On April 3, 1985, a hunter in a remote pocket of Campbell County, Tennessee, contacted an off-duty police officer. He had found what he believed to be human remains. When law enforcement arrived in the small community of Elk Valley, they quickly confirmed the hunter’s discovery. The area was known to locals as a dumping ground, a place where residents left their household trash because the county did not yet have organized convenience centers for rubbish.
Among the garbage, investigators recovered skeletal remains and a small collection of personal items: a beaded necklace made for a child, pieces of clothing, and possibly a shoe. The remains were those of a young girl. She had been murdered, and no one knew who she was. She was classified as a Jane Doe, and investigators began the slow, laborious work of trying to give her a name.
Law enforcement partnered with Dr. Bill Bass and the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, the nation’s leading facility for the study of human skeletal remains. The recovery was incomplete. The skull, the mandible, ribs, some teeth, and several long bones were all that could be gathered.
A body that has decomposed for years no longer looks like a body, so there was no complete recovery to speak of. The bones were brought to the university, where graduate students, including a young Lee Meadows Jantz, worked the case in class. As they analyzed the skeletal remains, they estimated the girl’s age at death to be between ten and fifteen years old. The official estimate leaned toward ten to fifteen, though Lee Meadows Jantz privately thought fifteen was too high and believed the girl was more likely ten to thirteen.
She remembered feeling sad, because someone somewhere was missing this child. Dr. Bass determined that the remains belonged to a white female, likely middle class, based on dental examination. He estimated that the remains had been in the woods for two, three, or perhaps four years, basing this on insect activity and the condition of the bones.
Beyond that, the tools available in 1985 offered little. There was no DNA testing. CODIS, the national DNA database, would not exist in the United States until 1998, and Tennessee would not join until 2002. Fingerprints were useless given the condition of the remains.
Investigators worked with what little they had, using systems like NCIC to make known that the remains had been found. They scoured the local area for missing persons who might match. No one matched. A few years passed, and investigators tried again, bringing in a forensic artist to create a sketch that might jog someone’s memory.
The sketch was released publicly, but again, no leads emerged. The child had dental fillings and otherwise appeared healthy. Investigators could not understand why no one had reported a missing girl who matched. Somebody was missing this child, and yet no one had come forward to say so.
The case grew cold, not because of a lack of effort, but because of a lack of technology. Over the years, the girl came to be known affectionately as Baby Girl. In the 1980s, her case was overshadowed by a wave of bodies being dumped along interstates across the country. In Campbell County itself, multiple bodies had been found discarded on the sides of roads.
Because the victim had no known local roots, she was overlooked. Years passed, and the case sat quiet. When Brandon Elkins became a young detective, he received the case as one of his first assignments. New badge, new office, no clue what he was doing.
His captain told him to look at some cold cases, and Baby Girl was among them. When he opened the file, there was only one piece of paper inside, a single NCIC entry noting that the remains had been found. Elkins had to rebuild the entire case file from scratch. By then, DNA technology had arrived.
Tennessee had been part of CODIS for about five years, and the NamUs system had become nationally available to law enforcement. Elkins submitted samples of the remains to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, and from those samples, a DNA profile was developed and entered into both CODIS and NamUs. He was hopeful, even excited, but the profile produced no match. Elkins hit what he called the CODIS wall.
The database was built largely on convicted offender profiles, and this young girl was not in it. In the mid-2000s, Elkins saw a photograph of a missing girl and felt chills. This has to be her, he thought. Dental records seemed to confirm it.
The four molars had marks that looked like the fillings in the unidentified skeleton. But the forensic odontologist who reviewed the chart said the marks were simply sealants placed on the teeth. It was a crushing letdown. Another promising lead came later from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, involving a missing girl from Washington state.
Again, the match looked promising. Again, DNA said no. The case followed Elkins for nineteen years. By his own account, there was nothing they had not tried.
In 2016, Leslie Earhart, a public affairs officer for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, began working alongside Elkins. She saw his passion and looked closer at the case herself. The TBI pushed information to local media and posted about Baby Girl on social media, hoping that by chance someone would recognize her. No tips came in.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children asked the TBI to try one more thing: forensic genetic genealogy, a new technique that used DNA profiles to trace family trees. The remains were submitted to a private lab, but months later came the dreaded email. Due to the degradation of the remains, no usable profile could be built. Elkins was deflated and despondent.
They had tried everything, and the new technology had still failed. Then David Middleman, the CEO of a company called Astrium, called Elkins. Middleman had seen the news about the case and wanted to help. Astrium had developed a technique called forensic grade genome sequencing, a mixture of scientific methods designed to build a DNA profile from even the most degraded samples.
The company was willing to fund the case themselves. Elkins initially told Middleman he had no funding available, but Middleman said they had donations and wanted to pay for it themselves. The remains were shipped directly from the other lab to Astrium. Processing skeletal remains was difficult for three reasons.
The DNA could be degraded, broken into fragments too short to read. The DNA could be chemically damaged, so damaged in places that it was no longer recognizable as DNA. And the remains, having sat in the woods for years, could be full of animal and bacterial DNA that drowned out the human genetic material. Astrium had developed processes to handle all three problems, working with even the shortest fragments and finding ways to isolate the human DNA from the contamination.
When the scientists at Astrium assessed the available bones, they decided the mandible with molars offered the best chance of success. They extracted the DNA and built a profile. The profile was uploaded to the Family Tree DNA database, a genealogical database consented for law enforcement use. Hundreds of matches came back.
Astrium’s software sorted out how those matches related to one another and to the unknown profile, and their genealogists placed the unidentified girl onto a family tree. Within about three months, Elkins received a second phone call, a better one. Astrium believed they knew who she was. The family had connections to Indiana.
Elkins’s criminal intelligence analyst found possible family members, and two children had been born in the same area of Indiana to a family in question, but both seemed alive. One was a brother, Randy Walker. Elkins called him, and Randy confirmed that his sister was missing and agreed to provide a DNA test. Astrium’s lab went to work and confirmed the match.
Elkins called Randy back and told him, this is definitely her. The girl found in the Elk Valley woods in 1985 was Tracy Sue Walker. She had gone missing from Indiana in 1978, after going to the mall with friends. She simply vanished.
Her remains were not found until seven years later, and in another state entirely. Tracy’s parents had died without ever learning what had happened to their daughter. Randy Walker told Elkins that he had never forgotten his sister and that not knowing what had happened to her had been very difficult. He described Tracy as a happy, normal high school kid with a group of friends, a girl who liked going to the mall and was excited about working with hair.
She wanted to be a hairdresser, and sometimes she cut Randy’s hair, with mixed results. She had her whole future planned out. Her life was together. Her future was bright, and it was cut short.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced the identification in August 2022. Media agencies across the state followed up on the story, and now they had a name and a photo. The identification helped humanize the case, and investigators began working with local law enforcement in Indiana to look into the circumstances surrounding Tracy’s disappearance and death. The case is unsolved, but identifying the victim has given investigators a new direction.
As one investigator put it, to know the victim is to know the killer. The success of Tracy Sue Walker’s case led the TBI to establish an unidentified human remains initiative. In 2022, the agency asked the governor’s office and the General Assembly for funding to apply forensic genetic genealogy to other unidentified victims in Tennessee. Since then, ten individuals have been identified through the program.
Brandon Elkins, who carried this case for nineteen years, called getting Tracy’s name back and finding answers for her family the most rewarding thing he had ever done in his career. The investigation into who killed Tracy Sue Walker remains open, and the TBI continues to seek information from the public.