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Chapter 1: What happened to the teenage girl found in Castro Valley?
She was 5'1", 110 pounds. She had a butterfly clip in the back of her hair. She had beautiful gold hoop earrings. No drugs, no alcohol in her system. If you put that all together, it tells you that this is the girl that was living next door. This girl could be from Louisiana. This girl could be from New York. This girl could be from Rhode Island. We have no idea where to even start.
Unfortunately, we're gonna have to dig up her body to find out who she is. I'm Sergeant Scott Dudek. I'm a detective with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. I can vividly recall pulling in here that night. It was late at night. They found a bag behind the local restaurant here in Castro Valley.
And the sad part about it, too, is outside of being discarded like a piece of trash behind a tree, she had a rag stuffed down her throat. She died of asphyxiation. So it was just a horrific, horrific ending. We have to figure out who this little girl is to go forward with the homicide investigation. One, two, three, up.
We're hopeful that the new pathologist that looks at her little body can tell us something that maybe we missed. Step down. OK, hold on a minute. This was a living, breathing person.
She does have a story to tell us. And she's trying very hard tonight to tell us what she can.
There are a million clues inside a skull. It just takes the right person to bring them out. Facial reconstruction is kind of a last-ditch effort. We were desperate to find out who killed this young girl. I knew we would. I just didn't know how. But it just proves that you really shouldn't give up.
The Girl Next Door, tonight's 48 Hours Mystery.
I think it haunts me a lot. I think it haunts everybody that's worked on this case. Like any good homicide detective, Sergeant Scott Dudek can sometimes get a little obsessed with his cases. But this case troubles him more than any other. What makes this one so different? She's just a child, and no one knows who she is.
If anybody deserves everything you got and then 50% more than that, it'd be a child. A 22-year veteran of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department in Northern California, Dudek has solved his share of gruesome crimes. But murders are rare in the suburban community of Castro Valley. It's a beautiful community. It's about 75,000 people. It's middle to upper middle class, most of it.
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Chapter 2: How did investigators begin to identify Jane Doe?
Police had to rely on her autopsy for other clues. We had 10 perfect prints that we got off of both her hands, which is a rarity. Investigators guessed she was in her early teens. She was in good health with perfect teeth. This Jane had all the appearances of a typical teenage girl next door, from her painted nails to her choice of clothing.
We had a seamstress redo the exact clothing that she was wearing. We found out it's a Tommy Hilfiger knockoff. And this is a teenager's outfit. It's very common. This is what all the kids were wearing.
Detective Dudek released this sketch, hopeful it was good enough for someone to recognize this girl once it was splashed all over the local media and posted on websites dedicated to finding missing children. With this sketch being released, we probably had 150 possible clues or sightings of people that thought they knew who our Castro Valley Jane Doe was.
One clue seemed so promising that Dudek and his partner, Ed Shequin, followed it all the way down to the Texas-Mexican border, where they collected DNA samples from several mothers of missing teenage girls, including a girl whose picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Jane. And every single one of those were checked out, and it wasn't her.
There would be many more dead ends, but Scott Dudak remained determined, even though his frustration was mounting. I'm a father. Everybody that works on this case is a father. And it just pulls at you every single day as far as why can't we just solve this? Then another clue that seemed almost too good to be true. from a possible witness. We thought it was a huge break.
We got an anonymous letter in the mail. The letter writer claimed to have seen someone get something from the trunk of a car and dump it in the very same bushes where the body was found. So basically, the person who wrote this letter was telling you that they got a look at the person who dumped the body of Jane Doe. Correct.
We asked this person to come forward, told him we would keep him anonymous. However, unfortunately, he chose not to come forward at that point. This potential witness admitted in the letter that he was reluctant to come forward because he himself had been in that parking lot waiting for a married girlfriend. Anything you want to say to that person now?
He's a huge witness for us, and we need him to make that decision and do the right thing. As the weeks turned to months, the letter writer never came forward, and no one claimed this young girl. But her case touched the people of Castro Valley, and an unlikely hero emerged. He had no way of knowing that what he was about to do would one day help solve this mystery.
From day one, She touched me, and to this day, she still does.
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Chapter 3: What forensic techniques were used to uncover Jane Doe's identity?
...will examine Jane Doe's bones for clues that could provide a better estimate of her age.
The bones all suggest that she's pretty much finished growing. I think she's probably much more, say, like 14 to 17 range. Okay.
In another attempt to pinpoint Jane's age, Dudek has turned to Dr. Duane Spencer, a dentist and forensic specialist.
These are the dental x-rays now of the maxillin mandible of Jane Doe. The wisdom tooth is just starting to get its roots. Dr. Spencer compares Jane's x-rays to some of his teenage patients. This is a 14-year-old that just happened to come into my office this week, and we took this picture. See how the roots are just little gnarly things?
They really haven't formed in comparison to the other molars. Let's put up a 15-year-old. Again, look at the wisdom teeth. See, they really haven't formed very much here. Right. And the last X-ray we'll put up is a 16-year-old. And again, you see some little roots. They're forming a little more now on this 16-year-old right here.
So I'm comfortable with saying this Jane Doe is in the range of 14, 15, 16, 17, somewhere in there probably.
A lot of people are used to seeing forensics on television by watching shows like CSI, but this is the real thing. The forensics field has made such leaps and bounds. That's why we decided that we would go over her body inch by inch by inch. Dudek feels the most important key to unlocking this mystery is to get a better picture of what Jane looked like alive. 62.
And for that, he calls in forensic artist Gloria Noosey, who will make a sculpture of Jane based on her bone structure.
Oh, look.
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