New Britain Jane Doe

On October 11, 1991, a survey crew working near the railroad tracks in the area of Myrtle Street in New Britain, Connecticut — across from the former Fafnir Bearing Company plant — discovered a woman's badly decomposed body concealed in garbage bags. She had died of a gunshot wound to the head. Investigators estimated she had been dead for somewhere between three weeks and four months before she was found, placing her death in the summer or early autumn of 1991. More than three decades later she has never been identified, and no one in New Britain ever reported a woman matching her description missing.

Investigators believe the victim was white or Hispanic and in her late twenties; her NamUs profile (case UP8821) uses an estimated range of roughly 25 to 35 years. She stood about five feet five inches tall, weighed 130 to 135 pounds, and had straight black hair approximately 10 to 12 inches long. She was found wearing a distinctive sleeveless, jumper-style white sun dress printed with panda bears and umbrellas — one detailed description notes pandas holding red ice cream, a red umbrella, and a yellow heart. A notable dental feature, a small tooth protruding from her mouth, would have given her a distinctive smile in life.

In 2011, her body was exhumed by court order so that the FBI could use her skull to build an updated likeness. In late December 2011, New Britain police released a three-dimensional facial reconstruction created by the FBI's Visual Arts Unit in Quantico, Virginia, drawing on skeletal measurements and computer modeling. "She's somebody's daughter. She's somebody's friend, and I know she was missed," Captain James Wardwell of the New Britain police said at the time. Police pointed to the 2009 identification of another local Jane Doe, Diane Cusack, through a similar reconstruction as reason for optimism. The FBI released a further updated facial approximation in 2018, this one clearly showing the protruding tooth. After the exhumation, the woman was reinterred in an unmarked grave.

The case was later taken on by the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer nonprofit that uses investigative genetic genealogy to identify unidentified remains. According to the organization, testing has produced many DNA matches from Puerto Rico, suggesting the woman likely had Puerto Rican ancestry — a lead consistent with New Britain's large Puerto Rican community. Genealogy research on the case remains in progress, though volunteers have reported difficulty narrowing the matches down to close relatives. According to case summaries, more than 75 missing women have been ruled out as the decedent over the years.

The homicide and the woman's identity both remain unresolved. The New Britain Police Department continues to investigate; the DNA Doe Project lists the department's Criminal Investigation Division as the agency of record, and police have asked anyone with information to contact them directly. Investigators have long emphasized that identifying the victim is the essential first step toward finding whoever killed her.