Follow up to Someone's Daughter (& parenthetically The Boy in the Box)

[truepenny]

So, a couple years back, I read Silvia Pettem's Someone's Daughter, about an unidentified murder victim from 1954. As I was putting together my master list of book posts, I came across that discussion and remembered that someone had mentioned that Jane Doe had been positively identified. So I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, the same year that Someone's Daughter came out, with its theory that Jane Doe was a woman named Katharine Dyer, (a) Katharine Dyer was found living in Australia and (b) Jane Doe was identified, by DNA testing, as Dorothy Gay Howard. (The article has some quotes from Pettem that will demonstrate why I disliked her when I was reading her book.) The theory that Harvey Glatman was Jane Doe's murderer was apparently holding up, but, of course, it's a purely circumstantial case.

Given that I was just blogging about another unidentified victim and existential despair, it seemed a propos to remark that sometimes the Jane Does can be identified 50 years later. In one way, that doesn't matter at all, of course. She's still dead and there's no one to bring to justice. If she was murdered by Glatman, he was executed in 1959. If she wasn't murdered by Glatman, there's no telling who her murderer was and what became of him or her. But on the other hand, and in service of that quixotic streak I was talking about, it does matter. It matters enormously. Not to her, but to us. If the living don't remember the dead, who will?

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Also, speaking of that question, If the living don't remember the dead, who will?, papersky wrote a poem.

Comments

Dorothy Gay Howard / Boulder Jane Doe

[pettem]

Please read the Epilogue to Someone's Daughter (also in the Kindle edition), http://silviapettem.com/epilogue.html Thank you.