The 14-year-old boy was walking along the frozen bank of the Lehigh River in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, on the morning of December 20, 1976, when he spotted three suitcases scattered near the water. Two had burst open after falling from the 300-foot Interstate 80 bridge above. One lay intact in the bare winter bushes. Something protruding from a broken case looked like a doll’s head.
When he moved closer, he saw it was not a doll. He ran. Pennsylvania State Police arrived to find the dismembered body of a young woman stuffed into the suitcases, wrapped in an old chenille blanket. A near-term fetus lay with her.
The autopsy ruled homicide by strangulation, compounded by facial trauma, a broken nose, and a gunshot wound to the neck. The dismemberment had occurred after death, carried out by someone who appeared to know what they were doing. The medical examiner estimated the murder had taken place within twenty-four hours of discovery: killed, cut apart, packed, and thrown from the bridge in a single terrible sequence. There was no identification.
The young woman had black hair, a petite build, olive skin, and was weeks from giving birth, but no name, no wallet, no keys. A facial sketch was circulated widely. No one came forward. The suitcases and blanket were common items that could not be traced.
In 1983, officials buried her in a local cemetery beneath a stone reading “Beth Doe. ” No date of birth, no hometown, no family in attendance. The reason no one claimed her was that no one had reported her missing. In Jersey City, New Jersey, the family of fifteen-year-old Evelyn Colon believed she had simply chosen to leave.
Evelyn had grown up in a Puerto Rican immigrant household, the daughter of Luis Colon Senior and Aurelia Torres, one of six children in a small apartment. In 1976 she became pregnant by Luis Sierra, a nineteen-year-old who had once lived next door and who her family later described as jealous and controlling, prone to locking her inside the apartment. Evelyn had told her mother she was afraid of him and that if anything happened to her, he was likely responsible. Aurelia heard the words and did not know what to do with them.
The family last saw Evelyn in early December 1976, heavily pregnant. When she called her mother complaining of illness, Aurelia prepared soup and went to the apartment. No one answered. The door was open.
The furniture was gone. Her daughter and Sierra had vanished. Then in January 1977, a letter arrived, written in Spanish, postmarked from Stamford, Connecticut. It said Evelyn had given birth to a healthy nine-pound boy named Luis Sierra Jr.
, that they had moved to Connecticut, and that everything was fine. No one should worry. For a family in 1977, a letter was proof. Luis Colon Senior believed it.
No missing person report was filed. When he later asked police for help, the letter was held up to show Evelyn had left voluntarily. The family waited. Years passed.
The silence deepened into a quiet grief. Aurelia sat by the window and sometimes thought she saw her daughter in the crowd. In 2000, dying in a hospital, she held her son’s hand and whispered, “Find Evelyn. ” She never learned that her daughter had been dead for twenty-four years.
Investigators never fully closed the case. In 2007, isotope analysis of Beth Doe’s teeth and bones suggested she had grown up in central Europe, perhaps Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Slovakia, and the investigation spent years pursuing Eastern European missing-person records. The analysis did not account for the diet of a mainland-raised Puerto Rican, and it sent the case down a dead end. In 2019, a former classmate believed she recognized the facial sketch as a runaway named Maline Cruz, and the media reported the case was solved.
Weeks later, police located Cruz alive. Another dead end. In 2020, the state police partnered with Oram, a Houston laboratory specializing in degraded DNA, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Oram built a full genetic profile from Beth Doe’s remains and uploaded it to commercial genealogical databases.
The system matched more than 1,700 centimorgans of shared DNA to a man in Texas named Luis Colon Jr. That level of match indicated an aunt or uncle relationship. Luis Colon Jr. was Evelyn’s nephew.
He had grown up hearing the story of the aunt who vanished in 1976, and he had submitted his own DNA years earlier not to solve a murder but to find missing relatives and fill gaps in his family tree. He had found nothing at the time. Then the Pennsylvania State Police called him. His sister, Miriam Colon Veltman, opened the Wikipedia page for Beth Doe and saw the facial reconstruction.
She said without hesitation that it looked like their Evelyn. Testing confirmed it: Beth Doe was Evelyn Colon, fifteen years old, from Jersey City. Her brother, by then sixty-one, said simply, “All this time, we were looking for Evelyn Colon, not Beth Doe. ”
Police asked the family who had last seen Evelyn.
They named Luis Sierra, the father of her child. They described the letter from Connecticut, a letter Sierra later admitted he had written himself. Evelyn’s sister added that Sierra had been violent and controlling and had locked Evelyn inside the apartment. In March 2021, detectives went to Sierra’s home in Ozone Park, Queens, where he had lived quietly for forty-five years as a bus driver.
At first he said he did not know Evelyn Colon. Then he changed his story, acknowledging they had dated and that she had been pregnant with his child, but insisting he had last seen her at the Jersey City apartment. He had no answer for why he never searched for his pregnant girlfriend. He was arrested on a charge of criminal homicide and extradited to Pennsylvania.
The case that had waited forty-four years now had a name, a suspect, and a courtroom. But from the beginning, there was a weakness no one could hide. There was no direct physical evidence linking Sierra to the crime: no weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA. The prosecution’s case rested on family statements, on a burned letter, and on Sierra’s own admission that he wrote it.
The defense called the arrest a huge reach and argued the police had arrested the wrong man. At the preliminary hearing in April 2021, Evelyn’s brother testified, and the judge found sufficient evidence to send the case to trial. Sierra was held without bail. The legal fight then turned on procedure.
The defense moved to suppress Sierra’s March 2021 statements, arguing he had not been read his Miranda rights even though he was effectively the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Police testified that Sierra invited them in, was not handcuffed, was told repeatedly he could stop at any time, and answered voluntarily. The motion remained unresolved, but a larger crack appeared. Evidence increasingly suggested the murder had taken place in Jersey City, New Jersey, not in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania was only the site where the body was dumped, and the state did not have jurisdiction to try a crime committed on New Jersey soil. In March 2024, the prosecutor acknowledged that the alleged crime most likely occurred in Jersey City, and the charges were dismissed in Pennsylvania. The case was transferred to New Jersey. Sierra walked free.
As of the most recent public information, New Jersey had not formally charged him. For the family, the search for Evelyn had always been the point. Miriam Colon Veltman launched a memorial fund to move Evelyn’s remains from the unmarked grave in Carbon County, place a headstone bearing her real name, and hold the service she never had. Evelyn’s parents did not live to see it.
Her mother had died in 2000 whispering the name of the daughter she never found. Her father died before the DNA match was announced. Only her brother, the eldest of the five siblings, lived long enough to hear the truth and testify against the man he believed had killed his sister. The case became one of the most studied examples of forensic genealogy solving a decades-old cold case.
The method Oram used, building profiles from degraded samples and matching them against commercial genealogical databases, has since been applied to hundreds of other unidentified remains across the country. It continues to give names back to the nameless. The lessons were plain, though they came too late for Evelyn. A letter is not proof that someone is safe.
A missing person report should be filed even when an explanation exists. A single family member’s DNA profile in a database can be the key that unlocks a case forty-four years old. And the words a frightened young woman speaks to her mother about the man who controls her may be the only warning anyone ever gets. Evelyn had given that warning.
It was not enough to save her. It was enough, eventually, to give her back her name.