The St. Louis Jane Doe is an unidentified girl who was found murdered in the basement of an abandoned apartment building on February 28, 1983 in

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...

. She has also been nicknamed "Hope", "Precious Hope", and the "Little Jane Doe." The victim was estimated to be between eight and eleven when she was murdered and is believed to have been killed via

strangulation Strangling is compression of the neck that may lead to unconsciousness or death by causing an increasingly hypoxic state in the brain. Fatal strangling typically occurs in cases of violence, accidents, and is one of two main ways that hanging ...

. She was

rape Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or ag ...

d and

decapitated Decapitation or beheading is the total separation of the head from the body. Such an injury is invariably fatal to humans and most other animals, since it deprives the brain of oxygenated blood, while all other organs are deprived of the au ...

. The brutality of the crime has led to national attention. The head of the Jane Doe has never been located, hindering dental examination and the possibility of a traditional facial reconstruction.

Discovery

On the afternoon of February 28, 1983, two looters entered an abandoned twenty four-unit red brick building at 5635 Clemens Avenue in

(since demolished); inside, they discovered the headless body of an

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

child in the home's basement. The looters noticed the body after lighting a cigarette, which illuminated it; her body was naked except for a yellow sweater, and had been left lying on her stomach, with the hands bound behind her back with red and white nylon rope. The victim was initially believed to have been a sex worker until police moved her body and discovered she did not have developed breasts, indicating she had not gone through

puberty Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction. It is initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads: the ovaries in a girl, the testes in a boy. ...

. Further examination was conducted within the next week.

Investigation

Initial findings

It was concluded by law enforcement that the victim was not killed at the location where she was discovered, as no traces of blood were found by the body. This led to law enforcement to believe blood had been drained from her body elsewhere; her stomach was also empty at the time of her death. The

Missouri Botanical Garden The Missouri Botanical Garden is a botanical garden located at 4344 Shaw Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. It is also known informally as Shaw's Garden for founder and philanthropist Henry Shaw. Its herbarium, with more than 6.6 million spe ...

performed mold tests on her body which determined she had been killed within five days of her discovery. The child had been bound at the wrists with a red nylon cord. Her head had been severed cleanly by a large blade, possibly a carving knife. She was between eight and eleven years old and was prepubescent; she had also been raped. She wore only a yellow, long sleeved V-neck sweater and two coats of nail polish on her fingers – both of them shades of red. Her head has never been found, but fingerprints, footprints and DNA information were successfully collected. There were no distinct marks or deformities on her body, she was approximately tall when she was alive. Ten months after her discovery, with no new leads for investigators, she was buried at

Washington Park Cemetery Washington Park Cemetery is a historic African-American cemetery active from 1920 until 1980 and located in Berkeley, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Large-scale disinterment occurred over several decades for various construction pro ...

on December 2, 1983. The child's sweater had previously been sent by law enforcement to a

psychic A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, ...

in Florida who wanted to touch it to receive a psychic impression; however, the sweater was never returned, and is presumed to have been lost in the mail. Four missing girls have been ruled out as the victim, as well as the Northampton County Jane Doe from North Carolina, who was ruled out to be the remaining parts of the body. She was also presumed to have been a victim of Vernon Brown, who had murdered a young girl in a similar manner. Brown was executed in 2005 and never confessed to murdering the Jane Doe, despite efforts made by investigators.

2013 exhumation

Authorities decided to exhume the body in 2013 in order to gather more forensic information about the victim. The remains had been misplaced, along with many other bodies in the Washington Park Cemetery, due to the negligence of cemetery records and were not found until mid June. The remains were located by using camera calibration techniques to determine precisely where a photograph of the casket had been taken on the day of the burial.

Isotope Isotopes are two or more types of atoms that have the same atomic number (number of protons in their nuclei) and position in the periodic table (and hence belong to the same chemical element), and that differ in nucleon numbers (mass numbers) ...

tests on samples of her bones were undertaken to determine the area the victim would have likely lived based on mineral content in her body. According to an article in the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'', the test results concluded the girl was likely to have lived her entire life in one of ten southeastern states: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, or North or South Carolina. However, the

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is a private, nonprofit organization established in 1984 by the United States Congress. In September 2013, the United States House of Representatives, United States Senate, and the Pres ...

catalogue entry alternately lists the midwestern–midatlantic states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, or West Virginia. After the exhumation, the remains were re-interred at Calvary Cemetery in the Garden of Innocents, a section of the cemetery designated for unidentified decedents.

2022 documentary

A documentary on the case entitled "Our Precious Hope Revisited: St. Louis' Little Jane Doe" was released in September 2022.

References

External links

* * * *{{Find a Grave, 11537499 1970s births 1983 deaths 1983 murders in the United States 20th-century women Crimes against children Female murder victims Incidents of violence against girls Murdered African-American people Murdered American children People murdered in Missouri Rapes in the United States Unidentified American children Unidentified murder victims in Missouri Unsolved murders in the United States Violence against women in the United States Deaths by strangulation in the United States