DNA may identify ‘Lady in the Lake’ after 36 years

This week, I started conversations between the St. Tammany Parish Coroner’s Office and the Buffalo New York Police Department, asking their labs to coordinate DNA testing. After 36 years, investigators may finally name the 20-something-year-old girl found tied naked to the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain.

An outdoorsman fly-fishing snagged the woman’s nude body on June 19, 1986, just east of the Interstate 10 twin spans, about fifty yards from the north shore of the lake. An autopsy revealed the woman, who had a plastic bag duct-taped over her head and a 22-pound weight tied to her neck, died of asphyxiation.

Two other findings from the autopsy surprised investigators. First, the victim had breast implants, and second, she was seven to 12 weeks pregnant. These facts bred hope they would find her quickly, but 36 years later, the identity of the Jane Doe investigators dubbed “the Lady in the Lake” remains a mystery.

Tuesday, July 15, 1986, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office released a painted illustration of the victim to local television stations and newspapers. The distributed image, a retouched morgue photograph, depicted a young, pretty woman with big eyes and a slightly upturned nose.

An accompanying news release described her as white, 20 years old or younger, 5-foot-7 inches tall, and weighing 100 to 120 pounds. The report said she had shoulder-length auburn hair and small, old scars on her right knee, right wrist, and upper abdomen. A broad tan line on her left ring finger suggested she had worn a wedding ring for an extensive period.

The victim’s body bore no significant wounds, and her blood contained minimal amounts of caffeine and alcohol. The coroner believed she died less than 24-hours before the fisherman found her body.

In the two weeks between that day and her burial in the Potter’s Field area of Greenwood Cemetery in Slidell, sheriff’s detectives investigated over two hundred leads and inquiries, eventually finding them fruitless.

Unsuccessfully, they tried to identify the woman by tracing her breast implants. Markings on the implants revealed their size, two-hundred cubic centimeters, and the manufacturer’s name, Cox-Uphoff International of Costa Mesa, California, but no Louisiana surgeons admitted to using implants from this company.

Inspector Harvey Pratt of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation created the illustration distributed with the release. “I spend most of my time repairing damage to facial features,” he later explained to a television reporter.

Pratt said he taught himself to retouch photos by hand. He pioneered the process for law enforcement use in 1982, five years before the release of Adobe Photoshop. He used morgue photos, physical descriptions, and anthropological theory to brush out wounds, bloating, and discoloration, and he repainted the eyes and hair to give the subjects life.

Pratt had produced over fifty retouched photographs for law enforcement agencies before the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office contacted him. He said those photos had helped put names to thirty-five bodies. One family claimed a corpse the day after police released his illustration, but others took years.

Seventeen years after investigators distributed Pratt’s illustration of the Lady in the Lake, authorities still had not found the victim’s name or origin, but they still found hope. Law enforcement and non-profit agencies, working together, established open-source and publicly accessible missing person databases online and nationwide.

On September 4, 2003, after learning of physical similarities between the Lady in the Lake and an Ohio teenager missing since May 1981, authorities exhumed the body from Potter’s Field. But an analysis of dental impressions conducted by LSU forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein ruled out a match.

Manhein, a thrice published author, directed LSU’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) lab, known for developing facial reconstructions. Called “The Bone Lady” for her ability to cull details about a person’s appearance and lifestyle from skeletal remains, Manhein took this opportunity to revise the original description of the Lady in the Lake.

The Lab Director described the victim’s height as between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4, three inches shorter than previously thought. The St. Tammany Parish coroner had estimated the woman to be in her late teens, but Mary Manhein told reporters she was in her mid-twenties.

Dr. Manhein’s examination found a previously undetected right hip fracture and plastic surgery on her nose.

“She had beautiful, perfect teeth,” Mary Manhein told reporters. “This suggests she probably came from at least a middle-class family that could afford regular dental care.”

The FACES lab extracted DNA from the woman’s bones and teeth and updated the online databases. But Mary Manhein believed the break in the case would come from the lab’s facial reconstruction.

She described how the lab made the model by placing tissue-depth markers on a cast of the woman’s skull and applying just enough clay to cover the tags. She said the result is much more exact and lifelike than the illustration from 1986.

“Buried in the ground, there was no hope of her ever being identified,” Mary Manhein told The Times-Picayune in 2003. “And I firmly believe no one should go to their grave without a name.”

When Mary Manhein retired in 2015, police still had not named the Lady in the Lake. Not one missing person in the national databases matched her description. But, unknown to investigators, that would change in 2019.

Last week, a Nevada drought allowed authorities to find two murder victims at the bottom of Lake Mead in a national recreation area near Las Vegas. The resulting news stories prompted me to recall our Lady in the Lake and revisit those national databases.

In 2019, the Buffalo Police Department added to the missing persons databases a young mother who vanished from Erie County in West New York between 1983 and 1985. Kathryn Grace Knox Zedick, a 21-year-old mother of two, weighed 120 pounds and stood 5-foot-2. She had auburn shoulder-length hair and perfect teeth.

If DNA specialists can prove Kathryn is the Lady in the Lake, we have solved a 36-year-old mystery, leaving three others untouched. How did the victim arrive in Louisiana? Who got her pregnant? And who smothered her with a plastic bag before dumping her in Lake Pontchartrain?