Evelyn Colon ("Beth Doe")

On December 20, 1976, a young man stopping along Interstate 80 near White Haven, Pennsylvania, climbed down toward the Lehigh River and discovered a grisly scene: three vinyl suitcases that had been thrown from a bridge. Inside were the dismembered remains of a young woman and her nearly full-term unborn daughter. The victim had been strangled, sexually assaulted and shot in the neck after death before being dismembered. She carried no identification, and for the next 44 years she was known only as 'Beth Doe,' one of Pennsylvania's most haunting unidentified-remains cases.

Investigators estimated the woman was in her late teens and nine months pregnant. Despite reconstruction efforts and widespread circulation of her description through organizations such as the Doe Network and NamUs, no one came forward to claim her, and the case went cold for decades. The brutality of the crime, a pregnant girl killed, mutilated and discarded along a highway, lingered in the memory of the state police and the surrounding community, but without a name for the victim there was little hope of finding who was responsible. Over the years detectives revisited the file repeatedly, and a facial reconstruction was created to try to give the young woman back her identity, yet each renewed push ended the same way, with no match and no clue to who she had been or where she came from.

The answer finally came through forensic genetic genealogy. In 2020 investigators, working with genealogists, uploaded a DNA profile developed from the remains to a genealogy database. It matched a man named Luis Colon Jr., who turned out to be the victim's nephew. Through him, Pennsylvania State Police identified Beth Doe as Evelyn Colon, a 15-year-old girl from Jersey City, New Jersey, who had disappeared in 1976. The identification was announced on March 31, 2021, nearly 45 years after her body was found. Evelyn, who had grown up one of several siblings, had been pregnant at 15 by her older boyfriend.

On the same day her identity was announced, authorities arrested that former boyfriend, Luis Sierra, then 63, at his home in the Ozone Park section of Queens, New York. Sierra, who had been 19 at the time of the killing, was charged with criminal homicide and related counts in Evelyn's death. The case appeared to be a rare cold-case triumph combining modern DNA science with old-fashioned detective work. In January 2025, however, the prosecution suffered a serious setback: a court dismissed the Pennsylvania charges after authorities concluded the murder had actually occurred in New Jersey rather than Pennsylvania, meaning the case fell outside Pennsylvania's jurisdiction. As of 2026, Evelyn Colon has her name back and a suspect has been publicly identified and arrested, but the ultimate legal resolution of her murder, and the question of where it will be prosecuted, remains unsettled. Her unborn daughter, who died with her, was never named.