Dawn Olanick (Princess Doe)

On July 15, 1982, the body of a young woman was discovered in Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown Township, Warren County, New Jersey. She had died of blunt force trauma to the face and head, with multiple fractures, and her face had been beaten beyond recognition. She was found wearing a red skirt and shirt, without shoes, socks, or undergarments, and investigators noted red nail polish on the fingernails of her right hand only. With no identification and no matching missing-person report, Lieutenant Eric Kranz of the Blairstown police dubbed her 'Princess Doe,' a name that would follow the case for four decades.

The case drew national attention to the broader problem of unidentified victims. On June 30, 1983, Princess Doe became the first unidentified-persons case entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center, in a ceremony involving then-FBI Director William Webster. Her remains were buried in the same Blairstown cemetery in January 1983 with donated funds. Investigators pursued the case for years without a confirmed identity: the remains were exhumed in 1999 for early DNA testing and again in 2020, according to Wikipedia, as forensic technology advanced.

In 2021, a molar tooth and an eyelash were submitted to Astrea Forensics, which extracted and sequenced degraded DNA, and Innovative Forensic Investigations conducted investigative genetic genealogy to build a family tree, an effort coordinated with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Genealogical leads brought investigators to surviving relatives, and family DNA comparisons confirmed the identification on April 29, 2022. On July 15, 2022 — the 40th anniversary of the discovery — the Warren County Prosecutor's Office and New Jersey State Police announced that Princess Doe was Dawn Olanick, a 17-year-old high school junior from Long Island, New York, who had left home in 1982 and was never seen by her family again.

At the same announcement, authorities said Arthur Kinlaw, then 68, had been charged with first-degree murder in Olanick's death. Kinlaw was already serving a sentence of 20 years to life in New York State prison for murder convictions stemming from other killings, and, according to prosecutors, he had confessed to the Princess Doe killing in written statements and letters to the prosecutor's office dating back to 2005, while incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility. Prosecutors alleged that Kinlaw had tried to lure the teenager into prostitution and, when she refused, drove her to New Jersey and killed her. Officials said the victim's identification was essential to building a prosecutable case despite the earlier confessions. The identification resolved one of the nation's most prominent unidentified-person cases; the murder charge against Kinlaw remained pending as of the most recent reporting, and he is presumed innocent of that charge unless convicted.