On November 1, 1980, patrol units with the Walker County Sheriff’s Office in Texas were dispatched to a body found on the side of Interstate 45 near the 123 mile marker. The victim was a young female, naked, with no identification. She had a ligature around her neck, a pair of shoes near her body, and a gold chain with a small pendant. Deputies believed she may have been sexually assaulted before or after death.
She was beaten badly, her face bruised. No one knew who she was. No one came forward to claim her body. Investigators began searching for missing persons in the area and talking to local residents.
Several people believed they had seen her. Some said she had come from south Texas and was headed to a prison to meet someone, but that could not be confirmed. The Hitching Post, a local location, was mentioned as a place where she may have been observed. Witnesses gave varying accounts, as eyewitnesses often do.
Detectives checked the prison units and found no sign that she had ever arrived or that she was connected to anyone there. A few days after the body was found, a bag was located in Huntsville containing women’s items, men’s items, and information leading back to Colorado. Investigators contacted the people whose names were in the bag. They confirmed they had not been in Walker County.
The lead went nowhere. With no identification possible, the county buried her in an unmarked grave in a local cemetery, listed as unknown white female. The case went cold. But the case never faded.
Everyone at the Sheriff’s Department knew about it. The public was deeply interested. A Facebook page for Walker County Jane Doe became extremely popular, drawing hundreds of thousands of views. People were fascinated by the tragedy of a teenage girl, seemingly from a middle class background, found dead on the side of a highway, violently assaulted, with no one able to say who she was.
There were theories about her being picked up in a station wagon and taken toward the prison, that she was a runaway from Texas. None of it could be confirmed. In 1999, her body was exhumed. Bones were pulled and sent off for DNA testing.
But because she was never entered into CODIS, the national DNA database, due to her age, the testing led nowhere. The case remained open, a persistent frustration for everyone involved. Years later, Astrea, a company specializing in forensic grade genome sequencing, became interested. Based in The Woodlands, about an hour from Walker County, they saw the case as a perfect challenge for their technology.
David Middleman, the CEO, read the entire case file. He did not sleep for three months. He had young children of his own. Seeing a teenager in that state was devastating.
His wife, Kristen, the Chief Development Officer, remembered that he was no longer the same. Astrea reached out to law enforcement. Lieutenant Thomas Bean, the primary investigator on the Walker County Jane Doe case, had never heard of the company. But he agreed to meet.
Eventually, with funding assistance from the FBI and the Texas Rangers, the decision was made to attempt identification through Astrea’s technology. The skeletal remains were processed. It was a shocking failure. The DNA was so degraded that nothing could be extracted.
Not every piece of skeletal remains is productive for DNA, but it is rare to get nothing at all. The disappointment was devastating for everyone. But the search for evidence continued. Bean and Wesley Doolittle, a Montgomery County Sheriff who had previously served in the Texas Rangers and was designated as the cold case investigator, met with the Medical Examiner’s Office in Harris County.
They wanted to find any evidence that could be tested. It was difficult. Evidence from the past had not always been preserved to modern standards. The jewelry she had been found with was unaccounted for.
Her clothing was no longer available. They were running out of things to look for. Then they learned that another private laboratory had evidence from the autopsy, slides that had been preserved with chemicals. There were small amounts of tissue on glass slides.
It was perhaps the worst kind of evidence to work with, chemically preserved material in tiny quantities, but it was better than nothing. The problem with formaldehyde-fixed slides is that the fixative breaks down DNA as it preserves the tissue. The DNA becomes cross-linked with proteins, fused together, like glue. It was extremely difficult to imagine reading a complete DNA sequence from such material.
But they decided to try. The slides were sent to Astrea. The scientists examined the DNA and saw the damage. The formaldehyde had cross-linked everything.
If they broke it apart, they might destroy the sample entirely. And when you test DNA, you consume it. You do not get infinite tries. If you are not confident, it is better not to touch it at all, because future methods might be able to extract value from it.
So they paused. David called Tom Bean and told him they were not giving up. There was research to do. New methods had to be developed.
At that point, time did not matter. The whole goal was to identify who she was, because there was still a family out there missing her. For more than a year, the research team worked on a solution. They fixed materials with formaldehyde in mock casework situations and tested ways to break the cross-links and recover the DNA.
Eventually, they developed a protocol that worked for the first time. They felt ready. David called Detective Bean. He warned him that if the process failed, the samples could be gone.
That was an inherent risk. It was a terrible piece of evidence, and there was no guarantee. But everything that could be done had been done. It was a responsible, educated effort.
This was their chance. They gave it a shot. The DNA sample went to the genomic side of the lab, was prepared, and placed on the sequencer. When the run finished, the data looked messy.
Pieces of the genome were missing entirely. But there was a lot of data, more than garbage and noise. It was a relief. The team built a DNA profile carefully, working to make it clean enough to compare against fresh profiles.
Once the profile was ready, they uploaded it to genealogical databases consented for law enforcement use. A program identified the most recent common ancestors of all the matches and produced hypotheses. The team examined each one. Very quickly, they were able to tell Tom Bean that they believed she was from a particular area, that they had identified a family, and that they thought she was one of several sisters.
David called Tom Bean. Tom was nervous, hoping the evidence had not been destroyed in testing. But David was ecstatic. He finally came out with names.
The victim belonged to a Minnesota family. The original theory that she was from Texas was wrong. It was now up to law enforcement to figure out who was missing from that family. Investigators searched every database they could find.
They found an obituary for a person David had named, and they began looking at family members. They found documentation on everyone listed on the obituary except one person. They were virtually certain that person was their victim. Tom Bean started calling the other names on the obituary.
On about the fourth call, a woman answered. He introduced himself and asked her not to hang up. He explained he was an investigator with the Walker County Sheriff’s Department, working a cold case from 1980. The next words out of her mouth he would never forget.
She said, “You’re calling about my sister. ”
At that point, they knew they had the right people. But confirmation was still needed. Family members stepped forward, went to their local police departments, and provided DNA samples.
The samples were sent to Astrea for testing. After all the testing, after everything was said and done, Walker County Jane Doe was identified as Sherry Jarvis. She was a 14-year-old girl. She had some trouble with truancy, which was illegal in Minnesota at the time.
According to her family, the state placed Sherry into a home and planned to take custody of her. She ran away and made her way down to Texas later that year. She was murdered on Halloween. Speaking with the family and confirming the information took months.
Additional testing was done to physically confirm the match. The press conference to publicly announce Sherry Ann Jarvis’s name was scheduled for the 41st anniversary of the day she was found. Her family attended. It was an emotional day for everyone, for the family, for the investigators, and for the online community that had followed the case for so long.
With her name came new possibilities. The family confirmed that Sherry had sent a letter to her mother saying she was okay and would return. That letter traced back to Colorado, which connected to the property bag found days after her body was discovered, information that had led to a dead end forty years earlier. But the murder remained unsolved.
The case was still open. Investigators began following new leads, working to find the person responsible, trying to determine if they had harmed anyone else, if they were still out there, and if they still posed a danger to society. Sherry Ann Jarvis was a beautiful girl. Her picture would forever remain etched in the minds of those who had worked so long to give her back her name.
For four decades, she had been a Jane Doe. Now she was a person, with a family, a history, and a story. The hope was that one day the person responsible for her death would face judgment.