Jane Doe gains identity after 60 years
- Samantha Elley
- Mar 26
- 2 min read
Fifty eight years ago a woman's body was found in Tiburon, California by a hunter. For the next six decades she would be known as the "Jane Doe of Marin County".
She was 5 feet, 2 inches with red hair, weighing around 105 pounds. The badly decomposed body was wearing a red cotton dress and an off-white or tan trench coat. While there was no identification on the body, initial investigations heard of a woman matching her description and three months earlier she had approached a fire station, asking if she could spend the night. She had no money for a taxi to get home. She was refused so she left.
Thanks to the work done by the Marin County Sheriff's Office, the California Department of Justice and ground-breaking forensic work by Othram Laboratory, using forensic-grade Genome Sequencing, the mystery has been solved when it led to members of her family.
The long-term Jane Doe now has a name: Dorothy Jean Williams, originally from Tasmania, Australia. Her married name was Dorothy Vaillancourt.
Dorothy was born in 1917 to James Williams and Esther (nee Wright) and married Francois Vaillancourt in 1943. They moved to San Francisco in 1944 where they had a family.
We may never know the steps that caused her to end up in the underbrush, badly decomposed, but now Dorothy has been identified, she is once again, seen.
Dorothy has been buried at Mt. Tamalpais Cemetery and Mortuary in San Rafael, California prior to her identification.
References
'Jane Doe found on California cliff identified by DNA nearly 60 years later', USA Today, accessed 25th March, 2025, DNA identifies Jane Doe found dead on California cliff in 1966
'Marin County Sheriff-Coroner & California DOJ Team with Othram to identify a 1966 Jane Doe', DNASolves.com, accessed 25th March, 2025, Marin County Jane Doe (1966) is now identified
'Williams, Dorothy Jean', Libraries Tasmania, accessed 26th March, 2025, Search - Tasmanian Names Index
'‘Marin County Jane Doe,’ whose body was found in Tiburon in 1966, has been identified', The Ark, accessed 26th March, 2025, The Ark | ‘Marin County Jane Doe,’ whose body was found in Tiburon in 1966, has been identified
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