A murder victim found in a box found in an Indiana cornfield has been identified, investigators announced this week, 50 years after the shocking discovery.
The woman – who was shot in the back of the head – is called Jane Hart, 69 years old – and she was born in 1906. The DNA Doe Project has been revealed Wednesday.
Hart, a housekeeper, was the daughter of a Croatian woman, who had immigrated to the United States the previous year before giving birth in Ohio.
It then moved from Ohio to Chicago, before disappearing from public databases in the 1970s.
Hart’s body was found in a box by cornfield farmer Norman Skoog and his 16-year-old son Curtis on October 8, 1976 — by which time authorities believed the box had been in the field for only 12 hours.
She was wearing a double-knit pantsuit, a green jacket, and trousers – and there was a smashed perfume bottle near her remains, The Lafayette Journal and Courier reported.
Investigators suspect that the woman inside was murdered a week before the box was found.
She was found with a large scar as a result of a radical mastectomy. The scar was about eight centimeters long. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
But Harold Konzelman, who was Benton County’s coroner at the time, told the Journal & Courier on October 9, 1976: “We have very little evidence to go on,” and authorities never tracked down a suspect.
Speculation has also flourished about the circumstances that led to her death.
“As for theories?” Matt Rosenbarger, Benton County’s current coroner, who helped exhume her body in 2019, said.
“There’s a wide variety for everyone. Maybe a mob hit?”
“Was it one of those things that happened in the wrong place at the wrong time? Who knows, for sure? We just know that we had no missing persons cases here at that time. And someone in the middle of Benton County went to leave it.”
Curtis Skoog even speculated that someone may have flown in by helicopter and dropped the box. Locals have never seen a car in the area or anyone acting suspiciously.
In 1977, Don Stelly, then the city’s mayor, suggested, “Maybe she was someone who got into the middle of something.”
More than 40 years later, Benton County coroners teamed up with the DNA Doe Project — and a profile was created, where they found she was of Croatian heritage.
“We can tell that Jane Doe has Croatian ancestry, which is challenging,” Harmony Vollmer said.
But researchers did find documents related to Hart’s living arrangements and family records. They also worked with her relatives.
“Thanks to the help of Jane’s surviving family, we were able to confirm her identity,” the researchers said.
Curtis Skoog welcomed the fact that the woman’s identity had been identified.
“It’s been a long way, 50 years ago…and it’s pretty much etched in my mind.” He told CBS.