From the archives: Missouri detective finally puts a face to skeletal remains found in 1990

Editor’s note: The Star is republishing this story from 2011 due to new developments in the case. Read the latest here.

When sheriff’s Detective Lorie Howard picked up the case three years ago, it was the only unsolved murder in McDonald County.

She read what reports there were. Picked through the evidence. Studied old photos of the nameless woman’s hogtied body, found in December 1990 along a remote road in Missouri’s southwest corner.

One big problem:

The woman’s skeletal remains were no longer in the evidence room. No one seemed to know where they were.

And without them, it would be difficult if not impossible to get a reconstruction of the woman’s face. Without a reconstruction, Howard wouldn’t have a photo to pass along to the media. Without help identifying the woman, the investigation would be as mired as it had been for nearly 20 years.

”I knew I needed to put a face on her,” Howard says. “I knew I needed to put a face on Grace.”

She calls her Grace because a while back a friend told her that only by the grace of God would she learn who the woman was and who killed her.

Now, after three years of working this case, mostly on her own time, Howard feels she’s closer to giving Grace back her real name.

She has spoken to investigators who worked the case years ago, talked to authorities across Missouri and other states, and enlisted help from a forensic artist in Canada.

They’ve recently found the bones. And on Howard’s desk rests a sketch of Grace, one she shared with the media just last week.As leads spill in, and she makes more phone calls trying to nail them down, she looks at the sketch.

”I will find you,” she thinks. “I will find out who you are. I won’t stop until I do.”

The case has gone national, with possible leads pointing to missing women from Ohio and Illinois, but Howard says it’s too early to know. The story of the murdered woman has been highlighted by web sleuths and crime blogs.”Detective Driven to Find Killer” reads a headline on an “America’s Most Wanted” website.

Howard investigates child sexual abuse cases and other sexual assaults for the McDonald County Sheriff’s Office. Her desk is near deputy sheriff Linda Grohler’s.From time to time over the years, Grohler would mention the county’s coldest case. I wish someone knew what had happened, she’d say.

One day three years ago, Howard turned her chair around to face Grohler. Tell me the story, the detective said. Grohler and her husband were taking a Sunday walk after church. As they went down their country road -- a narrow, bumpy, winding lane called Oscar Talley Road -- they stopped to pick up trash.

It was Grohler’s husband who saw the skull near an abandoned house. Animals had separated it from a woman’s skeleton. They called the Sheriff’s Department.

The woman’s body was bound with several materials, including a phone cord, nylon rope and a clothesline. Her hands were bound behind her back and tied to one foot. She wore a light-colored T-shirt, size 5 or 7 Lee jeans, white tennis shoes and a jean jacket -- but no undergarments.

In life, she stood between 5 feet 1 inch and 5 feet 4 inches. Authorities decided she was probably 20 to 30 years old. When Grohler finished telling her story, Howard knew she had to do something.

”From that point on, it’s been a hunt to find out who knows what.

”When Howard first combed through the physical evidence in the case, she didn’t find much. Just the clothes, the bindings and the tip of one fingernail.

No bones.

Howard hoped the fingernail would be a key to eventually identifying the woman. She sent it to scientists at the University of North Texas Health Science Center.

They were able to extract mitochondrial DNA, which Howard knew she could use to exclude possible matches when the time came. But the actual remains would give her the higher-quality DNA needed for identification.

One hair found on the collar of the woman’s jacket ended up belonging to someone else. Maybe a clue to who killed her, but not to who she was.

Howard needed a sketch.

”I was desperate for reconstruction,” she says. “I’ve done all the things I can do, but I needed a face. ”Trouble is, most forensic artists need a skull to do a sketch or sculpture.”

Yet one day, after her cold case investigation made the newspapers, Howard received an offer of help from a forensic artist in Canada.

”Here was this cop who sounded like she was desperate,” said Victoria Lywood, associated with the anthropology department at John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec. “The interesting part to me was there was no skeletal remains.”

Howard sent old photos of Grace’s remains to Lywood. Howard eventually obtained a cast of Grace’s teeth, which had extensive dental work, and sent that, too.

Without the actual skull, Lywood needed as many details as she could get.While recently working to get X-rays of Grace’s teeth, Howard received a call from the medical examiner’s office in Boone County, Mo. The chief forensic investigator there, Dori Burke, had been trying to help her with the case.

”I’m no different than anyone else -- I like a good mystery, too,” Burke said.

She finally had good news. They had found Grace’s bones.

The woman’s remains, which initially were sent to Columbia to be analyzed, had then been sent to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

And there they had stayed for years, Howard says.

Some of the bones had been used as teaching tools in the classroom, Howard says, but others --including the fully intact skull with teeth in place -- were secure in a box.

Howard says that it’s not surprising that the bones remained there and that some were used in the classroom.”

When you send bones away, and years and years pass ... they can use them for teaching purposes, and they do,” she said, adding that’s particularly likely if it’s a case where the bones haven’t been identified. “At least I know where she was.”

Among the remains was the femur, a good repository for DNA, Howard said. Teeth, too, are helpful because they have pulp, another good source.

The University of Arkansas had sent the remains back to Boone County. Howard immediately drove there to pick them up.

”I had found her and was taking her home,” Howard said. “I was thrilled.”

After getting a CT scan of the skull, Howard sent the results to Lywood, who would be able to do a more accurate sculpture.

A little more than a week ago, Howard got an email from Lywood. The subject line: “Lorie meet Grace.”

Howard froze. All she had to do was click the mouse and she’d see the woman she had been fighting for the last three years.

She admits she was nervous.

Lywood says she’s never worked with a more determined cop, attentive to every detail.

”Whoever did this deed better just step up and turn themselves in,” Lywood says. “Because she’s going to get ’em.”

Howard now plans to send the woman’s femur and one of her teeth for DNA testing. Maybe she’ll get a hit from a national DNA database.Maybe she’ll get a tip -- one that pans out -- from the release of Grace’s sketch and facial approximation.

Already, calls are coming in. From the plain curious and the web sleuths to people who think Grace could be their missing family member.

”It would be nice to know who she really is,” Grohler says. “She (Howard) has worked really hard at this, yes she has.”

Howard thinks that the killer is from southwest Missouri and that Grace probably came from somewhere else. If she was local, people would have reported her missing in the past two decades.

The woman probably was sexually assaulted and strangled because of the way she was found, the detective says. Hogtied, with no visible signs she suffered other violence.

What Howard knows for sure:

She’s sticking with the mystery until she solves it.

”I didn’t come this far to not finish,” she says. “I put so many pieces that didn’t make sense together, and I’m not going to not put in the final pieces now.”I want to reunite her with her family. It’s been 21 years. It’s time for her to go home, wherever home is.”