Carolyn Celeste Eaton ("Valentine Sally")

On February 14, 1982, an Arizona state trooper found the body of a young woman beneath a cedar tree along Interstate 40 near Williams, in northern Arizona. She had been dragged roughly 25 feet from the roadway, and her body was already decomposed. Because she was discovered on Valentine's Day and had no identification, investigators came to call her "Valentine Sally." Examiners determined she had died of suffocation or asphyxiation, finding no broken hyoid bone or other obvious trauma, and estimated she was a teenager or young adult.

The girl stood about 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-5 and weighed roughly 120 to 125 pounds, with blonde or strawberry-blonde hair about nine and a half inches long, blue eyes, and scars on her left foot and right thigh. She wore blue jeans, a striped white sweater and a white bra. One notably distinctive clue was a lower molar that had been drilled in preparation for a root canal about a week before her death, with a dissolved aspirin found in the tooth's cavity, suggesting she had recently seen a dentist. She was believed to have last been seen alive on February 4, 1982, at a nearby truck stop.

The investigation was long and frustrating. In 1984 the girl was mistakenly identified as a Florida runaway named Melody Cutlip on the basis of flawed dental analysis, an error later corrected. Over the decades multiple forensic artists produced facial reconstructions, and in 2005 the case was assigned to the Coconino County Sheriff's cold-case squad. A waitress recalled seeing a girl matching her description in the company of a truck driver in the days before the body was found, but no suspect was ever identified, and "Valentine Sally" remained nameless.

The breakthrough came through forensic genetic genealogy, aided by a grant from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that allowed investigators to enlist a private DNA firm. Using a familial DNA search, the firm identified potential relatives, who were contacted and whose DNA confirmed the match. On February 22, 2021, the Coconino County Sheriff's Office announced that "Valentine Sally" was Carolyn Celeste Eaton, 17, of the Bellefontaine Neighbors area near St. Louis, Missouri, who had been born on October 1, 1964, and had run away from home around Christmas 1981. Nearly 40 years after her death, Eaton finally had her name back, but her murder remains an open, unsolved homicide with no identified suspect.

Much of the investigation over the years centered on the last confirmed sighting of the girl. A waitress named Patty Wilkins recalled serving a young woman matching her description at a nearby truck stop on February 4, 1982, roughly ten days before the body was found, in the company of a truck driver wearing a distinctive cowboy hat. That driver was never identified. When Coconino County investigators finally reached Eaton's relatives in the St. Louis area, one family member reportedly asked, before being told any details, "Is this about Carolyn?" - a sign that her disappearance more than three decades earlier had never been forgotten by those who loved her, even as her killer's identity continued to elude authorities.