Forensic genealogist identifies Conway County Jane Doe as likely Jamie Ann Moore after 31 years

Stephanie Wyatt, a forensic investigative genetic genealogist, said she identified a likely identity for the woman long known as the Conway County Jane Doe after more than three decades of the case being cold.

An agency official who worked on the case said skeletal remains were found on Oct. 24, 1994, by a property owner near the railroad tracks on Highway 64 between Marlton and Plumberville. The official said the body was decomposed and investigators recovered only skeletal elements and clothing, and that vertebrae and other items were preserved in evidence in expectation that future DNA technology could help.

"The crime lab did keep vertebrae from the skeletal remains as they knew years later that the technology would catch up," the agency official said. "There was other items that were returned to us at the sheriff's office that we kept in evidence, that sit there for years and years."

The agency official and another investigator described repeated efforts to run the case through CODIS without a hit, then pursuing investigative genetic genealogy. After seeing work in a Faulkner County case, investigators sought help from Parabon NanoLabs and later from Othram Labs to generate new leads from the DNA that had been preserved.

"DNA testing is not a magic wand," Wyatt said. "Oftentimes detectives believe that sending in a DNA sample will deliver a name. What we found is this is more of a game of basketball where you're tossing the ball back and forth down the court. We say, 'hey, we found this lead on a family,' now we're gonna toss you the ball and say, we need FTDNA.'"

Wyatt said that within 24 hours of reviewing available results she identified Jamie Ann Moore as a potential person of interest in the Conway County case. Investigators said they located and interviewed relatives, collected a known sample from a daughter and received a laboratory report indicating about a 99.7% likelihood that the Jane Doe was that woman.

A family member who spoke during the update described discovering later in life that the woman had been missing and said the revelation was both painful and clarifying.

"She was never in a good place. She had a lot of violent relationships. Even though she wasn't the best mom, she was still my mom," the family member said. "It's just mind blowing."

Wyatt and the agency officials stressed the emotional complexity of identification work: finding a name can provide crucial answers and allow family members to grieve, but it also reopens loss and leaves the criminal investigation unresolved. The officials said the case remains an open homicide investigation and that they have established a tip line and continue to reach out to residents who lived near the area where the remains were found.

"We're reaching out to people that lived around her. That's what we started our tip line for so that we could get information," an agency official said. "We hope that one day soon that we'll have all those pieces together and it'll lead us to who was responsible for her murder."

Investigators urged anyone with information to contact the Conway County tip line. No arrests or suspects were announced during the update.