few meters from where her body was discovered.
Think about that. A girl died in a strange cemetery and was buried in that same cemetery by strangers who decided she deserved to be remembered.
Four lines were carved on the headstone: “Princess Doe, away from family, died among strangers, remembered by all.” Below that was the date she was found, July 15, 1982.
That was all they knew about her. But it was enough for them to care.
The small town of Blairstown had no connection to this girl. No one knew her here. No one here was involved in her death. But they adopted her as one of their own and never forgot her.
Every year, the community held memorial services at Princess Doe’s grave. Howard Mott, a local resident, often visited the grave and touched the words carved into the stone.
For decades, Blairstown kept the flame of remembrance alive for a girl the rest of the country had forgotten.
—
The case attracted more than just a small town’s attention. Eric Kranz turned Princess Doe into one of the most famous missing persons cases in America.
After extensive press coverage in 1982, HBO contacted Kranz and offered to film the case in a documentary titled “Missing.” The program aired in 1983 and presented a facial reconstruction of Princess Doe to millions of viewers.
She also appeared on other national programs, including America’s Most Wanted, hoping someone would recognize her. Hundreds of calls came in. Dozens of leads were pursued. None led to her true identity.
Then something historic happened.
On June 30, 1983, FBI Director William Webster personally entered Princess Doe into the National Crime Information Center. She became the first unidentified victim in history to be recorded in this federal database. Her file number was U63087962.
This was not just a step forward in Princess Doe’s case. It was a turning point in how America handles unidentified victims.
Before Princess Doe, there was no centralized federal system for tracking unidentified dead people. Her case became the impetus for entering thousands of other victims into the system in the decades that followed.
An unknown girl in a New Jersey cemetery changed how an entire nation searches for the missing.
But changing the system didn’t mean finding the answer. Princess Doe remained unidentified.
—
For years, the strongest theory was that she might be Diane Genese Day, a missing teenager from another family. Many investigators believed that theory. Kranz did not.
From the beginning, he insisted that Diane Day was not a likely candidate for Princess Doe. He was right.
In 2003, Princess Doe’s nuclear DNA was directly compared to a sample from Diane’s mother, Patricia Day. The result was conclusive. Princess Doe was not Diane Genese Day.
More than two decades of pursuing the wrong theory. Back to square one.
But while her identity remained a mystery, another question was finding an answer. That question was: Who killed her?
In 1999, evidence emerged suggesting two people may have been involved in Princess Doe’s murder. Their names were Arthur and Donna Kinlaw.
When you learn who they were, and what they did to other young women before and after Princess Doe, you realize the girl in Cedar Ridge Cemetery was not their only victim. She was just the first known victim.
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Arthur Kinlaw was not the kind of killer you see in movies. He didn’t hide in the shadows. He didn’t commit one crime and then disappear.
Arthur Kinlaw was a methodical serial killer with a pattern, a partner, a wife, and a business that traded in the bodies of young women.
He was born and raised in Long Island, New York, the same area where Princess Doe was later determined to have come from.
Alongside his wife Donna Kinlaw, he ran a prostitution network that operated throughout Suffolk County, New York, during the 1980s. The network wasn’t limited to one location. According to investigation files, the Kinlaws operated in Central Islip, Greenlawn, Bellport, and Hunts Point.
In addition to prostitution, they were involved in theft, forgery, burglary, and welfare fraud across seven states. These were not opportunistic crimes. They were an organized criminal enterprise, and young women were the merchandise.
Kinlaw’s pattern repeated with terrifying precision. He would approach young women, often vulnerable ones, those abandoned by their families or living on the margins. He would gain their trust. He would offer them a place in his prostitution network. When they refused, he killed them.
Not sometimes. Every time.
At least four young women fell into Kinlaw’s hands between 1982 and 1984. Four young women that we know of. The true number may be higher.
The first known victim was the girl in Cedar Ridge Cemetery, then known only as Princess Doe. Investigators believe Kinlaw met her in the West Babylon area of Long Island. There is evidence he tried to force her into his prostitution network.
She refused. He drove her to New Jersey, to Blairstown, a town neither of them had any connection to, and beat her to death in Cedar Ridge Cemetery in July 1982.
Blairstown wasn’t a destination. Blairstown was where he disposed of her body.
Just two months later, in September 1982, Christine Cosmo was shot to death in Coram, New York. Suspicion fell on Kinlaw. Christine was also a young woman in the gang’s activity area. Same pattern, same ending.
In 1983, another woman disappeared. Known in files only as “Mary,” she was estimated to be between 20 and 45 years old. Her body wasn’t found until December 21, 1999, when police discovered remains buried under the concrete patio behind Kinlaw’s home in Bellport, Long Island.
He killed her, dragged her to the backyard, and poured concrete over her. Then he lived in that house, walking back and forth over that patio every day as if nothing had happened.
The fourth victim was a woman named Linda. She disappeared sometime between March and April 1984. Her body was found floating in the East River in New York City on May 3, 1984. She had been strangled, beaten, bound, and gagged before being thrown into the river.
According to evidence, the Kinlaws met Linda at the Blackberry Jam club in Bay Shore, New York. She may have been Italian-American and lived with her grandmother in Bay Shore or Brentwood, Long Island. The Kinlaws befriended her. They offered her a place in the gang. When she refused and threatened to go to the police, Arthur, with Donna’s help, killed her and dumped her body in the river.
Same pattern: approach, coercion, refusal, murder.
Four women in less than three years. Two of them, Mary and Linda, remain unidentified to this day. We don’t know their real names. Their families may still be searching for them, or they may have lost hope long ago.
—
Donna Kinlaw was not just the killer’s wife. She was a partner in crime.
In 1998, the Kinlaws were charged with Linda’s murder after Donna was arrested in California while attempting another crime. When police interrogated her, Donna began to talk.
She provided details about Linda’s murder, and her statements led to the couple’s imprisonment. Arthur Kinlaw was sentenced to life in prison on two counts of second-degree murder, including the killings of Linda and Mary. Donna was sentenced to three to eleven years for manslaughter and released in 2003.
But Donna didn’t just talk about Linda and Mary. After Arthur faced the death penalty, she told police that her husband had killed another woman, a prostitute, in early 1982. She said something else too. She said she knew about the murder at Blairstown Cemetery.
There are two versions of Donna’s statements about Princess Doe, and they contradict each other. In one version, she said she was present with Arthur at the cemetery and watched him commit the crime. In the other, she said that in July 1982, her husband brought a teenage girl home, then left with her, and returned alone.
Either way, the result was the same. That girl was never seen again.
Donna also sat for an interview with a forensic artist and described the girl she claimed to have met. The sketch based on Donna’s description resembled the latest facial reconstruction of Princess Doe.
But everything Donna said remained the word of an accomplice trying to reduce her sentence. There was no physical evidence directly linking Arthur Kinlaw to Cedar Ridge Cemetery in the summer of 1982.
Most importantly, the victim remained unidentified. Without an identity, there was no way to prove a connection between Princess Doe and the Kinlaws. Without an identity, there was no case that could hold up in court.
Arthur Kinlaw remained in prison for other murders, but Princess Doe’s case remained open, waiting for a missing piece.
—
In 1999, investigators decided to try a new approach. Princess Doe’s remains were exhumed from Cedar Ridge Cemetery, seventeen years after her burial.
The goal was to collect a femur bone sample for DNA testing in Baltimore, Maryland. This was the first time DNA technology was used in this case. Investigators hoped DNA would do what fingerprints, dental records, and hundreds of television programs could not: give her a name.
But the technology of 1999 was not advanced enough. A DNA sample was extracted, but its quality was insufficient to produce a complete profile that could be compared to existing databases. The result led nowhere. Another dead end.
Princess Doe was returned to her grave, still unidentified.
But while science was stalled, an unexpected development came from inside prison walls.
On May 5, 2005, the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office received a handwritten letter. The sender was Arthur Kinlaw, an inmate at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. Kinlaw was serving a life sentence for two counts of second-degree murder, for Linda and Mary.
In the letter, he wrote that he wanted to be interviewed and to confess that he killed the unidentified woman found in Blairstown, Warren County, New Jersey, in 1982.
He initiated contact. No one forced him. No one offered him a reduced sentence. He wrote the letter voluntarily and said he killed Princess Doe.
Investigators went to Sullivan Prison and interviewed Kinlaw. He stated that he was directly responsible for the death of the unidentified woman in Blairstown. He provided some details about the crime.
From that moment on, over the following years, Kinlaw continued to send more letters and give varying confessions, all about the same thing. He killed the girl at Blairstown Cemetery in 1982.
Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer later said Kinlaw wrote several letters to his office starting in 2005 and also confessed personally during interviews. Not once, but many times, over many years. He wanted people to know what he had done.
Now stop and think about this. A killer in prison voluntarily writes to a prosecutor to say he killed a specific woman at a specific place at a specific time. In any other case, that would be enough for prosecution.
But not in this case. Because the problem wasn’t who killed her. The problem was who she was.
Kinlaw’s confession could not be fully confirmed because the victim remained unidentified. No identity, no family to confirm her disappearance, no records to prove she ever existed. No way to build a complete timeline of her last days, who she met, how she got to Blairstown, or what her relationship was to Kinlaw.
A confession without a victim’s identity is like a puzzle piece without a picture. You know it belongs somewhere, but you can’t prove it fits.
Pfeiffer later explained that although Kinlaw confessed nearly two decades before the case was solved, his office was not in a position to prosecute and present a strong enough case in court while so many pieces were still missing, including the most important piece: the victim’s identity.
This is the most painful paradox of the Princess Doe case. The killer confessed. The law knew who he was. He was sitting in prison, going nowhere. But the justice system could not hold him accountable for her murder because she remained just “Princess Doe,” a name given by police to a girl no one recognized.
No identity, no case. No case, no justice.
That equation had been true since day one. And twenty-three years after Kranz gave her the name Princess Doe, it was still true.
The case entered the strangest possible state. Frozen not for lack of suspects, not for lack of confession, but for lack of the victim’s identity.
Kinlaw remained in prison for the other murders. Princess Doe remained in a nameless grave. And time kept passing.
—
In 2007, new efforts began. Princess Doe’s remains were examined again, hoping DNA technology had advanced enough since the failed 1999 attempt. Multiple agencies participated in testing over the following years, but the results were still not sufficient to identify her.
Technology was advancing, but not fast enough. The DNA extracted from remains that had been decomposing for over two decades posed a major challenge for any laboratory. What remained of Princess Doe’s body was diminishing over time. Each exhumation, each sampling, reduced the available biological material.
Scientists were racing against decomposition. And decomposition was winning.
Then, in 2021, came the real turning point.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) decided to try again. But this time, they didn’t send the samples to ordinary laboratories. They went to Astrea Forensics, a California laboratory specializing in extracting DNA from highly degraded samples, the kind most other labs rejected.
And they didn’t send a femur bone or a large bone fragment. They sent the two smallest things imaginable: a molar and an eyelash.
The molar weighed 200 milligrams. That’s about the weight of a grain of rice.
From those 200 milligrams, Astrea Forensics tried to extract enough DNA to identify a girl who had died thirty-nine years earlier. If the attempt failed, there might be no other sample left to try again.
This was the last chance. And everything depended on one tooth.
—
That 200-milligram molar changed everything.
When Astrea Forensics received the sample in June 2021, no one was sure there was enough DNA to extract. The tooth had been in the remains for thirty-nine years, had gone through at least two previous exhumations, and had been stored in varying conditions for decades.
Most laboratories would have looked at this sample and said there wasn’t enough to work with. Astrea Forensics is not like other laboratories. They specialize in extracting DNA from samples others had given up on.
From that tiny tooth, they extracted a single DNA sample containing hundreds of millions of unique human DNA fragments. Hundreds of millions from just 200 milligrams.
That is the power of technology that simply didn’t exist forty years ago.
When Eric Kranz named Princess Doe in the summer of 1982, extracting DNA from a tooth wasn’t even within the imagination of forensic science. When the remains were first exhumed in 1999, technology had advanced but not enough. When they were examined again in 2007, the results still weren’t sufficient.
But by 2021, science had finally caught up with the case.
Astrea Forensics sent the results as DNA files to NCMEC and the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office.
But having DNA doesn’t mean having an identity. DNA only gives you the person’s genetic code. To turn that code into a name, you need genetic genealogy, a field that combines DNA analysis with traditional genealogical research to find kinship connections between an unknown person and living people.
Astrea’s results were transferred to genealogical consultants at NCMEC with Innovative Forensics Investigations. The project manager was Jennifer Moore. She agreed to do all the genealogy work for free, with no limits on time or scope.
For free. For a girl she never met, who died before she knew she existed.
This is the kind of commitment this case kept generating in the people who worked on it. From George Kees, who dug her grave, to the Blairstown residents who bought her headstone, to Eric Kranz, who never gave up, to Jennifer Moore, who worked without pay. Princess Doe had a special ability to make people unable to ignore her case.
Moore and her team began building a family tree from DNA segments, searching for distant relatives in public genetic databases, then working from distant relatives to closer ones.
The process took months. Hundreds of family branches were traced, verified, and eliminated.
On February 22, 2022, Innovative Forensics notified investigators that they had found a candidate for Princess Doe’s identity.
—
Investigators went to West Babylon, New York. That’s a suburb in Long Island, about eighty miles east of Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown.
They knocked on the door of Robert Olanick Jr. Robert opened the door and listened to what the investigators said. They asked about his sister.
He confirmed that his sister’s name was Dawn, Dawn Rita Olanick. She left home around June 24, 1982. She left at her mother’s request. She never returned.
No one in the family had heard any news about her since. For forty years, they didn’t know where she was. They didn’t know if she was alive or dead. They only knew she was gone.
Dawn Rita Olanick was born on August 5, 1964, in Manhattan, New York. Her father was Robert W. Olanick. Her mother was Constance Wahl. She had an older brother, Robert, and a younger sister, Lynn.
After her parents divorced, Dawn lived with her mother and sister in Bohemia, Long Island. She attended Connetquot Central School District until the last term of her junior year, eleventh grade, in the spring of 1982. After that, she stopped going to school.
That summer, her mother asked her to leave home. She was seventeen years old.
She left. Within a few weeks, she was dead, lying in a cemetery in a town she had no reason to be in, her face so badly beaten that no one could recognize her.
Investigators collected a DNA sample from Lynn, Dawn’s sister, for official confirmation. Mito Typing Technologies used Lynn’s sample to build a mitochondrial DNA profile. The profile was sent to a laboratory in Texas for comparison.
On April 29, 2022, the results were announced. Definitive confirmation.
Princess Doe was Dawn Rita Olanick.
Forty years. Thousands of hours of investigation. Hundreds of false leads. Dozens of collapsed theories. And in the end, a 200-milligram molar, a genealogist working for free, and a brother who opened the door for police.
That was all it took. But it took forty years for all those pieces to come together at the same time.
—
Now that there was an identity, the final equation changed. Identity. Family. Family. Timeline. Timeline. Connection. And the connection led directly to Arthur Kinlaw.
Dawn grew up in West Babylon and Bohemia, Long Island. Kinlaw ran a prostitution network throughout Suffolk County, Long Island. The distance between Dawn’s world and Kinlaw’s world wasn’t distance. It was overlap.
Prosecutor Pfeiffer later revealed there was evidence suggesting Kinlaw may have first met Dawn in the West Babylon area. The same area where she grew up. The same area where she was kicked out of her mother’s home at seventeen.
A seventeen-year-old girl, homeless, out of school, with no family protection, wandering Long Island in the summer of 1982. And a serial killer who specialized in hunting exactly that kind of prey. Working in exactly that area. At exactly that time.
On July 13, 2022, investigators from the New Jersey State Police issued an arrest warrant for Arthur Kinlaw. The charge: first-degree murder under section 2C:11-3a(1) for the killing of Dawn Olanick in July 1982.
Kinlaw, sixty-eight years old, was still serving a life sentence in Sullivan County, New York. He wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t gone anywhere for over two decades.
But now, for the first time, he was formally charged with the death of the girl he had confessed to killing seventeen years earlier.
The only difference between 2005 and 2022 was one name: Dawn Rita Olanick.
—
July 15, 2022. Exactly forty years to the day after George Kees found the cross pendant on the ground at Cedar Ridge Cemetery.
The Warren County Prosecutor’s Office held a press conference. Prosecutor James Pfeiffer stood before the audience with Colonel Patrick J. Callahan, Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, and representatives from the many law enforcement agencies that had worked on the case for four decades.
Pfeiffer announced: “Princess Doe is Dawn Rita Olanick, seventeen years old, from West Babylon, Long Island, New York. Arthur Kinlaw, sixty-eight years old, has been charged with first-degree murder.”
Pfeiffer looked directly at the cameras and said what he had wanted to say for years: “For forty years, law enforcement never gave up on the Princess Doe case.”
He explained that although Kinlaw had confessed nearly two decades earlier, his office could not file charges until the victim’s identity was confirmed. “Now, with the identity known, witness statements, the original investigation, and Kinlaw’s multiple confessions, they finally had enough to file charges.”
Kinlaw faces life in prison if convicted.
In that press conference room, there was a man many in the room didn’t know, but everyone knew his name. Eric Kranz. The man who gave Princess Doe her name forty years earlier. The man who dressed a mannequin in the victim’s clothes and took it everywhere. The man who checked millions of fingerprints, searched hundreds of missing persons files, contacted dozens of television programs, and never stopped thinking about the girl in the cemetery for a single day.
Kranz had retired by then. He sat there and heard the name Dawn Rita Olanick spoken aloud for the first time in a formal setting.
When a reporter asked him how he felt, he said seven words: “I have no words. I really have no words.”
For forty years, he had tried to give her a name. When that name was finally read aloud, the man who had spent his career fighting for her had no words to say.
That is the kind of emotion no one can prepare for.
Dawn’s cousin was also present at the press conference. Speaking on behalf of the family, he said: “These were pieces of a picture that everyone was trying to put together for forty years.”
He said the six words the family had waited four decades to say: “We miss her very much.”
Dawn’s sister, Lynn, who provided the DNA sample that confirmed the identity, finally had an answer to the question she had carried her entire adult life: where did her sister go?
—
But not everyone in the family lived long enough to know the answer.
Dawn’s father, Robert W. Olanick, died on December 11, 2017, in West Babylon. He was a quiet, thoughtful man who worked in aviation for Pan Am and then Delta, raised birds, and volunteered in community programs. He died without ever knowing what happened to his daughter.
Dawn’s mother, Constance Wahl, who asked Dawn to leave home in the summer of 1982, died in 1992. She also never knew. Thirty years after asking her daughter to leave home, she died without knowing that her daughter had been killed just weeks after leaving.
Rose Fairchild, who lived across from Dawn’s home in Bohemia, said they were close childhood friends. After Dawn’s parents divorced, they lost touch. Fairchild wondered for decades what happened to her childhood friend. Now she knew the truth.
Dawn’s family said they planned to replace the headstone at Cedar Ridge Cemetery, so Dawn could finally rest under her real name, not “Princess Doe.”
But the words on the old headstone will never be forgotten. “Away from family, died among strangers, remembered by all.”
Those words were true in 1983 when the Blairstown community carved them. And in a strange way, they remained true until 2022. Because Blairstown remembered.
For forty years, this small town, with no connection to this girl, held memorial services, visited her grave, and kept her story alive in the community’s memory when the rest of the country had forgotten.
A local official, upon hearing the news of Princess Doe’s true identity, said he received the news with a broken heart because the community had considered Dawn one of their own. They loved a girl they called by the name police had given her. Now they had to learn to call her by her real name.
Acting New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin spoke at the press conference. He thanked everyone who worked on this case over the decades.
—
Arthur Kinlaw is currently serving a sentence of twenty years to life in Sullivan County, New York, for two murder convictions. Now he faces an additional first-degree murder charge in New Jersey.
Of his at least four known victims, Dawn Rita Olanick is the only one whose identity has been fully established. Christine Cosmo was shot to death in Coram in 1982. Mary was found under a concrete patio in Bellport in 1999. Linda’s body floated in the East River in 1984.
Two of them still have no real names. Their families, if any remain, are still waiting for the truth.
The Princess Doe case left a legacy that extends far beyond a single investigation.
On June 30, 1983, when FBI Director William Webster entered her into the NCIC system, he set a precedent that changed how America handles unidentified victims.
Before Princess Doe, there was no federal mechanism for tracking unidentified bodies. After Princess Doe, tens of thousands of files were entered into the system.
Her case proved that next-generation genetic genealogy technology could break deadlocks that once seemed permanent. That 200 milligrams of biological material was enough. That forty years was not too late.
And that there are people who, even if they never met the victim, will never stop searching.
—
Across America, thousands of people still lie in cemeteries, morgues, and databases with names given to them by police. Jane Doe. John Doe. Baby Doe.
Every one of them once had a real name. Every one of them once had a family.
The Princess Doe case shows that each of them still has a chance to be found.
On the morning of July 15, 1982, George Kees saw a cross pendant on the ground at Cedar Ridge Cemetery. He followed the pendant and found a girl with no name.
Forty years later, on that same date, that girl was finally called by her real name. Dawn Rita Olanick. Seventeen years old, from Long Island.
A case that remained open for forty years. A molar weighing 200 milligrams. And a girl who finally came home.