Three DC Women Who Went Missing in 2006 Have Been Identified

D.C. Police recently announced that they had discovered and identified the skeletal remains of three women who had gone missing in Southeast Washington in 2006. While their remains were found in April, they weren’t identified until four months later, after a painstaking effort involving missing persons investigations and DNA testing.

The three victims are Dorothy Jean Butts, age 43, Jewel Marquita King, age 48 and Verdell Jefferson, age 41. A construction crew was working in the crawl space of an apartment building in Congress Heights when they first found some of the remains. That initial set turned out to be those of Butts. The remains of the other two women were found by authorities searching nearby in the woods behind the building, buried in a shallow grave.

The investigation progressed slowly while police worked to identify the remains. In the meantime, they had only scant evidence to work from.

First, while King and Jefferson appear to have been fatally shot, and buried close together, Butts was bludgeoned to death and found elsewhere. Second, the women went missing not far from their burial sites -- in fact, Jefferson lived on the same block -- but the detectives don’t know if they were acquainted with one another. Finally, all three women were mothers.

With only this scant amount of information to go on, investigators tasked a forensics anthropologist to work on establishing profiles of the victims. Their ages ranged from 35 to 45 years old, their heights could be estimated and their time of death could be roughly calculated. Using these basic facts, investigators searched through missing persons files to find matches. They checked files at both the D.C. Police Department and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database.

They identified eight possible matches, and then contacted the immediate families of those women and took DNA samples. By comparing the DNA of these relatives to the DNA of the remains, investigators were able to positively identify the three victims. Knowing their identities allowed the police to then move forward with a whole lot more information.

It also allowed them to ask the public on Twitter if anyone had seen these women in the area when they went missing. Police are hoping that the identities of the victims will help someone remember something suspicious that could have occurred when they went missing in 2006.

DNA technology has been crucial in this investigation so far, but it could also play a large part in prosecuting the offenders, if found and charged. “The role of DNA forensics in today’s courtroom cannot be overstated,” says a personal injury lawyer in Jericho, NY. Of course, anyone who’s watched CSI or Law and Order already knows this.

Police aren’t ruling out the possibility that a serial killer committed these crimes, and they have offered a reward of $25,000 for information that leads to an arrest or conviction in this matter.