Tammy Terrell

Case background and investigation

On the evening of October 5, 1980, a passing driver found the body of a teenage girl in a desert area of Henderson, Nevada, near what is now Arroyo Grande Boulevard and Lake Mead Parkway, according to a CNN report republished by KTVZ. With no identification, she became known as Arroyo Grande Jane Doe, a name taken from the place where she was found.

The death was ruled a homicide. KOLO-TV, citing Henderson police, reported that she had been stabbed and beaten, possibly with a hammer. According to the Wikipedia article on the case, she had multiple head wounds and several puncture wounds in her upper back, and investigators estimated that she had died roughly a day before she was found.

For 41 years, efforts to learn her name were unsuccessful. According to Wikipedia, hair samples were sent to a specialist laboratory in 2019, and the resulting DNA profile was uploaded to a genealogy database for comparison with potential relatives, in work overseen by genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter. Police described the technique as investigative genetic genealogy, in which DNA testing is used to find possible relatives of an unidentified person. The identification was confirmed with DNA from two of her sisters.

On December 2, 2021, the Henderson Police Department announced that the victim was Tammy Corrine Terrell, 17, of Roswell, New Mexico. The CNN report states that the identification itself was made on November 10, 2021. Wikipedia gives her date of birth as July 4, 1963.

Police said Tammy was last seen on September 28, 1980, in Roswell. According to the accounts summarized by Wikipedia, she had been dropped off at the state fair in Roswell that day and was later seen at a restaurant in the city in the company of a white man and woman who have not been identified; there were indications they may have been traveling toward California. Her body was found in Nevada one week later.

No suspect has been publicly identified and no one has been charged. KOLO-TV reported that, with a name now attached to the victim, Henderson police were treating the case as an active murder investigation. As of the sources reviewed, the killing remains unsolved and the investigation is described by police as ongoing.