On a Saturday in July 1982, two hikers in a remote meadow near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, made a grim discovery. They spotted a woman slumped over a fallen log, appearing at first glance like someone bending down who never straightened back up. She was dead, shot in the back of the head, with a pair of men’s underwear placed over the wound.
The victim had no wallet, no purse, no keys, and no identification. No one reported her missing. For 37 years, she was known only as Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe, buried in an unmarked grave marked by a cheap plastic green flag of the kind used to indicate a waterline.
The meadow, located along Mount Rose Highway between Reno and Lake Tahoe, sits at an elevation of 8,900 feet within 30,000 acres of wilderness. Investigators found two sets of footprints walking in from the parking area, but only one set walking out. There were no signs of a struggle, suggesting she had walked in willingly with her killer.
The autopsy revealed she died from a single gunshot wound, likely while bent forward, possibly tying her shoelaces. She had been sexually assaulted. The medical examiner estimated her age at 25 to 35, about 5'5" and 112 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Her body told a story: a vaccination scar on her left arm, an old injury to her left big toenail, and an 11-centimeter scar across her abdomen consistent with a cesarean section.
Her dental work was distinctive, featuring multiple fillings, crowns, and a gold bridge with porcelain facing. The sophistication of the work, along with the vaccination scar, initially led investigators to believe she might be from Europe. That theory guided the investigation for nearly 30 years before being debunked in 2010.
DNA was collected from the crime scene evidence in 1982, but the technology to use it did not yet exist. The samples were stored and left waiting. Over the years, investigators pursued more than 227 leads, distributed facial sketches to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, contacted Interpol, and entered her DNA into federal databases. No matches were ever found.
The case outlived the careers of many investigators. Larry Canfield, one of the original detectives, never stopped believing it would be solved. "Once we have the suspect's DNA," he said, "sooner or later it will break."
In 2015, Detective Dave Jenkins, working in Washoe County's newly formed cold case unit, rebuilt the theory from the ground up. He concluded she was likely from the West Coast and may have voluntarily cut off contact with family years before her death, which would explain why no one reported her missing.
The woman was eventually identified as Mary Edith Silvani, born September 29, 1948, in Pontiac, Michigan. She grew up in Detroit, the only daughter of John Edward Silvani, an Italian immigrant, and Blanche, a Canadian woman. Her childhood fell apart early. Her mother struggled with mental illness and left when the children were young, dying in 1980 without seeing them again. Her father raised the three children alone but passed away in 1964 when Mary was 16.
After her father's death, the siblings scattered to California. Around 1972, Mary disappeared from the lives of everyone who knew her in Michigan. The last time anyone saw her, she was pregnant and living in a boarding house for single women. The child was given up for adoption, and that was the last time anyone heard her voice.
In 1974, she was arrested for vagrancy in Detroit, a minor violation. Her fingerprints were recorded and placed in a file, where they sat for more than four decades. Between 1974 and 1982, no one who knew her during those years has ever been found. She had lived so invisibly that when she stopped existing, the world didn't notice the difference.
The breakthrough came in February 2018, when forensic experts from the Washoe County Sheriff's Office attended a conference in Seattle. They heard a presentation on forensic genealogy, a method most of the world had never heard of. The speakers were Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, co-founders of the DNA Doe Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to giving names back to unidentified remains.
The Washoe County team realized they might be looking at the answer to their longest unsolved case. In April 2018, they officially contacted both the DNA Doe Project and Identifinders International. Evidence from the case was sent to a private laboratory, where technicians extracted usable DNA profiles from samples that had been in storage for 36 years.
Two parallel tasks were assigned: identify the victim from DNA taken from the body, and identify the perpetrator from the DNA in the rape kit. No one had ever done both in the same case before.
The victim's DNA profile was uploaded to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database. The initial results came faster than anyone predicted. Two distant cousins appeared in the database, leading to family connections in New York. From there, genealogists worked backward up the family tree until it pointed to a couple in Detroit, John and Blanche Silvani. They had only one daughter, and the family tree said that Sheep's Flat Jane Doe was that daughter.
Just three days passed from the first match results to a name. Investigators contacted the Detroit Police Department and found the 1974 vagrancy arrest fingerprints. They compared them with the fingerprints taken from the body in 1982. It was a perfect match.
In August 2018, Washoe County Chief Medical Examiner Laura Knight signed the official death certificate. Thirty-six years after she died, Mary Edith Silvani finally officially existed in government records. But no public announcement was made because the killer had not yet been identified.
The DNA from the rape kit contained a full profile of the killer, but it had no matches in CODIS, the FBI's federal criminal DNA database. He had never left DNA in the criminal justice system. Identifinders International took on the task of identifying him.
The killer's DNA was uploaded to GEDmatch, and results matched descendants of a couple in Dallas, Texas. The genealogists built the family tree from there. The Dallas couple had three sons and only one known grandson, who was immediately ruled out. The suspect was a secret, an illegitimate child born out of wedlock and given a completely different surname.
His name was James Richard Curry, born November 16, 1946, in Bexar County, Texas. His father came from a Dallas family that did not want to acknowledge the boy, and his mother raised him under her own surname. That was why his identity had been blurred out of every family tree.
Curry had a criminal record. He was arrested for robbery in Texas, served time at Huntsville Prison, and was released in 1977. He then moved to Waukegan, California, where he worked at a locksmith shop. Investigators suspected he had killed a locksmith co-worker there, whose remains were never found.
In early 1982, Curry shot and killed Richard Lemon Jr., stuffing his body into a barrel and hiding it in a self-storage unit. On July 17, 1982, he sexually assaulted and shot Mary Silvani at Sheep's Flat. Then on January 2, 1983, he killed Gerald Noveski in San Jose, sexually assaulted his wife Sharon, and shot her in the head by the side of the road.
On January 4, 1983, Curry walked into the San Jose Police Department and turned himself in. He confessed to killing the Noveski couple and Richard Lemon, but he said nothing about Nevada. He never mentioned the woman slumped over the log.
The day after he was booked into jail, Curry tore fabric from his mattress cover and tried to harm himself. He was placed in the ICU on life support. On January 7, 1983, doctors turned off the machines. He was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m.
Because Curry died before going to trial, he was never convicted of any crime. And because there was no conviction, his DNA was never entered into any law enforcement database. That was the answer to the question that had haunted the case for decades. They had evidence from day one. It just had nothing to match it to.
To confirm Curry was the killer, a Washoe County detective contacted two of his adult children. Both voluntarily provided DNA samples. The Washoe County Forensic Science Division confirmed the DNA from both children was consistent with the DNA at the crime scene. Curry was their father and the perpetrator who killed Mary Silvani.
His pattern was unmistakable: sexual assault followed by a gunshot to the back of the head. He did it to Sharon Noveski on State Route 92, and he had done it to Mary Silvani in the Sheep's Flat Meadow. What no one knows, and will never know, is how and where Mary and Curry met.
On May 7, 2019, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office held a press conference in Reno. For the first time in 37 years, both the victim and the killer had been identified at the same time. On the screen, organizers placed two images side by side: the facial sketch created from the forensic profile and the faded yearbook photo from Mackenzie High School in 1966. The imagined face and the real face next to each other for the first time.
Mary's nephew, Robert Silvani Jr., had never met his aunt. He grew up with no one, his father leaving when he was four. The DNA process connected him to a distant cousin named Angel Capriles in New York City, a relative he didn't know existed. Capriles' mother and Mary had grown up together.
After the case was closed, the Diocese of Reno donated a granite headstone for Mary's grave. The inscription was written by the two relatives who found each other through her death: "Our lost angel has been taken to heaven. She has been found and will never be lost again."
As for James Richard Curry, he died in 1983, never tried for any crime, never confronted with what he had done to Mary Silvani. Investigators believe he had at least four known victims, possibly more. He left this world without knowing that 36 years later, two of his children would voluntarily give DNA samples to police, and science would link him to the unidentified woman in the Sheep's Flat Meadow.
Why did it take 37 years? The answer was not negligence, but the convergence of many limitations at once. CODIS only works when the perpetrator has previously left DNA in the system. Curry had no DNA record because his robbery occurred before the era of forensic DNA, and he died before being tried for the murders. Mary's fingerprints from 1974 existed in a Detroit police file, but no one thought to search minor criminal records from another state for a victim in Nevada. And the European theory had led the investigation in the wrong direction for nearly 30 years.
But there was a deeper gap than all of that. The system was designed to find people who were being looked for. Mary Silvani was not being looked for. She had lived invisibly long before she died. No stable family, no recorded permanent address, no steady job, no one waiting for her to come home. No one reported her missing, not because they didn't care, but because they didn't know there was anything to worry about.
The DNA Doe Project was created to solve exactly this problem. GEDmatch does not require the perpetrator or victim to have ever interacted with the criminal justice system. It only requires their relatives, anywhere in the world, to have voluntarily uploaded their own DNA profiles. The entire organization runs on volunteer labor, more than 60 genealogists working without pay.
The Silvani case was a turning point in forensic history. It was the first time forensic genealogy was used to identify both the victim and the perpetrator in the same case at the same time. The case leaves behind a practical lesson: uploading DNA to public genealogy databases can make cases like this solvable. Your DNA doesn't just tell your story. Sometimes it is the only remaining link to give a name back to the dead.