Reet Jurvetson

Reet Silvia Jurvetson was a 19-year-old Estonian-Canadian woman from Montreal who, in the late summer of 1969, traveled to California, telling her family she had met a man she was excited about. She sent a single postcard home with a Los Angeles address, then was never heard from again. Her parents, immigrants who had fled Soviet-occupied Estonia, assumed for decades that their daughter had chosen to disappear into the counterculture. In reality, Reet had already been murdered within weeks of her arrival, her body left in the brush off Mulholland Drive.

On November 16, 1969, a teenage boy who was birdwatching found the fully clothed body of a young woman on an embankment below Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. She had been stabbed more than 150 times, later counts placed the wounds around 157, concentrated in her neck and chest, with defensive wounds on her hands. She had died roughly two days earlier. With no identification and no missing-person match, she was assigned the designation 'Jane Doe 59' and informally nicknamed 'Sherry Doe.' Because the killing occurred close in time and place to the Manson Family's murders, investigators long wondered whether the cult was involved.

The Jane Doe remained nameless for 46 years. The break came in June 2015, when a friend of the Jurvetson family in Canada, searching online, came across a morgue photograph of Jane Doe 59 that had been posted to help identify her and recognized Reet's face. The family contacted the Los Angeles Police Department, and Reet's sister provided a DNA sample. Testing confirmed the match in December 2015, and the LAPD publicly announced the identification in April 2016, finally giving a name to the young Montreal woman who had vanished nearly half a century earlier.

Identifying Reet did not solve her murder. The LAPD publicly discounted the Manson Family theory, saying the evidence did not support it. Instead, detectives focused on the mysterious man Reet had crossed the continent to meet, known only as 'John' or 'Jean,' whom friends described as resembling singer Jim Morrison and speaking with a slight French accent. Investigators released a sketch and appealed for information about him and a possible second man, believed to be his roommate, but neither has been located. Reet Jurvetson's family, who buried her decades after her death, has continued to seek answers. As of 2026 the case remains open and her killer unidentified, a rare instance in which a victim has a name but her murderer does not. Her remains, held for decades in a California grave, were finally reclaimed by relatives who had spent nearly fifty years without knowing her fate. Her identification stands as a testament to the power of a single photograph and a family that never stopped wondering what became of the young woman who went to California in 1969 and never came home.