“There is a young girl, a child, that is murdered in the most horrific way. She was naked. She had no identification with her. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody came forward to claim her body. It had been 40 years by the time we got the case. That’s almost hopeless. The whole goal is to identify who she was because there is still a family out there that’s missing her.”
“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find a lot of evidence in this case, which was very frustrating. We took skeletal remains and processed them only to find that we could not get DNA from these remains. That was devastating. And I was thinking, I hope that they didn’t destroy all of our evidence in trying to test it.”
“That was hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in this case. A 40-year-old autopsy slide that’s preserved with chemicals was not on the list of things we thought we’d be seeing. And we’re running out of things to look for. I just remember my husband was no longer the same at all. On November 1st of 1980, patrol units with the Walker County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched out to a body that was found on the side of IH-45 approximately the 123 mile marker.”
“My name is Thomas Bean. I’m a lieutenant with the Walker County Sheriff’s Department and I am the primary investigator on the Walker County Jane Doe murder case. Upon arriving on scene, they located a female who was deceased. She was a younger female. She was naked. She had no identification with her. Back in 1980, they didn’t have the stuff that we do now, so they collected the evidence that they could that they located on the scene.”
“There was a ligature around her neck and there was a pair of shoes that were near the body. On the body, there was also a gold colored chain and it had a little pendant on it. At the time, deputies believed that that the female had also possibly been sexually abused prior to death or after death. They started looking for anybody that was missing in the area, started talking to local people to see if anybody had seen or recognized the female that was found on the side of the road.”
“They actually made contact with multiple people who did believe they’d seen her and who gave information on different leads that they could follow. The Hitching Post is one of the locations that she was possibly observed at. There was a restaurant as well. The people that they interviewed, they had them look at pictures, they had them look at the body, and they were getting a lot of information.”
“Um but, I will tell you that people who are eyewitnesses, you get wide ranges of memories and wide ranges of people who think that they could have talked to her, but they may not have. And some of the people that talked to our investigators told us that she had come from down south in Texas and that she was headed to a prison to to meet with someone, but at the time, none of that could be confirmed.”
“The detectives, they went out, they talked to the units. There was no sign of her ever showing up at the units. There was no link to anybody at the units that we could find. So, a lot of the stuff we could not confirm at the time. A few days after the body was found, there was a bag that was located in Huntsville.”
“They found this bag that had some female stuff in it, some male stuff, and some information that led back to Colorado. The investigators actually contacted the people whose names were in that bag. They spoke with them. They confirmed that they hadn’t been here in Walker County, and ultimately that kind of just went to a dead end at that point.”
“When she couldn’t be identified, the county actually buried her in an unmarked grave over in a local cemetery listed a unknown white female. From that point, the case went cold. This case was always near and dear to everybody. Everybody that comes to the Sheriff’s Department and that works for the Sheriff’s Department knows about this case.”
“The general public was interested in everything. At one point, there was a Facebook page for Walker County Jane Doe that I want to say it was like the third most popular page at the time in America because everybody wanted to find her.”
“It had gone viral. There, you know, it was getting hundreds of thousands of views.”
“You know, the fact that there’s a teenage girl seemingly from a middle class background found dead on the side of a highway. She was naked. She was beaten badly. Her face was bruised and she had been violently assaulted. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody came forward to claim her body. There were a lot of theories about her being picked up in a station wagon and taken up towards the prison.”
“That she was a runaway from Texas. I talked to Carl a couple times. He had a lot of people that would reach out to him instead of to me. So, he would provide that information to me and we would follow up on it. But, ultimately none of that could be confirmed. In 1999, the body was exhumed. They pulled some bones and sent them off to possibly get DNA.”
“But, with her not being entered into CODIS because of her age, we were never going to find anybody with that. Ultimately, that was it led led to nowhere. Ultimately, the whole goal is to identify who she was and maybe get her back to her family so she can have a proper burial. This case is one that has had tremendous interest.”
“So, it’s not like people weren’t trying to solve it. All we know is that there is a young girl, a child, that is is murdered in the most horrific way. Everyone wants to know who she is.”
“No one can identify her. My name is David Middleman and I’m the CEO of Astrea. There are a lot of challenges in in taking a a case that has been cold for for decades.”
“And the bottom line is that in most of these cases, there is DNA evidence. And if there’s DNA evidence, there’s a good chance that the case can be cracked, that the identity can be restored. And that’s what we do here at Astrea. One of the biggest things about Astrea is we bring hope to hopeless cases.”
“My name is Kristen Middleman and I’m the Chief Development Officer at Astrea. We use forensic grade genome sequencing to build DNA profiles. We are able to infer identity prior to having a suspect or victim’s name. It’s the complete opposite of what is done with forensic DNA up until now. We’ve had a long-standing interest in what the National Institute of Justice calls a silent mass disaster.”
“This is mass accumulation of human remains, mostly victims of crimes uh that have never been identified. And if you don’t know uh who a victim is, how do you even work the homicide?”
“The Walker County case is about an hour north of The Woodlands where we uh operate. And uh you know, it just it seemed like a case that would definitely benefit from the technology.”
“So, uh we were intrigued because it was clearly a challenging case if everyone knows about it and wants to solve it and there are no uh solutions as to the identity. But, anytime a case comes up on the radar in our area, of course we’re going to reach out and try to help. David, I don’t know if he’ll tell you this.”
“He actually read the entire case file. And he didn’t sleep for 3 months. And I think it was so horrible of a of a death. We have young kids, right? And so, seeing a teenager in that state is devastating. I just remember my husband was no longer the same at all. The fact that there’s a new wave of technology in DNA testing and computer science that could help address these cases, it almost feels negligent not to apply the technology.”
“So, we reached out because we wanted to know if we could have the opportunity to evaluate any remaining evidence, even though it had been about 40 years between her death and the time that we had reached out to help. I received a call from Astrea. I’ve never heard of Astrea before. So, I sat and I talked with them.”
“They actually convinced us to come down and have a meeting and we ended up using the FBI and the Texas Rangers as well to assist with funding. My name is Wesley Doolittle. Um I’m the Montgomery County Sheriff and I previously served in the Texas Rangers. At that time, I was designated as the cold case investigator.”
“I’d talked to David before. Talked about unidentified persons and how we might start dwindling those number of cases down and identifying as many people as we could through the services that Astrea had to offer. It was agreed upon that we were going to see if we can identify our victim through the use of Astrea’s technology.”
“We provided Astrea with the skeletal remains that we had. We were excited to get started. We took skeletal remains and processed them only to find that we could not get DNA from these remains. Not every piece of skeletal remains will be productive for DNA, but it’s it’s very rare.”
“It was frankly shocking to see such a such an outcome. They had no DNA on them at all. That was devastating. For everybody. I got a call that told me that it was so degraded that they weren’t going to be able to provide it either.”
“It it hurts, but it it wasn’t going to stop anybody. Tom and I met with the Medical Examiner’s Office in Harris County and attempted to recover some evidence or try to find evidence in this case that we could retest or test for the first time, maybe had not been tested.”
“That was a tricky thing in this case because people were not sure where the evidence was or what was left. The property rooms and the past have have not always been to the standards that they are today, which was very frustrating. Every time we identified an item, uh we would find the item was missing.”
“So, there was jewelry that she had been found with, uh but the jewelry was unaccounted for. The clothing was no longer available. So, we’re beginning to get concerned cuz the skeletal remains aren’t working, and we’re running out of things to look for. And Tom and I had learned that uh another private laboratory had evidence from an autopsy that had been sent to them in the past.”
“And they said that they have some slides that were recovered during the autopsy. There was a small amounts of uh tissue uh that was preserved from her body. And so, at last, we’ve identified perhaps the worst evidence to work from cuz it is chemically preserved material of a very small amount on a glass surface, but it’s better than nothing.”
“They told me that they weren’t sure that they were going to get anything from it, but they were going to try. And it was absolutely worth it. So, we went ahead and we got those slides sent down to Autumn. The problem with formaldehyde-fixed paraffin-embedded slides is that fixative actually breaks down the DNA as it fixes it onto the slide.”
“It’s like glue, right? Sticking it all on however it goes. And then they dehydrate that slide. It’s like, you know, when you have a the butterfly collection and you spray the butterfly with a chemical um and it just stays perfectly preserved. But if you were to touch it, it would just burst into dust. All of that is terrible for wanting to get a piece of DNA that you can actually sequence every single letter for.”
“So, what we had to do is figure out how do you rehydrate and collect that DNA back into a test tube, and then how do you read all of those tiny fragments of DNA and create a DNA sequence that now will give you someone’s identity? That’s tough.”
“And so, we started to work the case. The first thing that happens is our scientists at the front end of the forensic grade genome sequencing process look at the properties of that DNA.”
“Well, the formaldehyde had cross-linked all the DNA on that slide. This is called uh DNA protein cross-links. Lots of the intracellular parts are like bonded together. There are giant proteins that are like fused to the DNA, and you can’t really pull them off. And so, we were worried that if we were to break that up and we were to consume it, we would not be able to read the sequence of the DNA very well.”
“If you build a DNA profile, but the DNA profile is low quality or doesn’t have the right letters, you won’t find any relatives. So, it’s very important that we’re not just building a profile, but that we’re building a usable profile that can actually reveal the relationships we would need to positively identify the person.”
“When you test DNA, you’re consuming it in the process, and so you don’t have infinite tries to test it. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not really confident that you’re going to be able to help, it is better not to touch it because future methods may be able to then bring a value. We’d rather wait than test DNA and destroy it.”
“And that’s what we did in this case. We actually took a pause. That’s tough because we’re often going back to law enforcement and saying, ‘This process is not ready.’ Um I do remember that phone call between David and Tom Bean. He was devastated. And David said, ‘Look, we’re not giving up.’ They told me that the way that you have to extract the DNA, it it could ruin the sample.”
“David told me there was there was a lot of research he was going to have to do. He said he was pretty much going to have to start a whole new testing process to verify that it would work. But at that time, time didn’t matter. The whole goal is to identify who she was because there is still a family out there that’s missing her. So, we had to solve two problems, which was how are we going to get that DNA read? That’s a laboratory challenge.”
“And then a computational challenge so that when we get the DNA letters out, how can we distinguish signal from noise? How do we know which DNA letters are actually going to be useful in identifying her? And we took the time to figure out how this would work in a hypothetical mock uh casework situation. The research side of our lab continued to do mock casework by fixing materials with formaldehyde and seeing if we could then figure out how to break the cross-links and do it.”
“And it took maybe a little bit more than a year for us to be able to develop a protocol that actually worked for the first time. When we felt comfortable, we called up uh Detective Bean and said, ‘I think we’re ready.’ And we felt reasonably confident, so we get in contact with Detective Bean. When talking to David about this new process that he had discovered during his research and his his trials, he he did warn us that if it doesn’t work, that the samples could be gone.”
“I told him that there is an inherent risk. This is just a really terrible piece of evidence, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work, but I think we’ve done everything we can do to say we made a responsible and educated effort to to attempt it. This was our chance, so we we gave it a shot. So, the DNA sample goes from that feasibility analysis room over to the genomic side of the lab.”
“And the genomic side of the lab is now going to prepare it and put it on the sequencer so that you can, using forensic grade genome sequencing, read the letters on this DNA sequence left at the crime scene. So, we do the run on the DNA sequencer, and we get the data, and it looked messy. There was pieces of the genome that were missing entirely, but but there was a lot of data there.”
“And so, I was I was I was excited and um and just seeing it come off the machine and knowing that the run was successful and that it wasn’t all all garbage and noise. It was uh it was it was such a relief. So, the team got together, and we sat down and figured out how we’re going to build a DNA profile that has the highest chance of returning the most real genetic relationships.”
“And so, the profile we’re building from this 40-year-old autopsy slide has to eventually look close enough to where it can be compared apples to apples with a with a fresh DNA profile. And and that process was very challenging. So, we do the best we can do to clean up the DNA. There’s a a little bit of an adjustment to the lab protocol that we used to make it more workable.”
“Once we have the DNA profile, we are now ready to find those relatives and start to look and see if we can’t trace back together a next of kin. So, we created this robust profile. It uploads to these genealogical databases that are consented for law enforcement use. And we have a program that very quickly figures out who the most recent common ancestors are of all the matches, and it starts to tell you who they think the most likely candidates are for the DNA that are there.”
“So, it gives you hypothesis. And our team actually goes in and looks at every one of those hypotheses and decides which one makes the most sense to them. In this case, very quickly we were able to tell Tom Bean we think that she is from this area, and we think this is her family, and we think it’s one of these sisters.”
“I was very excited. I called Detective Tom Bean. I actually got a call from David. And I was thinking, I hope I didn’t take the chance with with the wrong company. I I I hope that they didn’t destroy all of our evidence in trying to test it. But David was ecstatic. I could tell that he knew something, and he he finally came out with some names.”
“We were able to tell him that the family that this victim belonged to is a Minnesota family, and that we don’t think that this victim was from Texas, which was the original theory. And he told me that it was now up to us to figure out who was missing from the family. Immediately after that, we started searching every database that we could find, and we we found an obituary for the person that that David had provided us the name of, and we started looking at family members.”
“And we were able to find some sort of documentation on every family member on that obituary except for one person. And at that point, we were pretty positive that that one person listed on the obituary was going to be our victim. After we found the obituary and we found the the one name that we couldn’t find any information on, I started calling all the other names.”
“I think I was on call number four when a lady answered the phone, and I introduced myself, and I asked her, ‘Please don’t hang up on me. I’m an investigator with the Walker County Sheriff’s Department, and I was working a cold case from 1980.’ And the next words out of her her mouth, I’ll never forget. She She said, ‘You’re calling about my sister.'”
“And at that point, I knew we had the right the right people. The next step was I needed to confirm this. Ultimately, a couple family members stepped forward. They went to their local police departments. They provided DNA samples, and the local departments sent them to us so that we could have them tested and confirmed that this is who it was.”
“Ultimately, after all of the testing, after everything was said and done, we identified Sherry Jarvis as Walker County Jane Doe. There are some things that you look forward to for so long, and then it finally happens. I don’t even think I can describe it. I just got chills thinking about it. It’s it was finally there. We had a name.”
“It felt very rewarding to be able to finally know that this was this was the woman um that for 40 years no one knew the identity to. She was a 14-year-old girl. She uh had a little bit of trouble with a truancy. At that time, truancy was illegal in Minnesota. At some point, according to the family, the state actually put Sherry into a home, and they were planning on taking custody of Sherry.”
“And and and she basically ran away, and clearly had made her way down to Texas later that year in 1980, and then unfortunately was murdered on Halloween. Speaking with the family to the point of we could actually release this information took months. We had to do further testing with Authiram and Sherry’s brother to get a physical confirmation that it was her.”
“The press conference for Sherry Ann Jarvis’s name to be publicly told was actually scheduled for the 41st year anniversary of the day she was found. It was great to release the information and let everybody know that that she had a name. Sherry’s family came, and and we were honored to be included to be up there with Ranger Doolittle and Detective Bean while the sheriff announced the identity. That was an emotional day.”
“It was an emotional day for the internet.”
“It was an emotional day for everybody because this really was a hopeless case. And when that name came in on my cell phone, you know, I was stunned. The fact that you can call her by a name, Sherry Jarvis, rather than just Walker County Jane Doe, was a very emotional moment for me.”
“To have a name for a victim, that’s a huge victory for the case. Not just to bring closure to the family, but to also have the opportunity to generate new leads. I spoke with the sisters. I spoke with brother. In speaking with them, they confirmed to me that Sherry had sent a letter to her mom saying that she was okay and that she was going to return.”
“That letter actually traced back to Colorado, which Colorado was in our very initial report with the found property bag a few days after Sherry’s body was found. 40 years later, we found out that she had been in Colorado, where we initially knew that there was information from. So, we’re following up on those leads. We’re working on finding the person that did this, trying to determine if they’ve done it to anybody else.”
“Are they still out there? Is there still a continuing danger to society? This is still an unsolved murder case. The page still exists. The page is still out there. So, I leave the page open and let people comment on it. Once you know who your victim is, once you can piece together the end of their life, law enforcement’s really good at figuring out who did it.”
“And for the first time, we’re entering an era we have really limitless capabilities in being able to scale, you know, advanced DNA analysis and its interpretation. It it brings an exciting future where, you know, unsolved crime is is really a choice. To my knowledge, I don’t believe that anybody other than Authiram has been able to get DNA the way that they extracted DNA in this case.”
“I don’t believe in closure when something terrible happens to you. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m never going to use that word. I don’t believe that we gave anyone closure for anything. This is awful. What I do believe is we give people the truth. And allowing people to have the truth allows them to turn the page to the next chapter.”
“I promised the family members we have what’s called a Tree of Angels. They hang ornaments on a Christmas tree every year for people who were killed in violent crimes. And I hang Sherry’s ornament every year, and I I’ve told the sister that I will continue to do that until the family can come down here and do it themselves.”
“And even after that, I will still hang that as long as I’m allowed to. Sherry Ann Jarvis was a beautiful girl. Her picture is forever etched in my mind, and some horrible human being took that away from her in the most horrific way. And now, there’s real hope. I hope that one day I will be able to contact everybody in that family and let them know that the person who is responsible for Sherry’s death has had their judgment day.”
