New York Jane Doe Identified as Florida Teen Missing Since the 1970s

When Tammy Jo Alexander went missing from her Brooksville home back in the 1970s, her family didn’t notify authorities.

Years passed and no one let the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office know that a former Hernando High School student was gone without a trace.

All that changed on Aug. 14, 2014, when a friend of former classmate of Alexander, Laurel Nowell, reached out to the sheriff’s office. Nowell, who now lives in Apache Junction, Ariz., told Hernando deputies her friend disappeared sometime between 1977 and 1979, between the age of 14 and 16.

Acting on information provided by Nowell, the Hernando sheriff’s office launched an investigation into the decades’ delayed missing persons report. Investigators were able to make contact with Alexander’s stepsister, Sharen Nelson, who now resides in Lakeland.

Nelson, an email from the sheriff’s office stated, confirmed the disappearance “and that the family had never reported it to authorities.”

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A third confirmation of the disappearance came when investigators reached out to Pamela Dyson of Panama City. Alexander’s half-sister relayed a similar story, the email stated.

With confirmation of the disappearance in place, detectives entered Alexander’s information into the Florida Crime Information Center database and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs for short.

A match for information related to Alexander turned up on Jan. 7, the sheriff’s office reported Monday. Authorities in Livingston County, N.Y., told Hernando investigators Alexander was a match for a cold case of theirs that dated back to 1979.

The body of an unidentified female homicide victim had been found in a New York cornfield back on Nov. 10, 1979. The teenage girl, believed to be between 13 and 19, remained known as simply another Jane Doe until a full mitochondrial DNA match for Alexander was obtained.

The 35-year-old cold case was solved.

Hernando authorities have not said why Alexander’s family failed to report her missing.

The national NamUs database contains information related to thousands of missing persons cases across the country. Nationwide an estimated 4,400 unidentified remains are found annually, according to the database’s website. There are an estimated 90,000 active missing persons cases nationally at any given time.

To learn more about NamUs or to search the database, visit it online.

Photo of Tammy Jo Alexander courtesy of the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office