Sleuths Are Haunted by the Cold Case of Julie Doe

The task force has about 20 or so active volunteers who comb NamUs and newspaper archives for victims that may be trans. Of course, searching the exact term transgender rarely gets many hits, except for very recent cases. One volunteer, Jessica Veltstra, told me she’s learned to search outdated language. “In older case, you have to look for derogatory terms,” she said. “You have to look for things like crossdresser, transvestite, and transsexual.” Volunteers also key in on details such as makeup or nail polish on victims reported as male, or men’s clothing on victims reported as female. They treat these as clues but not definitive proof of gender identity.

Many of these victims were probably misgendered in life, and when I spoke with Lee and Anthony, they were careful not to misgender them in death. They defaulted to the singular they when referring to Trans Doe Task Force cases—with the exception of Julie Doe, whose breast implants and pitting in her bones were fairly clear signs of transitioning. And they have discussed how to depict the gender of the Does in facial reconstructions. “If there’s an unidentified person whose forensic art might not reflect what we already know about them—if they’re not represented according to a gender they may have lived as—we want to make sure there is art that reflects that,” Anthony said. In a couple of cases, volunteers have used the gender-swapping tool on FaceApp to depict Does as they might have looked pre- and post-transition. It’s totally amateur, Lee quickly acknowledged, but no one else was doing that for these victims.

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After all, Michael says, these victims were “people who were marginalized in life and marginalized in death.” The volunteers I spoke with said they’d joined the task force for precisely this reason—to bring attention to cases that might otherwise be forgotten.

Earlier this year, DNA Doe Project genealogists tentatively made the first ID in a Trans Doe Task Force case called Pillar Point Doe. The victim, who was found stabbed and strangled in Half Moon Bay, California, in 1983, was originally identified as a male in women’s clothing. The sheriff’s office has not announced the person’s identity publicly yet, and Lee Redgrave said the group would wait for the sheriff’s investigation to wrap up before digging further into Pillar Point Doe’s identity as potentially trans, to avoid affecting the official police work.

By now, the task force has documented several dozen cases with victims that may be trans and referred at least five to the DNA Doe Project, including the case of Julie Doe. Her case has proved tricky, as labs have been unable to extract enough DNA. But the volunteers haven’t given up. Her DNA has been to four different labs now, and her latest sequencing results are expected soon.

Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic.