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Jane Doe gains identity after 60 years

Writer: Samantha ElleySamantha Elley

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.


Dorothy Jean Williams
Dorothy Jean Williams

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.


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