Jane and John Doe still `someone's children'

January 17, 2007
ACO News
BY KERI SPRENGER

Jane and John Doe are common placeholder names used on television shows and in court cases. But to investigators with the Orange County Sheriff's Office and volunteers of the Doe Network, those names mean a whole lot more — they are someone's kids.

Investigators with the Orange County Sheriff's Office, with the assistance of the Doe Network, have been trying to crack two different cold cases in the county.

The first case involves Jane Doe, an unidentified white female who was found in Orange County on Sept. 19, 1990. According to police documents, she is estimated to have been between 15 and 25 years of age at the time of her death and was found by a clean-up crew along Interstate 40 approximately 15 feet down an embankment east of the New Hope Church Road exit.

Investigators followed nearly 300 leads on the case but have still come up empty.

Since 1998, Orange County Sheriff's investigators have been searching for the family of a child whose remains were found near I-85.

The boy, John Doe, is thought to be between 8- and 10-years old at the time of his death. It is thought that he could be either white or Hispanic in ethnicity. He was found close to the I-85/I-40 split near Mebane on Sept. 25, 1998.

According to police documents, the body was found while a road crew was mowing under some billboard signs. The body showed no signs of foul play or trauma, and there was no blood on the child's clothing. He was carrying $50 in his pockets, but little else is known about him. It is speculated that he may have been part of a migrant worker group that visits the area each fall.

Investigators sought time on the America's Most Wanted network television show back in 2001 to profile the cases, but were bumped after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Though they haven't given up hope of finding out who the two people were, investigators have had no fresh leads on the cases in years.

Officials of the Doe Network are working to change that.

Daphne Owings, the area director in North Carolina for the volunteer Doe Network, works to profile long-term missing persons.

She has been collaborating with Inv. Tim Horne of the Orange County Sheriff's Office to help try to crack these two cold cases.

"I try to bring them home," she said. "The bottom line is, these kids belong to somebody."

She said the Doe Network is trying to get DNA profiling done and possibly isotope testing on the young boy to try to determine where he came from. That information will then be fed into a national database with DNA information and matched with any hits. Some cases have been solved like this, she said.

"It's just a matter of the dots being connected," she said.

Anyone with information about the cases is asked to call 644-3050 and speak to Horne. All callers will remain anonymous.

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