Nearly 28 years ago, road workers discovered the body of a young woman near a canal in the 4300 block of East Williams Field Road in Gilbert. She has been unidentified since, buried as a Jane Doe in Tempe's Twin Buttes Cemetery for the indigent.
But now, a harder push is on to identify the woman, estimated to be between 25 and 30 years old with dark brown hair and extensive orthodontic work including a bridge plant in her lower front teeth.
The woman, who is either Native American or Hispanic, is 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 142 pounds and had shoulder length curly dark brown hair. She is one of 735 unidentified deaths in Arizona, with 202 of them in Maricopa County alone. Of those, up to 30 percent of the county's unidentified deaths are from the East Valley, according to information from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office.
The woman was found shortly after 8 a.m. on August 15, 1983, and her cause of death was suffocation, according to Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic anthropologist with the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office. Her body was exhumed March 22, the same day Shannon Aumock was positively identified nearly 20 years after her body was discovered in a pile of trash by an ATV rider in north Phoenix near Deer Valley Road and North 26th Street.
Aumock she was found was strangled to death on May 28, 1992, soon after her 16th birthday, according to the medical examiner.
The Gilbert and Chandler police departments each has active homicide investigations under way.
Fulginiti, who said she has a dream to put a name on each unidentified person, has been able to move forward in recent months with completing her mission. With the help of an ongoing $138,000 federal grant received by the county through the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission and National Institute of Justice to fund research for unidentified deaths, the medical examiner's office has exhumed 24 bodies since September and has identified five of them. The office also has leads on three more unidentified deaths, including a man believed to be from Chandler who was killed in a motorcycle crash in the late 1980s.
"When we received the grant, we were hoping to get one person identified," Fulginiti said. "We've identified five and have the names of two others we need to positively identify, so we've had much higher success than expected. It has encouraged us to go forward."
If anyone has any information about the death of Shannon Aumock, the woman found in Gilbert, or the man whose skeletal remains were found in the Superstition Mountains, they can call the Phoenix Police Department's Violent Crimes Bureau at (602) 262-6141 or Silent Witness at (480) 948-6377.
• Contact writer: (480) 898-6533 or msakal@evtrib.com
reddi27 posted at 4:28 pm on Wed, Apr 13, 2011.
Calling her "the Gilbert woman" implies that she is from Gilbert, which we obviously don't know, because we don't know who she is. This misstatement appears in both the story and the cutline. It is confusing for the reader. It should be written that she is "the woman found in Gilbert." Sorry if my nitpicking is annoying, but my degree is in journalism and I have worked as both a reporter and an editor.
evtrib posted at 5:04 pm on Wed, Apr 13, 2011.
You are right. It was meant to be descriptive, but I'll change it.
azconan posted at 2:14 pm on Thu, Apr 14, 2011.
Being an ex cop it took me 2 minutes to figure out who she is. Its obviously CARROT TOP. Take a look. If it isnt him its his sister ! Case closed...Youre welcome
Smartaleck posted at 2:52 pm on Thu, Apr 14, 2011.
The East Valley and Scottsdale make up about one-third of Maricopa County both geographically and by population, so naturally it would have about one-third of everything in Maricopa County.
mikedurham posted at 10:55 am on Fri, Apr 15, 2011.
Cold cases have varying degrees of attention. The most frequently solved cold cases are those with DNA evidence available and with family members who advocate for justice on the behalf of the homicide victim. The next level contains cases with recoverable DNA evidence. The next level contains cases that have family advocates and no identifiable or recoverable DNA evidence. The fourth level are those cases without recoverable DNA evidence and no family advocates. Maricopa County does not list on a central registry cases of unidentified homicide victims, or any unsolved or cold homicide case for that matter. I urge county citizens to call their board of supervisors representative to require that the sheriff's department create such a registry which in turn would help with the identification of many of these victims. Do you even know how many unsolved homicide cases there are in Maricopa County within the definition of evidence retention? No one does.