Murder victim found dead in 1979 near Las Vegas Strip, identified as missing 19-year-old from Cincinnati
LAS VEGAS– A body discovered in 1979 in an open field near what is now a busy intersection of the Las Vegas Strip has been identified as an Ohio teenager who left home that year in search of her biological father, authorities announced Tuesday known.
According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, she was 19-year-old Gwenn Marie Story. For 44 years, she was known only as “Sahara Sue Doe,” nicknamed because of the intersection where she was found.
Police said Tuesday that progress in DNA testing led to the identification last month.
According to police, a man discovered the body on the night of August 14, 1979, while walking through a vacant lot on the northern edge of the Las Vegas Strip. She had wavy hair and her fingernails and toenails were painted red.
Today, the nearby Strat Hotel towers over that intersection, where the Sahara hotel-casino is located.
Authorities believe the victim had died within 24 hours before the discovery, according to a record of the case in a database maintained by the National Center for Missing. & Exploited children.
An autopsy showed she was the victim of a homicide, police said, but investigators were not able to identify her until they worked with a private DNA testing lab last September.
Othram, which specializes in forensic genealogical analyses, said in a statement on Tuesday that its scientists have built “an extensive DNA profile for the woman,” alerting authorities to possible relatives who provided DNA samples that confirmed that ” Sahara Sue Doe' was the missing Ohio teen.
Story's relatives told police she left home in Cincinnati in the summer of 1979 to look for her father in California. They said she was traveling with two male friends. Story's family never heard from her again.
When the two friends returned to the Cincinnati area in August of that year — the same month Story was found dead — they told the teen's family that they had left her behind in Las Vegas, police said.
The police department says it is now turning its attention to those two friends and how Story ended up dead near the Las Vegas Strip.
The breakthrough in Story's case comes amid advances in genetic testing that have led to identifications of missing persons and cold case victims in recent years.
Earlier this year, Othram also helped Nevada State Police identify a victim who remained nameless for 45 years after her badly decayed remains were found in a clothing bag in a remote area of northern Nevada in October 1978, less than a year before Story was found dead. in Las Vegas. The victim in that case, Florence Charleston, also went missing in Ohio.