She was killed and dumped in a ditch over 40 years ago. A deputy coroner has vowed to find out her name
CHICAGO - In a cardboard box on a gurney in the Morris, Ill., coroner's office are two pieces of a skull. On the wall above Brandon Johnson's desk is a sketch of the woman it belonged to. Eventually, in a small cemetery on a nearby rural road, Johnson hopes to add a headstone with the woman's name to the mounds of dirt that mark her recently exhumed grave.
The bones belong to Grundy County's only unidentified person, says Deputy Coroner Johnson, who exhumed the woman's remains in December. He feels it is his calling to name the dead. Specifically, to identify this woman, whom officials call Jane Seneca Doe because her body was found lying in a ditch along a Seneca, Ill., highway, about an hour and a half southwest of Chicago.
"There's a constant reminder of what I'm doing, and to keep trying," Johnson, 27, said. The sketch of the young African-American woman with a round face watches him, day after day.
