It was no secret to Nicole Cvetnić that her great-grandmother Mary, an immigrant from Croatia, sent her son to an Ohio orphanage in 1914 because of economic hardships. But neither she nor other relatives knew that a daughter was sent to an orphanage as well.
On June 17, 2023, Cvetnić received an email from someone named Cairenn Binder from an organization called the DNA Doe Project. She thought it was spam.
“We are working on the case of a Jane Doe (unidentified remains) who is believed to be of Croatian descent, and you are a genetic match to her on GEDmatch in about the range of a 3rd cousin,” Binder wrote in the email.
About three years later, this Benton County, Indiana, “Jane Doe” was identified as 67-year-old Jane Hart, last seen in Chicago in the 1970s.
“I didn’t think it was real, so I ignored it at first, but then the same woman contacted me again,” Cvetnić said this week. She works for USA Today Co., the media company that owns the Journal & Courier, and lives in Chicago.
Cvetnić’s DNA was on GEDmatch, a site built for genetic genealogy research, the type of investigations the DNA Doe Project has performed since 2017. Her DNA was a 1.6% match.
“Investigative genetic genealogy uses DNA, direct-to-consumer DNA tests, in combination with traditional genealogical research, building family trees and genealogical profiles,” said Traci Onders, DNA Doe Project’s director of case management.
DNA Doe Project then reached out to other members of Cvetnić’s family, who were closer DNA matches — including 78-year-old Mary Kay Ross, Hart’s niece.
“We had no idea that she even existed,” Ross said in a phone interview this week.
With other family members’ DNA, the investigators could uncover more of Hart’s history.
“We looked at thousands of documents. The types of documents that we use would be things like census records, birth records, marriage records …,” Onders said. “For this case specifically, we had some orphanage records.”
The investigators learned that Hart was sent to St. Joseph’s Orphanage for Girls in Cleveland when her father died. Jane’s mother, unable to provide for all three of her children, sent one son and her daughter to separate orphanages.
She kept her other son, who was later adopted by Nicole Cvetnić’s great-great-grandfather after their marriage. They later gave birth to Helen Cvetnić, Hart’s half-sister and Cvetnić’s great-grandmother “Mimi,” who died in 2009.
Hart lived at St. Joseph’s until she was old enough to provide for herself. A few years later, she moved from Ohio to her last known residence in an apartment in Chicago, where she worked as a housemaid in the 1970s.
Finding the mystery
From there, she vanished until Oct. 8, 1976, when 16-year-old Curtis Skoog and his father, Norman, discovered a heavy box containing a woman’s body in one of their fields about 15 yards from County Road 200 South, six miles north of Otterbein.
After nearly running into it with his farm’s combine, Norman found the unusually heavy box and called for help.
“When they got back, they passed me on the lane, and I was like, ‘Man, something’s off,’” Skoog said in a 2019 Journal & Courier article. “That smell — it was something else.”
In the box, they found Hart’s body bound in plastic wrapping.
Hart was shot in the back of the head and stuffed into a box that measured about 3 feet by 2 feet by 1 foot. She was wearing a green pantsuit with a two-tone green jacket. The only item with her was a broken bottle of perfume.
Police reports in the J&C at the time pegged her age between 60 and 65. Police told the J&C that she had sandy hair with some gray mixed in. Police said she was 5 foot 2 and 170 pounds to 180 pounds. She wore little to no makeup. She had an upturned nose with a bump beneath the bridge, large ears and calloused hands. An autopsy showed she’d undergone a radical mastectomy on her right side.
Police at the time believed the woman had been killed seven to 10 days before she was found, according to a J&C account. Police cordoned off miles of county roads for days, treating the wet fields as a crime scene.
In 2019, Benton County Coroner Matthew Rosenbarger decided to exhume Hart’s body from Fowler Cemetery.
“She had not been identified and we were wanting to try to put a name to her and try to get some closure for her family,” Rosenbarger said Wednesday, July 15.
Rosenbarger said in 2019 that the unsolved case had nagged at him through the years. He’d been a grade-schooler in Fowler in 1976, when the woman was found, so he didn’t remember much from then. As a deputy with the Benton County sheriff’s office for 13 years and later as a detective with the Purdue University Police Department, he’d read up on the case, as investigators asked to pull files to chase hunches or leads that wound up going nowhere.
“I know it really bothered all of them that they couldn’t resolve that,” Rosenbarger said. “The previous investigation deserved the extra effort now that science has caught up. They worked so hard, and I wanted to carry that torch for them, I guess.”
Rosenbarger sent Hart’s remains to the DNA Doe Project.
“DNA databases do not represent every ancestral population equally. Because people of Eastern European and Croatian descent are underrepresented, Jane did not have the close matches that we might expect,” said Onders, who joined Hart’s case in October 2024.
‘Hopefully, she’s at rest’
In 2024, a breakthrough led them to Hart’s mother, who immigrated to the United States in 1905 and gave birth to Jane Hart in 1906.
“Hopefully, she’s at rest. Fifty years is a long time for someone to not be known,” Ross said. “I would really like to find out why this happened, like why she was killed.”
Benton County Sheriff John Cox has not responded to several attempts to contact him this week. It is unclear whether the identification will restart a criminal investigation.
“I don’t know that it is an active case,” Rosenbarger said, “but I think any additional intelligence would be acted upon.”
In 2019, when the body was exhumed, Rosenbarger addressed some theories.
“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?” the coroner said then. “We just knew 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 is convinced the box was dropped in his family field by a helicopter.
Sheriff Steely told the J&C in 1977 that he subscribed to a similar theory. State police detectives told the J&C they were less sure about a helicopter’s role.
But “it’s pretty obvious there was some type of air rotation in that field, right around that area, and there is no way anyone could throw that box from that road,” Curtis said this week.
Cvetnić is not sure whether the case will resume but is grateful she could help identify Hart. She urges everyone to submit their own DNA to GEDmatch.
“It can be so powerful and so good in so many ways … but it also has this really powerful side of potentially identifying people who are killed and we don’t know who they are,” Cvetnić said.
Although her great-grandmother Mimi never knew about her half-sister, Cvetnić hopes that will change.
“I like to hope that Mimi is up in heaven, and she’s meeting Jane,” Cvetnić said through tears, “and realizing ‘I have this half-sister’ and maybe saying to Jane, ‘Hey, that girl down there, it was because of her.'”
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Relatives of Benton County’s ‘Jane Doe’ ‘had no idea that she even existed’
Reporting by Ava Westendorf, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Ava Westendorf, Lafayette Journal & Courier | USA TODAY Network
