In the summer of 1971, two young men riding motorbikes through a wooded area in Howard County, Maryland, found a middle-aged woman lying semi-conscious in what locals knew as a lovers lane. She was dehydrated, sunburnt, and nude from the waist down. A slip lay several feet away. It looked as though she had tried to crawl away.
Beneath her fingernails, investigators found dirt. The evidence pointed to a sexual assault and a severe beating. She was barely alive when police arrived. She was rushed to a hospital, but no one knew her name.
The Howard County Police Department checked with nearby agencies for missing persons reports and found nothing. They sent a nationwide teletype. They ran her fingerprints through NCIC. They released a sketch to the media, hoping someone would recognize her.
No one came forward. In September 1971, the woman died of a stroke. An autopsy ruled her death a homicide, but she went to her grave as the 1971 Jane Doe. The case went cold.
Decades passed. In 2019, Technical Corporal Wade Zuehlke of the Howard County Police Department looked over his caseload. This was his agency’s oldest unsolved homicide. The original evidence was mostly gone, but, for reasons no one could explain, the medical examiner’s office had kept the histology slides taken during the autopsy.
These are small tissue samples from major organs, preserved on glass slides using formaldehyde and paraffin. It is some of the most difficult DNA to work with, but it was all there was. Zuehlke had heard about Astrium, a DNA technology company that had produced major breakthroughs in other unidentified person cases. He sent an email.
Within a day, case manager Mike Bogle responded. Astrium had just succeeded with the same kind of degraded histology slide material in another case and believed they could do it again. In October 2024, the case was accepted. The lab process began by scraping a small amount of tissue from the slides, breaking open the cells to release the DNA, then isolating it.
The extracted DNA was analyzed for suitability, then sequenced to build a full profile. For Zuehlke, the phone call confirming that a complete DNA profile had been recovered felt like a validation of everything he had hoped the science could do. But it was only the beginning. The profile was uploaded to FamilyTreeDNA’s database, the largest consented law enforcement database in the country, and matches began to flow in.
The victim was related to a man named Charles Sharkey. The investigators realized the fastest way to identify the Jane Doe was to contact the family and ask for a rapid kinship test. Zuehlke found a Charles LeRoy Sharkey living in Mentor, Ohio, and made the call. Charles Sharkey did not answer for long.
He hung up twice, convinced he was being scammed. When his wife convinced him the police were really on the line, he called back. Zuehlke explained the cold case and asked a question he had learned to ask in such situations: had anyone in the family ever gone missing and never been heard from again? Chuck told him that he and his sisters, Marie and Judith, had been placed in an orphanage when they were all under five years old.
It had happened in the early 1950s. Adoption records from that era were scarce, and a fire in the orphanage’s records room had destroyed what little documentation existed. Chuck remembered nothing before the age of seven. He remembered a cruel foster home, the Parmadale orphanage, and being with his sister Marie.
He did not remember his parents, though he thought his mother might have been named Sarah. Chuck agreed to provide a cheek swab. Astrium built his DNA profile, which contained hundreds of thousands of data points, and compared it directly to the profile of the Jane Doe. The output was a numerical value indicating relatedness.
It was not a third cousin match. It was a parent-child match. The woman found beaten and dying in that Maryland field in 1971 was Chuck’s mother, Sara Bell Sharkey. The news was shocking for everyone involved.
Zuehlke now had a name for his victim but also a new responsibility. He knew Sara’s children had been placed in an orphanage in the early 1950s and then separated from each other. He began searching for Marie and Judith, a case within a case. Chuck’s own story had been hard.
After running away from the orphanage repeatedly, he had found a small apartment and survived on odd jobs, cleaning stores and washing windows. He entered the military and went to Vietnam. When he came home, he shut out much of his childhood. He lost contact with Marie.
For sixty years, he wondered where she was and whether she was even alive. Marie, whose full name was Marie Mildred Sharkey, had her own memories. She and Chuck had survived the abusive foster home together, hiding in the woods, eating food taken from farms, and sleeping in galvanized trash cans lined with leaves. Chuck ran away often and always asked her to come with him, but she was too afraid.
A caseworker named Edith Emery eventually helped Marie find an apartment over a hardware store in Cleveland. Chuck stayed with her for a while, then disappeared again into the military. Marie always believed he would come back because he always had. Her daughters, in the late 1990s, tried to find him with the limited internet of the era, writing letters to every Charles Leroy they could find.
Only three responded, and none was her brother. Marie gave up hope. Zuehlke’s search for Marie was difficult. He worked law enforcement databases across the country and eventually located a woman in Springfield, Illinois, with the same birth date as Marie but a different last name.
His cold calls went unanswered, so he contacted her daughter, Lynn. He told her the call would be one of the strangest she ever received. She put her mother on a three-way call. When Zuehlke told Marie he was investigating a murder and that her mother had been killed in 1971, her heart stopped.
Then he told her he had found her brother. Marie had always known Chuck was out there somewhere, but she had stopped believing she would ever see him again. The two siblings, who had been separated for more than sixty years, finally spoke. Not long after, they met in person.
Marie came with her three daughters, and Chuck gained three nieces. The reunion was emotional, quiet, and full of relief. They sat next to each other, comfortable in a way that made the decades apart seem less important. They began talking every day.
Chuck said his blood pressure had gone down. Marie said she felt safe again. Among the memories they shared were the trains that passed near the orphanage at night, blowing their horns. As children, they believed the engineers were doing it just for them.
Zuehlke also discovered that Judith, the youngest sister, had died in 2021. He arranged for her remains to be sent to Chuck, so that all three siblings could be together at last. He learned as well that the children’s father, Gabriel Stanley Sharkey, had died in New Orleans before Sara’s murder, ruling him out as a suspect. What remained unsolved was who killed Sara Bell Sharkey.
Zuehlke still had an open homicide on his desk, a woman who had been the victim of a violent crime, and he wanted to know what happened and who did it. Sara’s children were left with their own unanswered questions. Chuck wondered why their mother had let her three children go through so much, though he acknowledged she may not have known what happened to them. She may have given them up hoping for a better life.
Zuehlke appealed to the public for information, pointing out that someone out there likely knew what really happened in that wooded field more than fifty years ago. The family that was torn apart in the early 1950s had found each other again before the end of their lives, a rare and meaningful ending to a long journey. But the larger story remained unfinished. Sara Bell Sharkey was no longer nameless.
Her murder was still unsolved.