Dawn Olanick (Princess Doe)

Case background and investigation

On July 15, 1982, the body of a teenage girl was found beside Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown Township, Warren County, New Jersey. According to news reports citing the Warren County Prosecutor's Office, she had been beaten so severely that her face could not be recognised, and investigators believed she had been dead for less than a week. With no name to give her, local police called her Princess Doe.

The case became a landmark in the handling of unidentified remains. WFMZ-TV reported that she was the first person entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database of this kind. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, the community paid for her burial at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in January 1983, and her remains were exhumed in 1999 so that DNA samples could be taken. Those details rest on Wikipedia and were not confirmed in a primary source.

The identification came four decades later. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said a single molar was submitted in 2021 to Astrea Forensics, which extracted and sequenced the DNA without charge, and that Innovative Forensic Investigations then used investigative genetic genealogy to build a family tree. CBS News reported that the identification was confirmed on April 29, 2022. On July 15, 2022, the 40th anniversary of the discovery, the Warren County Prosecutor's Office announced that Princess Doe was Dawn Olanick, a 17-year-old from Long Island, New York, who NBC New York reported had just completed her junior year of high school.

On the same day, prosecutors announced that Arthur Kinlaw, then 68, had been charged with first-degree murder in her death. News reports said Kinlaw was already serving a sentence of 20 years to life in New York for other murder convictions. According to prosecutors quoted by NBC New York, there was evidence suggesting that Kinlaw was involved with a prostitution ring, wanted Olanick to join it, and killed her when she refused. These are allegations that have not been tested at trial.

Prosecutors said Kinlaw had written letters to their office beginning in 2005 in which he admitted the killing, and that he had also made admissions in an interview. According to the reports, investigators were unable to corroborate those statements, or to bring a charge, until the victim had a name. Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer credited science and technology with making the identification possible.

A relative quoted by WFMZ-TV thanked investigators and said the family missed her, while asking for privacy. No report of a trial, plea or other resolution of the charge against Kinlaw was found in searches carried out in September 2026, and he is presumed innocent of this charge unless convicted.