She was found in a ditch beside a country road in western Ohio in April of 1981.
She was wearing a buckskin jacket, handmade, a tan pullover with leather fringe running along the seams and a deep purple lining.
That jacket is why for nearly 37 years the world knew her only as buckskin girl.
Investigators came to know a great deal about her.
They knew she was in her late teens or early 20s.
They knew that at some point in her life, a dentist had fitted a crown to her front tooth.
They knew her bare feet were clean, and that told them she had not walked to the place where she was found.
What they did not know for all those years was her name.
Her fingerprints went into the FBI’s computers.
Her DNA went into national databases.
Nothing came back.
Detectives who had never met her carried her casket.
Strangers left flowers at her grave for decades.
And the stone they set over her did not even say buckskin girl.
It said Jane Doe.
All that time, part of the answer was sitting in storage in Troy, Ohio.
A tube of her blood drawn in 1981, kept in an evidence room, and never refrigerated.
Several laboratories said the DNA inside it was no longer any good.
They were wrong.
In the spring of 2018, two women working through the night at their computers took the data from that blood and in about 4 hours they found the family it came from.
It was not a match in a police database that named her.
[music] It was not a missing person file.
There was no missing person file.
What named her in the end was a single line in a family tree put there by someone who was still looking for her.
This is the story of who she was.
Of the people in one Ohio county who refused to let her stay a Jane Doe and of how a jacket, a grave, and a tube of blood finally gave her back her name.
It starts with a man who was moving house.
This is the Unnamed Files.
We follow the people the world forgot to name all the way to the day they get it back.
If that’s the kind of story you want more of, subscribe now.
Friday, April 24th, 1981.
Greg Benbaw was moving.
He was a lieutenant with the Lello Falls Fire Department, and he was carrying his belongings from a place on State Route 55 to his new home on Greenley Road, west of Troy.
Two friends were helping him, the brothers Neil and Martin Hoffman.
This was Miami County, Ohio, about 20 m north of Dayton, farm country.
Greenley Road runs through Newton Township and the stretch that matters to this story lies near Horseshoe Bend Road.
Interstate 75, the highway that runs from the top of Michigan all the way to Florida, passes about 5 mi away.
On one of their trips, Brideenbomb noticed something lying in the ditch beside the road.
A buckskin coat with fringe.
Years later, he remembered his reaction.
I was like, “That’s a nice coat.”
They kept moving his things.
The next time they came back along Greenley Road, Brideenba told Neil Hoffman to go and take a look at it.
Hoffman went closer.
“Oh my god,” he said.
“There’s a woman in that coat.
She was lying on her right side, curled up in the ditch.”
Benbod did not have a phone yet at the new house.
[music] So he picked up his fire department radio and called dispatch.
He told them they had found a young woman and that they believed she was already dead.
She had died less than 2 days before she was found.
The autopsy found that she had been strangled and that she had suffered blunt force trauma to her head.
She was fully clothed, bell-bottom blue jeans, a brown turtleneck sweater with an orange crisscross design on the front and the jacket.
She had no shoes and no socks, no purse, no bag, no identification of any kind.
Her pockets were empty.
Nothing at the scene said who she was.
In those first hours, the deputies who came out to Greenley Road had a young woman, a jacket, and very little else.
And there was one more thing.
Her bare feet were clean.
[music] Whoever she was, she had not walked down Greenley Road barefoot.
Investigators came to believe she had been killed somewhere else and brought to this road, 5 mi from the interstate.
A quiet place and an easy one to reach.
Think about that for a second.
Someone brought her here and then they left.
Brendenba’s call brought the Miami County Sheriff’s Office.
A detective named Robert Schwitzer was the first to investigate.
From that day on, the sheriff’s office would later say the case remained assigned to a detective as an active investigation.
In 1981, there was no internet and no public database where a family could post a photograph of someone they were looking for.
As the chief investigator at the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory would later describe it, agencies had little contact with each other in those years beyond phone calls and leads based on height and weight.
A young woman far from home carrying nothing that said who she was could be found within 2 days of her death and still fall into every gap between one county and the next.
And then there was the jacket, handmade and tan, pulled on over the head with leather fringe around the seams and a deep purple lining.
The sheriff’s office would later describe it as having a Native American design.
It was the most distinctive thing about her.
Decades later, the state’s cold case file would call it very unique and note that it had never helped to identify her.
Detectives became certain of one thing.
She was not from here.
If she had been, somebody would have known her.
So, the first question was the simplest one.
Who is she?
And in Miami County in April of 1981, nobody had an answer.
So, investigators did what they could with what they had.
She was white, between about 5’4 in and 5′ 6 in tall, and around 125 to 130 lb.
Her reddish brown hair was parted in the middle and braided into two pigtails.
She had light brown eyes, freckles across her face, and the ruddy complexion of someone who had spent a lot of time outdoors.
She was well-groomed.
A specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children would later describe her as a woman who took care of herself.
Her eyebrows were neatly plucked.
Her clothes were clean.
Her teeth were perfectly aligned and very white, and one of them carried a sign that someone somewhere had taken her to a dentist.
Her upper right front tooth had a porcelain and metal crown.
Her age was only an estimate, late teens, maybe early 20s.
In 1981, the estimate was 18 to 24.
Later estimates would stretch to 26.
Years later, the detective who would carry her case said he thought she looked closer to 15.
Each of these was a clue.
Each should have led somewhere.
Her fingerprints were taken and later entered into the FBI’s automated fingerprint identification system.
They matched no one.
She had no criminal record.
The crown meant that somewhere a dentist had a chart with her teeth on it, but a dental chart only helps if someone knows whose chart to pull.
Within days, her description and a sketch of her face went out to the newspapers and onto local television.
Tips came in.
Decades later, that same detective said there had been plenty of them in 1981 and that none of them panned out.
Some people said they had seen her at a bar.
Those leads went nowhere.
Over the years, investigators would wonder whether she was a runaway, a hitchhiker, a juvenile, or someone from another state, or even another country.
Her careful grooming made it hard to believe she had been living rough for long.
Every theory stayed a theory.
None of the numbers was wrong.
None of them helped.
There is one more detail from those first [music] days and it seemed small at the time.
During the autopsy, a sample of her blood was drawn into a tube.
The tube went into storage in an evidence room.
[music] Nobody refrigerated it.
It would sit there at room temperature for nearly 37 years.
Remember that tube for now.
The case had a description, a set of fingerprints, [music] a dental chart, and a jacket.
It did not have a name.
And within weeks, Miami County had to decide what to do with a young woman nobody had come forward to claim.
She was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Troy weeks [music] after she was found in a section of the cemetery known as the Potter’s Field.
It is the part of a cemetery set aside for people with [music] no family to pay for a plot or no name to put on one.
The detectives working her case had [music] never met her.
They served as her pawbearers.
People from town who knew her only from the newspaper came and left flowers.
The stone over her grave was simple.
It read Jane Doe, April 22nd, 1981.
[music] That was the day investigators then believed she had died.
There was no birth date.
There was no name.
It did not even say [music] Buckskin Girl.
Her nickname did not come from the stone.
It grew out of [music] the jacket.
Over time, in newspaper stories and in the way her case was talked about, she became buckskin girl.
[music] In 2007, when the Dayton Daily News listed the unidentified dead of the Miami Valley, it noted simply that the fringed jacket had led to her unofficial name.
For decades, the only thing a stranger could call her was the name of something she had been wearing on the day she was found.
[music] And the town kept coming back.
Year after year, strangers visited her grave and left flowers.
In 2016, 35 years after she was buried, a reporter found that people were still doing it.
2 years after that, a local paper noted that her grave still drew visitors and the occasional spray of flowers.
One of the cemetery’s groundskeepers had a private name for her and once explained it to a detective visiting the grave.
[music] I call her Dorothy because she looks like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
The groundskeeper said, “I just want to send her home, put on her ruby shoes, and send her back where she belongs.”
She had no shoes when she was found.
Every April, local television marked another anniversary.
On the 34th in 2015, Dayton’s WHIO ran another report.
Miami County authorities were still working on the Jane Doe case.
One of that year’s anniversary newscasts would matter more than anyone could have known.
[music] We’ll come back to it.
By then, she had a life online, too.
Volunteers had built web pages about her.
Her case was posted on the Dough [music] Network, a site where amateur sleuths compare the missing with the unidentified, looking for the match that the official systems [music] missed.
Greg Bridenbaw went on to become chief of the Lello Falls Fire Department.
He stayed in that part of the county and he farmed near Greenley Road.
Decades later, he put it in one sentence.
You drive by there and wonder, you know, who she was.
The sheriff’s office would later say her case was never closed and that it was always on a detective’s desk.
But the tips had run out.
The newspapers moved on to other stories, and the years began to pass.
If it gets to you that a town tended the grave of a young woman whose name it never knew, hit like.
It tells YouTube these stories matter, and it means more of them get told.
Back in Troy, the question never changed.
So, how does a young woman with fingerprints, a dental chart, and a sample of her own blood on file stay nameless for decades?
In 2001, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory used that stored blood to build a DNA profile of her.
By then, she had fingerprints in the FBI’s system, a full dental record, and her own genetic code on file.
Dr.
Elizabeth Murray, a forensic anthropologist in Cincinnati who would later take on her case, said it had exactly the kind of identifiers that should have produced an answer long before.
Good fingerprints and distinctive dental work.
I just couldn’t understand, she said, why this case couldn’t be solved.
Here is the answer, and it is not complicated.
Every one of those records is half of a match.
A fingerprint finds a person only if that person’s prints are already on file.
A dental chart is no help until someone knows whose dentist to call.
A DNA profile needs another profile from her or from her family waiting on the other side.
And on the other side, there was nothing.
According to the Miami County Sheriff’s Office, she was never reported as a missing person.
In another state, a mother never moved out of her house.
She never changed her phone number.
She was hoping that one day her daughter would come home.
Two halves of the same story in two states with nothing to connect them.
Back in Ohio, the national systems were filling up with the unidentified dead and they were nowhere near complete.
In 2007, the Dayton Daily News reported that the FBI’s national system held 6,48 unidentified people.
34 of them had been entered from Ohio.
Experts estimated that might be as little as 10% of the real number.
And only one state in the country, California, required all of its local police agencies to file their missing and unidentified persons reports with the FBI.
She was one of seven unidentified people that the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory listed for that story, and the lab said it never stopped trying to identify them.
A spokesman for the Dough Network, a volunteer group that works these cases, told the paper that if the FBI’s database were used to its full potential, there would be many potential matches overnight.
That same year, the federal government launched the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System known as Namos.
It was the first national database that police, medical examiners, and families could all search.
She was entered in 2008, one of the first people ever placed in it.
Through it, her fingerprints, her dental chart, and her DNA profile were made available to investigators anywhere in the country.
In 2009, a sample of her mitochondrial DNA went to the FBI for its combined DNA index system, known as Kotus.
None of it helped.
Year after year, detectives checked her against new missing person entries, and year after year, nothing matched.
Her records sat in every system, carefully kept, waiting for the other half of a match that was never there.
If you’re wondering how a woman with fingerprints, dental records, and a sample of her own blood on file stays nameless that long, subscribe.
The people who refuse to accept it are coming next.
And what they kept is the reason this story has an ending.
Now, one call shows how the system was supposed to work.
In May of 2015, a man in Miami County named Ally Black contacted the sheriff’s office.
He had seen a newscast on the anniversary of this case, and he wondered whether the young woman in the buckskin jacket could be his sister, Brenda.
She had last been seen in Vanelia, Ohio at the start of 1980.
He gave a sample of his own DNA.
It was compared against hers.
It did not match.
Brenda Black was not Buckskin Girl, but Brenda’s case stayed open.
In 2022, the coroner’s office in Will County, Illinois, working with a genetic genealogy lab called Aram identified her.
She had been found beside Interstate 80 near New Lennox on April 19th, 1981, 5 days before Greg Benbaw noticed a coat in a ditch on Greenley Road.
As of 2022, her death was still under investigation.
Two women the same month, two ditches in two states.
Both waited decades for a record that would let someone say who they were.
As of July 2026, Namos lists 15,539 unidentified people whose cases are still open.
Every one of them was found.
None of them has been named.
We’ll get to her name, but first you need to understand why it took nearly 37 years and who refused to let it take forever.
Because while the systems waited, a handful of people in Miami County did not.
Robert Schwitzer was the first detective on her case.
Over the decades, the file passed from one desk to the next inside the Miami County Sheriff’s Office, and it never left the building.
Steve Lord, who rose to chief deputy, spent nearly two decades on it.
Around 2013, it landed with detective Steve Hickey.
He was the third detective to take her on, and he had not been born when she was found.
He said it was hard not to make it personal.
What they wanted, he said, was a name to go with the face, a proper burial, and then hopefully a suspect.
If they needed more DNA or new dental testing, the sheriff’s office was prepared to exume her.
And there was Dr.
Elizabeth Murray, a forensic anthropologist and professor of biology at Mount St.
Joseph University in Cincinnati.
In 2010, Namos assigned her to manage the case.
She had worked on more than 30 Ohio cold cases, and on this [music] one, she kept looking for new science to throw at it.
By 2016, the science had caught up with some of their questions.
That February, the sheriff’s office worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on a new facial reconstruction.
It was a forensic estimate of how she had looked in life, made with newer technology [music] in two versions, one with her braids, one with her hair down.
[music] Hickeyi had only ever seen her in the case photographs.
The reconstruction showed her with her eyes open.
“I’d never seen my Jane Doe with her eyes open,” he said.
It was like she was finally looking at me.
Carol Schweitzer, a senior forensic case specialist at the National Center, suggested something else.
United States Customs and Border Protection, ran a laboratory in Houston that used pollen to trace where smuggled drugs had come from.
Why not try it on her?
Her clothes had been sealed in a box in the sheriff’s office property room since 1981.
Now they went to Texas.
On April 24th, 2016, 35 years to the day after she was found, the results came back.
The pollen on her clothes was mostly oak with some spruce and hemlock.
It pointed to the dry oak forests of the Northeast, a region that takes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and parts of New England.
She had either come from there or spent a long time there.
There was soot, too.
The kind that comes from traffic and industry, from cities, or from a lot of time spent along highways.
And on the jacket itself, there were pollen grains in excellent condition from somewhere much drier, [music] the western United States or northern Mexico, somewhere she had been not long before she was killed.
Hair samples went to a laboratory in Utah.
[music] The water a person drinks leaves a chemical trace in their hair as it grows.
According to the sheriff’s office, hers suggested a transient year, including roughly four months spent around Fort Worth, Texas, and southern Oklahoma.
Every result made her more real.
None of them gave her a name.
So, the keepers came back to the one thing that had been there from [music] the start, the tube of blood.
It had sat unrefrigerated for decades, and [music] it was still liquid.
Several laboratories had already looked at it and said the DNA was no longer viable.
It [music] was the last real chance.
And in 2017, Murray found the people who might be able to use it.
That year, she was in the audience at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences listening to a forensic genealogologist named Colleen Fitzpatrick [music] describe what Family Tree DNA could do.
Before the talk was even [music] over, Murray had written to her.
Her message, as she later recalled it, was simple.
I have the cases if you have the methodology.
If it means something to you that a tube of blood written off by laboratories was still sitting in storage in Troy, hit like.
What happened to it next took about [music] 4 hours.
Now, Colleen Fitzpatrick, a retired nuclear physicist who had written the book on modern forensic genealogy, and Margaret Press, a retired software engineer in Sebastapole, California, who had published mystery novels, had just founded something called the DNA Dough Project.
[music] It was a volunteer nonprofit with one purpose, to put names back on the unidentified dead.
Using the same DNA tools adopes use to find their birth families.
[music] Here is how it works.
The DNA testing behind Kotus looks at about 20 places in a person’s genetic code.
That is enough to tell whether two samples come from the same person.
It is not enough to find a cousin.
Consumer tests, the kind people buy to learn about their ancestry, read hundreds of thousands of single points in the genetic code, known as SNIPS.
Share enough of those points with a stranger, and you are related.
[music] And how much you share tells you roughly how closely.
In 2018, a free public website called Jed Match.
Let people upload those results and compare them with anyone else’s.
A genealogologist with a stranger’s list of matches can build that stranger’s family tree backward to the ancestors they share and then forward again through every branch looking for a family that is missing someone.
The following year, JedMatch changed its rules so that users had to choose to opt in before their profiles could be searched in [music] police cases.
The problem was the blood.
It was nearly 37 years old and it had never been refrigerated.
Some people in law enforcement and in genetic genealogy had told them that what they were trying to do could not [music] be done.
Murray took the tube to Dr.
Weining Tang of AMD Biotech who managed to pull usable genetic material out of it.
Then a biioinformatics team working through Full Genomes Corporation with a scientist named Greg Mcun turned the damaged data into something a genealogy site could read.
Of the hundreds of thousands [music] of points they needed, somewhere between 50 and 75% had survived.
Fitzpatrick put it this way.
We got enough marbles in that jar to make it work.
The data went up to Jed Match, which at the time held more than 800,000 profiles.
That was about a tenth of the size of the biggest commercial DNA company.
It was enough.
Late on the night of March 28th, 2018, Press and Fitzpatrick began working through the matches.
Press later compared it to a delivery room.
Volunteers all over the country were at their computers, waiting in the project’s private online group, ready to start building trees.
The matches come in from the most distant relatives first.
Press remembered watching them climb.
A fourth cousin, a third cousin, a second cousin once removed.
She kept hitting refresh.
Then within hours, a match close enough to be a first cousin once removed.
Someone close enough to have known her.
They found that relative’s family tree online and began clicking through it.
Grandparents, great-grandparents.
Then they split up and worked forward through the descendants.
Crest opened one branch, a father with four children.
Three were living.
For the fourth, a daughter, the death field had been filled in.
Death unknown.
Missing, presumed dead.
“This is her,” Press told Fitzpatrick on the phone.
“This is her.”
By about 3 in the morning on March 29th, they had a name.
After nearly 37 years of searching, the genealogy had taken about 4 hours.
Press and Fitzpatrick were quick to say it was rare and that most of their cases take hundreds, sometimes thousands of volunteer hours.
The next morning, they called Elizabeth Murray.
The sheriff’s office took it from there.
A relative provided a DNA sample and on Monday, April 9th, 2018, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory confirmed the match.
Press said one of the detectives told her he could not even begin to understand what they had done.
To him, it was witchcraft.
It is widely described as the first identification of its kind ever announced to the public.
It was not the first name the project had found.
It was the first the world heard about.
Her case had been one of the first the DNA Dough Project ever accepted.
The sheriff’s office reached out to her family.
Her mother was still alive and Chief Deputy Steve Lord would later describe her to reporters.
Her mother lived in the same house for the last 37 years.
Lord said she didn’t change her phone number.
She was hopeful that one day her daughter would return.
So, we’ve given her answers, but [music] it’s not necessarily the answer she wanted.
For nearly 37 years, the young woman in the buckskin jacket had lain in a grave in Troy, waiting for someone to say who she was.
Now someone could.
Her name was Marsha Lenor King.
For nearly 37 years, she was Buckskin Girl.
From here on, she has a name.
She was born Marsha Lenor Sausan on June 9th, 1959 in Arkansas.
By the time she died, she went by Marsha King and her home was the Little Rock area.
She was 21 years old, not a teenager as some had guessed, a grown woman about 7 weeks short of her 22nd birthday.
Her father, John Sausman, had remarried and by the end of his life lived in Kansas.
His wife, Cindy, would become one of the family’s voices after the identification.
And there is something about that family tree that only came out later.
The year after the identification, Colleen [music] Fitzpatrick explained it to an audience at Middle Tennessee State University.
The line that read missing presumed dead was there because of Marsha’s father.
John Sasson essentially was putting a note in a bottle to tell the world what happened to my daughter.
Fitzpatrick said he was looking for her and that was his note.
John Sasson died in January of 2018 about 3 months before his note was answered.
He did not live to hear it.
So in two different places, two parents had been waiting.
Her mother in the same house, her father in a family tree.
When the sheriff’s office reached the family, Lord said they had been holding on to one hope.
They were hopeful Marsha was going to come home, he said.
However, they’re learning at this date that that’s not going to happen.
On Wednesday, April 11th, 2018, the Miami County Sheriff’s Office announced her name.
The family chose not to make a statement.
Sheriff Dave Duchek said they wanted to keep their confidentiality and asked that it be respected.
The sheriff’s office released a photograph of her beside the reconstruction that had stood in for her face since 2016.
The reconstruction had been a careful estimate.
The photograph was her.
At the same press conference, Elizabeth Murray told reporters this was not a routine case of DNA solving an unidentified person.
She called the work revolutionary and groundbreaking.
Greg Bridenbaw, who had noticed the coat almost 37 years earlier, came to the press conference.
When he heard the news, he said the family had closure now, and so did the people who had found her.
What the public record holds about the rest of Marsha’s life is limited, and her family has kept most of it private.
Here is what is documented.
According to the DNA Dough Project, she left her home in Arkansas in 1980, and her family did not hear from her again.
According to investigators, she got around mostly by hitchhiking, which has made it hard to trace where she went.
Somewhere along the way, she came to own a handmade buckskin jacket with a deep purple lining.
Who made it and where she got it, the record does not say.
Knowing her name changed the investigation itself.
For nearly 37 years, detectives had been trying to solve the murder of a woman they could not identify.
Now, as Detective Hickey put it, they could finally start a victimology.
Who she was, who she knew, where she had been.
Within days, he said, tips were already coming in.
The sheriff’s office said that knowing who she was would be critical to finding whoever was responsible.
A year later, Lord summed up the whole case.
“It had been a complete mystery,” he said, “and in the end, it had come down to technology.”
By 2019, they had a timeline.
In March of 1981, she was in the Pittsburgh area.
Then she was back in Arkansas.
Detectives found and spoke with [music] at least six people there and placed her in the Little Rock area about 2 weeks before she died.
On April 6th, 1981, investigators believe she got on a bus in the Little Rock area headed for Louisville, Kentucky.
They have evidence that put her in Louisville on April 10th.
In 2020, the sheriff’s office said detectives had pieced together her whereabouts and her relationships in the two weeks before her death.
They have not made those details public.
At some point, she spent time in northern Shelby County, Ohio, the county just north of where she was found.
Investigators also believe she was heavily involved with a religious group, the Wayi International, which has its headquarters in Ohio.
In 2019, the sheriff’s office said the group had cooperated with the investigation.
They believed she was killed on April 22nd, 1981.
2 days later, three men, moving one of them into a new house on Greenley Road, saw her jacket in a ditch.
We know some of the places Marca went in those last weeks.
We do not know why she went to them, who she was with at the end, or who killed her.
Her stepmother, Cindy Sausman, would later describe her as very trusting.
Marca, she said, had obviously fallen into the wrong hands.
She was a very sweet, beautiful, loving young girl.
Cindy said her mother, Lord said, was already looking at replacing the stone that said Jane Doe.
And the family had a decision to make.
For almost 37 years, Marca had lain in a stranger’s town.
Now they could bring her home.
Her family did not take her away from Troy.
[music] On Friday, July 20th, 2018, about 50 people gathered at her grave in Riverside Cemetery.
Nine of them were her family.
The new stone had been paid for with private donations [music] in a fundraising effort led by Paul Sullenberger, a retired Piqua police officer.
[music] He had been on the job when she was found, and he said hers was one of the cases [music] that stuck with him.
He felt it was part of his job, he said, to replace that stone at no cost to [music] her family.
It came from Edwin F.
Nickel Monuments in Versailles, Ohio, [music] and it was set on a new cement base in the northeast corner of the cemetery.
The Reverend Greg Simmons, chaplain of the Miami County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge, spoke.
“We are grateful this day has come,” [music] he said that Marsha has a name other than Buckskin Girl.
Sullenberger asked everyone there to say her full name out loud.
Her name is written in stone and etched in [music] our hearts and minds,” he said.
Sheriff Duch said he couldn’t thank people enough, and Chief Deputy Lord used the moment to ask once more for anyone who had contact with her in April of 1981 in Ohio or Kentucky to come forward.
Then Cindy Sausman spoke to the people of a town that had [music] cared for her stepdaughter for 37 years.
“Words don’t describe the feelings we have for all of you,” she said.
How you have loved her and taken her in your arms.
Marsha had fallen into the wrong hands,” she said.
But after that, she was in good hands, in the loving hands of the people here.
The family had no plans to move her back to Arkansas.
The stone that went up that evening carries her name.
At the family’s request, it carries her father’s surname, too.
[music] 13 days after her name was announced on April 24th, 2018, police in California made an arrest in the Golden State Killer case after investigators there used the same public genealogy database.
It was 37 years to the day since Greg Bridenbaw saw a coat in a ditch.
2 weeks earlier, her case had shown the world that this kind of search could work.
[music] But this kind of search has not yet named the person who killed Marcia King.
Her murder is still unsolved and the Miami County Sheriff’s Office says the investigation is open.
In 2020, the Sheriff’s Office said it had sent hair recovered in the case for newer DNA testing in the hope of identifying someone she had been with shortly before her death.
No result has been [music] announced.
The case is listed in the Ohio Attorney General’s unsolved homicide database where anyone with information can submit a tip or they can contact the Miami County Sheriff’s Office [music] directly.
And there is the honest part of this story.
An identification is not an ending for everyone.
Margaret Press later recalled what Marsha’s mother told her.
[music] “It’s not closure.
It’s bringing up the pain all over again.”
She said, “You will move on to your next [music] case.
I’ll never move on.
Colleen Fitzpatrick has said Marsha’s mother described it to her another way.
What the identification gave her was not closure, it was release.
That is true.
And it is also true that after nearly 37 years, her mother knows where her daughter is.
For nearly 37 years, the story of the young woman in the ditch on Greenley Road was told as a story about nobody, a Jane Doe.
No name, no one looking.
None of that was true.
Her mother was looking from a house she never left beside a phone she never changed.
Her father was looking in a family tree with one line that asked the [music] world what had happened to his daughter.
And a town that never knew her kept a grave for her, carried her casket, and brought her flowers for 37 years.
The jacket was the first thing anyone saw.
A nice coat in a ditch.
For decades, it was the only name anyone could give her and the only clue that knew where she had been.
It turned out not to be her name at all.
It was just something she had been wearing, something someone made by hand on the day she was found.
In the end, [music] what named her was not the jacket.
It was her own blood and her father’s note.
The stone over her grave in Troy once said Jane Doe.
Now it says who she is.
Anyone who visits that grave can read her name.
She is still buried in the town that kept her, and that town knows who she is.
She was 21.
She was born in Arkansas on June 9th, 1959.
She had reddish brown hair she wore in braids and freckles and a face that had seen a lot of sun.
She was a daughter, a step-daughter, and a sister.
She hitchhiked.
She traveled.
In the last year of her life, she was nearly always on her way somewhere.
She was very trusting and her mother never stopped hoping she would come home.
Her name is Marsha Lenor King.
For nearly 37 years, the world called her Buckskin Girl.
She deserves to be remembered as Marsha.
This has been the Unnamed Files.
If her story stayed with you, share it with someone who would want to know her name and subscribe because there are more than 15,000 people still waiting for theirs.
