Officials in Smith County announced on Tuesday that the woman who was found dead on a highway near Tyler and known as Jane Doe for almost 40 years has been identified as a young mother and wife from north Texas, with the help of DNA technology. NBC 5’s Allie Spillyards has the story.
It was an announcement nearly four decades in the making.
On Tuesday, the Smith County Sheriff's Office said that 39 years after a highway mowing crew discovered a woman's remains along I-20, it finally could match a victim sketch to a face and name.
"The remains were identified as Sindy Gina Crow, a white female with a date of birth of September 12, 1957,” said Sheriff Larry Smith.
Detective David Turner was on the scene shortly after the gruesome discovery on Oct. 1, 1985. But aside from some jewelry and a t-shirt from Dallas's now defunct Top Rail honky-tonk, found nearby, there were few clues.
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"We would've never identified her unless we did this ancestry thing,” said Turner.
In 2021, a group of volunteer genealogists, the DNA Doe Project, stepped in, breathing new life into the case.
"Through this process, our team was able to build the family trees of matching DNA relatives,” said team lead Rhonda Kevorkian.
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With the help of a grant and specialty labs, the volunteers worked to match DNA from the remains to people in an ancestry database.
They landed on a first cousin and eventually confirmed Sindy Crow's identity against DNA samples collected from her mother in Fort Worth and a daughter in Alabama. She would have been just an infant when her mother was last seen.
“We know this is a bittersweet resolution, and our hearts go out to all who grieve her loss,” said Kevorkian.
Family told investigators that the then 28-year-old, who lived in Arlington, was distant from family.
They didn't know she was married or a mother. No one ever reported missing.
The Sheriff’s Office said that answering how Crow wound up dead near Tyler may prove to be the most difficult question yet.
"It's very difficult to go any farther,” said Smith.
Still, they hope identification provides some closure and a long-overdue chance to lay her to rest properly.
