Who was the Midtown Jane Doe and how was she discovered?
Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is about a gruesome discovery in a New York City basement, one that set off an investigation weaving together threads that you would never expect to find in a single case. A shadowy suspect. A tangled family tree filled with deception. An iconic rock club.
The September 11 attacks mob shakedowns tied to a gangster who would later find fame on The Sopranos. Like you name it, it is in this case. And at the heart of it all is a teenage girl and the decades-long mission to restore her identity. But even though she finally has her name back, justice still remains out of reach. And police need your help to find out what really happened to her.
This is the story of a woman who for more than two decades was known only as the Midtown Jane Doe. It's Monday afternoon, February 10th, 2003, and construction workers are clearing debris from a basement of a rundown five-story building on West 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan, a neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen.
Now, this place is in pretty bad shape, and the only reason the workers are even down there is because the restaurant next door arranged to rent part of the basement just for storage. So they're doing their thing when one of them notices something weird in the corner behind this old boiler.
It's this big rectangular concrete slab, like six feet wide, five feet long, taller than your standard cinder block. And it looks just all kinds of wrong. Like it definitely doesn't belong here. And in a place like New York where lifers have seen it all, that is saying something. So a worker takes a sledgehammer to this thing.
And instead of the solid thud that you would expect to hear when you like hit concrete, there is this echoing sound that tells them it's hollow inside. And with the blow, the cement starts breaking apart until they see brown fabric poking through. And when they pull on it, a human skull starts popping out.
Now, the worker notifies the NYPD, and Detective Gerard Gardner, who just started his shift and is next up in rotation to catch a case, heads straight to the scene. Now, he knows right away that this is not going to be a routine investigation. New York City has more than its fair share of homicides, don't get me wrong, but cases involving skeletal remains are rare here.
So he calls in the city medical examiner's forensic anthropologist, and when they dig through that concrete to the dirt below... They find a skeleton like curled up in the fetal position, all wrapped up in a rust colored carpet.
This was literally a concrete coffin.
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