Police are pictured on the former Route 17, now Interstate 86, in the town of Ellery on Dec. 6, 1983, after a woman’s body was found in a drainage ditch. To this day, the woman’s identity and circumstances leading up to her death, have not been discovered. P-J file photo

For more than 37 years a marker at Sunset Hill Cemetery near Lakewood has noted the final resting place of a woman found slain along old Route 17 in the town of Ellery.

The bronze plate states “Jane Doe 1983,” a simple, yet painful reminder that the woman’s identity — and the puzzling events leading up to her murder — remain a mystery to this day.

“You’d think something would have come up by now,” said Randy Vanderschaaff, a retired criminal investigator with the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office.

Efforts have been renewed to solve the decades-old homicide by the Sheriff’s Office with the help of a powerful tool unavailable to police in the early ’80s — social media.

The story of Jane Doe begins on the morning of Dec. 6, 1983, when a truck driver with Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. discovered a body between 8:30-9 a.m. in a drainage ditch along the Southern Tier Expressway, between the Chautauqua Lake bridge and Westman Road in Ellery.

Pictured is the bronze plate marker at Sunset Hill Cemetery for “Jane Doe.” P-J photo by Eric Tichy

The woman had no purse or identification; she was found face up and “partially clad” without shoes, jewelry or personal belongings.

At the time, police believed “Jane” may have been in the ditch for up to 24 to 36 hours before she was found. Snow cover would have buried her from view until rain showers revealed her body.

According to Vanderschaaff — who took over the investigation in 1985 and stayed on the case until his retirement in 2004 — the unidentified woman was shot four times, twice in the chest, once in the back and once inside the mouth, with .38-caliber or .357-caliber bullets.

The victim was described as a white female about 30 to 37 years old, 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing about 128 pounds. She had brown eyes, a wart above her left eye, a mole behind her left ear and a scar on her throat. She also was believed to have had a child earlier in her life.

From the onset, the woman matched no local missing person reports.

The note on stationary from the Blue Boy Motor Lodge in Vancouver, British Columbia, found in Jane Doe’s pocket. Investigators have been unable to decipher the letters and numbers.

An examination of the body by a forensic anthropologist in Buffalo provided police with some clues to the woman’s identity, but ultimately left investigators with more questions than answers.

The victim was believed to be of European origins, based on a number of findings: her clothing included a V-neck camisole originating in Italy and which wasn’t available via export, as well as a high-quality, multi-colored trench coat that was reversible to olive drab wool; she had expensive dental work with gold fillings that led police to believe she wasn’t local; and she also had an IUD, a form of birth-control, that was foreign made and available in Canada at the time but not for distribution in the United States.

But perhaps the most puzzling piece in the case involves an item found in Jane Doe’s pocket: a single note written on stationary from the Blue Boy Motor Lodge in Vancouver, British Columbia. The note contains three lines of scribbled letters followed by five numbers. While the letters — possibly written in shorthand — are hard to understand, the numbers are much more clear: 24233 on the first line; 68301 on the second; and 74261 on the third.

“The Blue Boy note was emphasized by investigators back in 1983 because they hoped that she may have stayed there and her name would be on a receipt and someone would recognize her having had stayed there,” said Kristie Lyon, an investigator with the Sheriff’s Office.

Lyon said copies of receipts from the motel were obtained from October 1983 through December 1983.

Police are pictured on the former Route 17, now Interstate 86, in the town of Ellery on Dec. 6, 1983, after a woman’s body was found in a drainage ditch. To this day, the woman’s identity and circumstances leading up to her death, have not been discovered. P-J file photo

“With the travel distance between Vancouver and where Jane Doe was found, the time frame of her having stayed at the motel could be vast,” she said. “Also, back then no one remembered seeing anyone similar to Jane Doe at the motel.”

Though theories have been developed over the years, the note’s true meaning or significance remain unclear. The same goes for how Jane Doe ended up in Chautauqua County.

“We have no indication as to why she was found along the roadside,” Lyon said. “She had no other evidence on her which would indicate where she was from or that she was a prostitute.”

Vanderschaaff said examination of fingerprints early on in the investigation by the FBI and INTERPOL, an international organization that facilitates worldwide police cooperation, yielded no clues to the woman’s identity. Details of the case were eventually placed in several detective magazines both locally as well as in Italy and other European countries with no success.

Information also has been entered into NamUS — the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

MULTIPLE DEAD ENDS

Police looked into several tips in the days, weeks, months and years following Jane Doe’s homicide.

Because she was found on the side of the expressway, investigators looked at the possibility she was with a truck driver before her death. Based on the angle of her wounds, Vanderschaaff previously stated that “Jane” may have been shot from outside the cab of a semi tractor-trailer.

There also were reported sightings of a woman matching her description at trucks stops along Interstate 90, including one specifically at a service station near North East, Pa., the day before the woman was killed. That theory suggests Jane Doe may have been traveling east.

Other tips led officers to different parts of North America.

Vanderschaaff recounted the time investigators went to Oklahoma after a man confessed to the killing. That man was serving a 1,200-year sentence for robbing and shooting another person.

“He confessed to killing her, and everything he said about the case checked out to be true. So we went to Oklahoma,” Vanderschaaff said.

After spending time with the inmate, it became clear he was not their guy. “You just knew it wasn’t him,” Vanderschaaff said, noting that the man learned of the case through a detective magazine. “He was a scam artist.”

In another instance, a woman in California called to state that the victim was her friend from Toronto. Vanderschaaff went to Toronto, but the woman was a “no-show.”

TURNING TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Lyon was 5 years old at the time of Jane Doe’s death. Now one of the principal investigators on the case, she has turned to social media in hopes of identifying the victim that might then lead to her killer.

Earlier this month, the Sheriff’s Office started the “Jane Doe Chautauqua County” Facebook page. It is written in first person and is updated regularly with information regarding the case, including what Jane Doe looked like, the clothes she was found wearing along with the note from the Blue Boy Motor Lodge in Canada.

The idea to start the Facebook page began after Lyon connected with police in Louisiana, who also had turned to the social media giant to help solve a decades-old homicide. In that case, a young woman was found dead Jan. 28, 1981, near a logging road in Bossier Parish, La. The woman, dubbed “Bossier Doe,” was found without a purse, and a search of databases for missing and unidentified persons turned up no results.

Like the Jane Doe case, decades passed without a positive identification.

That changed in November 2014, when a full DNA profile was established for Bossier Doe and released to the media. A Facebook page was created, modeled itself from a separate case involving a Florida teenager who went missing in 1979 and identified 35 years later as homicide victim in New York.

Just six days after the Bossier Doe Facebook page went live, a local 911 communications officer noticed that the composite sketch of the young homicide victim appeared to match a missing person post on Craigslist. After DNA testing, the victim was found to be 17-year-old Carol Ann Cole of Kalamazoo, Mich.

Lyon is now hoping for similar success locally.

“Social media is huge, it’s viral,” she said. “So that’s what we started with Facebook. It’s written in first person to gain a little more attention — we want attention in this case. We have shared clippings (from newspapers) and will continue to share things. I was only 5 years old when this happened. A lot of people are intrigued by this kind of stuff.”

Jane Doe’s profile — including height, weight, eye color and DNA information along with the circumstances leading up to her death — have again been shared with INTERPOL. This information, Lyon said, is then sent to several countries to compare with missing person files.

“We then in turn receive back potential names and see if the stats match our Jane Doe,” Lyon said. “If they do not, they are an associated hit and we continue on until the next comes in.”

Within the last week, Jane Doe’s DNA profile and fingerprints have been sent to Vancouver Police and their coroner’s office to run them against their missing persons database. At present, no matches have come back.

“They will notify us should we get someone who matches our Jane Doe,” Lyon said. “We are reaching out to federal law enforcement agencies who may be able to help us with genealogy and are awaiting to see if our DNA profiles will work to submit. This will take some time for us to figure out as we will be working with a crime lab to assist with this.”

Meanwhile, the posts shared on the Facebook account have begun to gain traction. Each have dozens of shares, bringing much-needed and new attention to the case.

“Hopefully we can get her ID and go try to get some leads to her homicide,” Lyon said. “It’s just a shame she hasn’t been identified. We believe she had a child, possibly 15 years before she died, so maybe there’s a child — they would be an adult now — out there not knowing what happened.”

She continued: “Somewhere out there, there’s a family that doesn’t have any closure. Any case we work, we want to give family closure, whether it’s a burglary or a homicide.”

Information regarding the case can be sent to the Sheriff’s Office at 753-2131.