A woman whose body was discovered inside a box in an Indiana cornfield has finally been identified nearly 50 years after the chilling find, investigators announced this week.
The victim, who had been shot in the back of the head, was identified as 69-year-old Jane Hart, born in 1906, the DNA Doe Project revealed Wednesday.
Hart worked as a housekeeper and was the daughter of a Croatian woman who had immigrated to the United States the year before giving birth to her in Ohio.
She later relocated from Ohio to Chicago, but by the 1970s, her trail had disappeared from public records.
Hart’s remains were found on Oct. 8, 1976, by cornfield farmer Norman Skoog and his 16-year-old son, Curtis. At the time, authorities believed the box had been left in the field for only about 12 hours.
She was dressed in a double-knit pantsuit, along with a green jacket and slacks, and a shattered vial of perfume was found near her remains, the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported.
Investigators believed the woman in the box had been killed roughly a week before she was discovered.
She was also found with a large scar from a radical mastectomy. The scar measured about eight centimeters long, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
But Harold Konzelman, who was the Benton County coroner at the time, told the Journal and Courier on Oct. 9 1976 “We have so few clues to go on” and authorities never tracked down a suspect.
Speculation also flourished on the circumstances leading up to her death.
“As for theories?” Matt Rosenbarger, the current Benton County coroner who helped exhume her body in 2019, said.
“There’s the wide variety that everyone has. Possibly a mob hit?
“Was it one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time things? Who knows, for sure? We just know we had no missing cases around here at the time. And someone went way out in the middle of Benton County to leave her.”
Curtis Skoog even speculated that someone may have traveled on a helicopter and dropped the box. Locals never saw a car in the area or someone acting suspiciously.
In 1977 then-sheriff Don Steely suggested, “She may have been somebody who walked right into the middle of something.”
More than 40 years later Benton County coroners teamed up with the DNA Doe Project – and a profile was created, where they found she was of Croatian heritage.
“We could tell that our Jane Doe had Croatian ancestry, which posed a challenge,” Harmony Vollmer said.
But researchers found documents relating to Hart’s living arrangements and family records. They also worked with her relatives.
“It was thanks to the assistance of Jane’s surviving family that we have been able to confirm her identity,” researchers said.
Curtis Skoog welcomed the fact that the woman had been identified.
“It’s been a long road, 50 years ago… it’s pretty much tattooed in my mind,” he told CBS.
