A hunter found her body in October 1970, in the woods off Route 94 in Chester.

She’d been there a few months. Police say her hands were tied behind her, and the killer shot her in the chest, shoulder and spine. She fell backwards. Her body shielded her fingers from the ravages of weather and animals.

That happenstance may lead to her identity, nearly 47 years later.

These days, her case is in the hands of State Police Senior Investigator Yan Salomon.

Pushpins dot a map on the wall of his office at the Monroe state police barracks, marking unsolved homicides, many of them body dumps, in Orange County and the surrounding area. Some, police believe, are the work of organized crime and serial killers. Some of them are decades old, like the Chester Jane Doe.

“I don’t know if it’s solvable,” Salomon said. “Someone would have to come forward and help us solve it, give us some details.”

First break in case



In 1970, there was little hope of learning who she was, and less of learning who killed her.

No one had reported the slim, 5-foot-2 woman missing. Her hands, though shielded, were still partly decomposed.

Rockland County’s medical examiner at the time, Frederick Zugibe, used a new technique he’d developed to produce usable prints. Finding a match took decades and new technology.

By 1989, New York began operating a computerized fingerprint database, and police ran Jane Doe’s fingerprints over the ensuing years, without success. The state upgraded and expanded its capabilities over time, and by 2014 had more than 8.4 million print records.

In late 2015, as the Division of Criminal Justice Services in Albany re-entered state police cold-case prints into the system, a hit popped for Jane Doe. Her prints matched a set recently entered by the NYPD from a 1969 arrest under the name Shirlene Dixon.

In January 2016, after an examiner verified the match, state police got the information. The NYPD had a provided booking photo, but little else.

“We started trying to find out who Shirlene Dixon was,” Salomon said.

SUNY New Paltz's role



In March 2016, police exhumed Jane Doe’s body and sent a bone sample to the University of North Texas for analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, hoping to eventually compare the profile to a living relative to confirm an identity.

While they waited, investigators hit on the idea of having a 3D model made of the skull so a forensic sketch artist could put a face to Jane Doe. Last summer, they took her skull to SUNY New Paltz and the college’s new Hudson Valley Advanced Manufacturing Center.

Director Daniel Freedman, who’s also dean of the School of Science and Engineering, said they pulled in Anthropology Department head Ken Nystrom for help, and the center used cutting-edge tech and 3D printers to create an accurate model of the skull.

“We spent the good part of a day scanning it,” Freedman said. Then students Kat Wilson and Aaron Nelson cleaned up the data for the printer program, which took about a week, so everything would render properly.

“I think we were able to get a pretty good match,” Freedman said.

Before police could get the model to an artist, old-fashioned sleuthing intervened.

The NYPD found paper records in the 32nd Precinct basement showing the woman had been arrested under the names Fannie and Fanny Hill, Acey Moore and Evelyn Moore. Police tracked down a man who'd been arrested with “Shirlene” in the 1969 case.

Salomon said the man told police the woman he knew as Acey Moore was in the heroin trade. He didn't know who she worked for, but said she made trips to the projects in Philadelphia, and always had a limousine for those trips. He last saw Acey in the summer of 1970, at the St. Nicholas Projects on 8th Avenue in New York. He told police Acey was accosted there by two large African Americans, one who appeared male, the other a butch female. He never saw Acey again.

Now police knew where and when she’d been abducted, and they were pretty sure she was Evelyn Moore, born in 1939.

Evelyn Moore’s rap sheet, back to 1960, gave her birthplace variously as New York City, Maryland and South Carolina. But police couldn’t find birth records.

Salomon said it was a New York Times reporter using an online ancestry database who found a Census record for “Elvin Moore,” with relatives Jacob and Fannie Moore.

Salomon said Jacob Moore is alive, in his 80s, living in Philadelphia with a caretaker. He has some memories of his long-lost sister Evelyn. His DNA will tell police if they’ve finally, definitively identified their Jane Doe.

If that pans out, Salomon said, “now the question is, who killed her?”

Police think she — like some other body-dump cases they’ve had — might have been connected to notorious drug kingpin Nicky Barnes.

They’ve thought about reaching out to Barnes through his Witness Protection Program handlers. “Maybe he would be a gentleman,” Salomon said.

hyakin@th-record.com