Mary Edith Silvani (Sheep's Flat Jane Doe)

Case background and investigation

On July 17, 1982, hikers discovered the body of a woman off a hiking trail at Sheep's Flat, a meadowed area near the Mount Rose Highway above Incline Village on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. The woman, dressed in casual beach attire — a sleeveless blue shirt, Lee jeans, a one-piece swimsuit, and light yellow tennis shoes — carried no identification. She had been sexually assaulted and shot in the back of the head, possibly while bending over, and investigators estimated she had been dead roughly 24 hours. She was approximately 5 feet 5 inches tall, about 112 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and had a scar consistent with a Caesarean section. For 37 years she was known only as 'Sheep's Flat Jane Doe' or 'Washoe County Jane Doe.'

The Washoe County Sheriff's Office pursued the case for decades without identifying the victim. According to investigators, a detective's 2015 review suggested she was likely from the western United States, but conventional methods stalled. In early 2018 the sheriff's office partnered with the DNA Doe Project and IdentiFinders International to apply investigative genetic genealogy, uploading a DNA profile developed from the victim's remains to the public database GEDmatch. In July 2018 the DNA Doe Project reported a tentative identification, and by late summer 2018 investigators confirmed the victim as Mary Edith Silvani, using fingerprints from a 1974 Detroit Police Department arrest record to corroborate the DNA findings.

Silvani was born September 29, 1948, in Pontiac, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit, where former classmates at Mackenzie High School remembered her as quiet and kind. Her early life was difficult: her mother spent years institutionalized, and Silvani reportedly experienced homelessness after her father's death when she was a teenager. Around 1972 she had a child whom she placed for adoption, and at some point in the 1970s she moved west to California, where investigators found little trace of her life before her death at age 33.

The same genetic genealogy techniques were applied to male DNA recovered from the crime scene. According to the sheriff's office, genealogists traced the profile to a Dallas-area family and ultimately to James Richard Curry, a Texas-born ex-convict who had worked as a locksmith in California after his release from prison in 1977. DNA testing involving Curry's children confirmed the match, investigators said. Curry had been arrested on January 6, 1983, in connection with killings in the San Jose area; he confessed to multiple murders, including a 1982 killing in Santa Clara and two January 1983 killings, and died by suicide in the Santa Clara County jail the day after his arrest. Because he died in custody, Curry was never charged or tried for Silvani's murder, and authorities have named him as her killer based on the DNA evidence.

On May 7, 2019, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office publicly announced both identifications and closed the case. The announcement was widely reported as the first known instance in which both a homicide victim and her perpetrator were identified through investigative genetic genealogy. Curry, who is suspected in at least one additional homicide, was never convicted in any of the killings attributed to him.