Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Like so many people curious about her family history, Christina Montorio submitted a DNA profile to a company that offers insight.
The decision yielded a knock on the front door of her New Jersey home by an out-of-state investigator with stunning news: Montorio was related to an unidentified woman found dead in 1991 at the bottom of an interstate embankment in Maryland.
The interaction, two years ago, shows how investigators have been using "forensic genetic genealogy" to try to solve a case that recently passed its 35th anniversary. Their quest to bring identity - to bring, in some ways, life to a woman known simply as "Jane Doe" - appears to be making progress.
"They're closer than they've ever been," Montorio said by phone.
"I think this mystery will be solved soon," added Kat Johnson, founder of the Maryland Missing Persons Network.
Officials with the Maryland State Police declined to comment, other than saying that their probe remains active.
Little is known about the woman. On July 31, 1991, a highway worker trimming vegetation found her decomposed body facedown along southbound Interstate 270 in an area that cuts through the sprawling Monocacy Civil War battlefield in Frederick County. Investigators estimated she was between 17 and 25 years old. They couldn't tell how she died but soon said that foul play was suspected.
They also released details of what she was wearing, including a gold herringbone necklace, a neon-pink ankle bracelet, a dark tank top and a size 11 denim skirt-short combination called a skort. Her fingernails and toenails were painted pink, and she had distinctively protruding front teeth, according to the Frederick News-Post.
There were early reports that the woman may have been seen at a Frederick-area home three weeks before her body was found. Authorities also noted she was found within 10 miles of a truck stop. In 1995, Maryland State Trooper Gary Bachtell told reporters he'd been in contact with detectives about a North Carolina truck driver who had confessed to killing three women and dumping their bodies along interstates. Whether this potential link was pursued further is unclear. In 2021, a Maryland State Police spokesperson confirmed to the News-Post that investigators had obtained the victim's DNA.
In New Jersey in 2018, Montorio decided to use her DNA to research her family background. As an adopted child, she was particularly interested in finding her biological parents. She sent a saliva sample to Ancestry, which she said provided information about her heritage as well as a specific DNA profile. She then uploaded that profile into the website of another company, GEDmatch, which helps connect people who have similar DNA profiles.
GEDmatch gave her a choice of whether to make her profile information available to law enforcement. She checked yes.
"I wanted to help them solve cold cases," she said.
Investigators given access to such DNA profiles aim to match them to DNA profiles collected from crime scenes and unidentified bodies. Getting a match doesn't so much lead directly to a suspect or an identity, but it can point investigators to possible relatives, often very distant ones who have no clear family connections to their target other than genetic similarities. And once investigators have the names, they will sometimes contact them.
That's what happened to Montorio when the Maryland investigator came to her home. After he explained why he was there, she was excited to try to help, even as she mourned a relative she didn't know. Montorio considered what might have happened if she had met her relative.
"We could have been friends. Things could have been different," she said. "She was a woman who was just discarded and thrown away. It feels sad. It feels really sad."
Investigators in cases such as these take a name like Montorio's and map out traditional family tree diagrams. (This work is also done by private companies contracted by law enforcement agencies.) Investigators often go back several generations, establish branches, and then work forward to a time when a crime or a missing person was discovered, according to industry experts. Ideally, this leads investigators to the names of possible suspects or identities - someone of a certain age who might have been in a certain area - or good leads to continue their search.
The Jane Doe case in Frederick County has always been personal to Johnson, the founder of the Maryland Missing Persons Network. On the afternoon of July 31, 1991, when she was 21, Johnson hitchhiked from Rockville to Frederick, and soon heard news reports about a body found near the highway she had traveled.
"It scared the death out of me," said Johnson, now 56. "I assumed she had been hitchhiking, too."
Johnson remembers initially thinking the woman was from the area. Around 1999, after learning that the woman still had not been identified, Johnson dove into investigating the case herself.
Johnson helped build a much broader group of online sleuths, the Doe Network International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons. The Frederick case continues to weigh on her.
"I've spent years trying to figure out who it was. It has been very personal. This could have been me," Johnson said. "This has literally haunted me for years."
(COMMENT, BELOW)