Volunteer sleuth is on mission to ID mystery torso

By Susan Weich
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/05/2008
Post-Dispatch St. Charles columnist Susan Weich
(Post-Dispatch)

If investigators solve the homicide of a woman whose torso was dumped in Wright City, they might have a 42-year-old woman from the Kansas City area to thank.

Traycie Sherwood is with the Doe Network, an all-volunteer group started in 1999 that catalogs missing persons cases across the U.S. and tries to match them with unidentified remains.

Sherwood joined the group in 2002 after a friend of hers, a retired homicide detective from Alabama, told her about the network's website. She logged on and was horrified by the number of missing people.

Sherwood said that because of her background, she has a place in her heart for those searching for loved ones. She was adopted as a baby, and when she was 30, she found her birth mom. "That kind of got me hooked on the whole searching thing," she said. Sherwood is now the Missouri and Oklahoma director for the Doe Network. She said she spends much of her free time updating the website, www.doenetwork.org.

When she or any of the other 200-plus active volunteers get a lead, she contacts law enforcement.

Sherwood said she first became interested in the Wright City case because she was familiar with the Interstate 70 rest stop where the torso was found June 28, 2004.

"I had actually stopped there a few times," she said. "I travel 70 quite a bit because I've got a lot of friends who live in St. Louis."

She became passionate about the crime because of its brutality.

"I couldn't get over the way she was left there; it just kind of stuck in my mind," Sherwood said.

Over the next several months, Sherwood and others came up with about 40 potential matches for the woman's identity.

She e-mailed several police agencies with the information and waited for a response. When she didn't hear back right away, she didn't give up. She kept sending out more information.

After Sherwood read an article I wrote last summer, when I was covering public safety issues, she called me. I put her in touch with Warren County Coroner Roger Mauzy, who had just held a memorial service for the woman.

A few weeks later, Sherwood took a day off from her job with the state and drove to Warrenton to look at Mauzy's file on the murder. The two went over his report, photographs, newspaper articles and a profiler's description of the would-be suspect.

The headless, limbless woman had no distinguishing marks except two scars on her abdomen ­ one from a Caesarean section and the other from an appendectomy.

She was clad only in an oversized black bra, size 36B.

The woman had been found in a remote area of the rest stop, along a circle drive that is primarily used as a picnic area. Her torso was 10 feet from the pavement, down a slight hill. Police think she was killed somewhere else and thrown out of a car or other small vehicle.

Because decomposition was minimal, she probably had been killed within hours of the discovery of her remains.

"Traycie was appalled by what I showed her," said Mauzy. "I think it made her almost as anxious to identify this girl as I am."

When Sherwood went home, she kept in contact with Mauzy and sent tips via e-mail to him. Mauzy said it comforted him to know that someone was working on the case every day.

Sherwood also sent those tips to detectives with the Major Case Squad, and last week, the group reconvened, in part to look at the leads she had sent. They brought in new detectives for a fresh perspective on the case. Unfortunately, the tips didn't lead to the woman's identity.

When Sherwood heard the news, she was frustrated but not defeated.

"I thought that based on what I knew, I had given them some really good possibilities," she said.

She said she won't give up until she finds the woman's identity.

"When they find something, you'll probably hear me screaming from here," Sherwood said.

Somewhere, someone is missing the woman who was dumped in Warren County. Sherwood just doesn't know who yet.