SHORT READ
Samuel Little Victim Identified 44 Years Later
Escatawpa Jane Doe finally has a name.
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A couple of days after Christmas 1977, two men went hunting in the woods near Jackson County, just off Interstate 10, which was still being built. They were looking for game, but instead, they found the remains of a woman who’d been dead between three and four months.
The police were called, and the scene was preserved. She was a small black woman with a gold front tooth who was believed to wear a wig. Unfortunately, there was little left of her, and she didn’t have identification, so during her examination, she was given the name Escatawpa Jane Doe, and her DNA was taken.
Escatawpa Jane Doe’s case went cold pretty quickly, but over the years, multiple facial recognition and composites have been created to try and find her identity. As the decades ticked over, new experts came in to create a new likeness but all attempts proved futile.
In 2012, Pascagoula police’s Darren Versiga found Escatawpa Jane Doe’s case. The detective specialised in cold cases and knew the processes involved to find a name for Escatawpa Jane Doe.
Versiga began uploading the woman’s information to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, but it brought up no leads. Back then, DNA technology was very much a pipe dream, still, Versiga tried but failed to find a name on any databases.
Five years later, in 2017, Escatawpa Jane Doe’s bones were taken from a lab in Oklahoma to another crime lab in Mississippi to gain more information from the remains. The bones spent months at the lab, but no further data was extracted, and the case appeared to, once again, go cold again.
In January 2021, Othram Inc. labs appeared on the scene. The laboratory based in Texas has been responsible for numerous breaks in cases over the past few years, including Siobhan McGuinness.
Othram took the DNA from Escatawpa Jane Doe’s bones and managed to find a potentially distant cousin in the same state. That cousin put the Pascagoula police…
