SHELBY - Officials are planning to exhume the body of an unknown woman buried in Preble County decades ago in hopes it will solve the case of a Shelby-area woman who went missing 75 years ago.

Shelby police opened the cold case in October regarding Mary Jane Croft Vangilder, who disappeared in 1945.

Shelby police and the Preble County Coroner's Office are hoping to exhume the body of a "Jane Doe" in Eaton, Ohio, within the next few months to have DNA extracted and analyzed by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Shelby Police Chief Lance Combs said this week on the department's Facebook page that Officer Adam Turner has done a magnificent job pursuing information regarding the disappearance of Vangilder.

More:Police reopen case into woman missing from Shelby since 1945

"And although frankly the chances are remote that this is our missing person, our sincerest hope is that if nothing else, it might provide closure for this or another family with a missing loved one," Combs said.

The Shelby area missing woman was born Mary Jane Croft on Nov. 19, 1911, in Fairmont, W.Va., then became Mary Jane Vangilder on Jan. 29, 1929, when she married her husband, James. The couple had five children, but it appears James' abusive behavior forced her to move to Ohio sometime in 1943, according to investigators.

Mary Jane got a job as a forklift operator at the Wilkins Air Force Depot in Shelby and lived in Plymouth. Her granddaughter Mindy Wilson said her grandmother did not own a vehicle, so she got rides to and from Shelby from helpful coworkers.

Despite the separation after moving to Ohio, Mary Jane maintained contact with her children. She would mail war bonds to her children, as well sending as letters and clothes, her granddaughter said.

But in 1945, things changed again. Mary Jane sent a letter to West Virginia, asking her children to send the war bonds back to her home in Plymouth. They complied, but a few weeks later, she appeared to have sent them her final war bond, with no explanation, the News Journal has previously reported.

That was the last time the family heard from Mary Jane.

Turner discovered in his research that Mary Jane filed for divorce on Feb. 12, 1945, in Huron County. It appears she quit her job about a month later. The divorce was granted in November of that year.

Turner suspects that since she was a woman from another state who had no family in the area, Mary Jane's disappearance at first went unnoticed.

On Wednesday, Turner, who obtained a master's degree in criminal justice and forensic science from St. Leo University in St. Leo, Florida, said if the "Jane Doe" body in the pauper's grave in Mound Hill-Union Cemetery in Eaton is not Vangilder, he will not give up his search for her.

"We will find out who it is when DNA is taken from this Jane Doe...," he said. "When you look at the technology that's happened in just the last couple of years with private DNA databases like Ancestry and MyHeritage, they are solving cases based off information in those databases. When the DNA is taken from this Jane Doe, it will be entered into the national system through the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. They will handle that. And if there is a 'hit' on the DNA from Mary Jane's daughter and her grandchildren, we will know there is a possibility. The DNA will have to be compared side by side," Turner said.

"If it's not Mary Jane, there's going to be another 'hit.' If there's not a hit there, I think we can find out who that Jane Doe is with the help of those databases," Turner said.

Turner said he was led to Preble County after he was looking through the website, "Find A Grave."

He searched "Jane Does" and changed the parameters to search for "unknown remains found after 1945," then printed off a list and went through each name one by one. Turner located a newspaper article detailing an unidentified body found in Preble County in 1968.

He reached out to the National Missing and Unidentified System (NAMUS) which is a federal data base that works to match unidentified remains and missing persons.

"That is an open website. Anybody can do it — coroner's offices, law enforcement, family and friends can enter their loved one into this data base. I reached out to them and said, 'Hey put me in contact with somebody from Preble County and see if I can get some more information,'" he said.

Turner said he then contacted Dave Lindloff, coroner's investigator of Preble County, west of Dayton, inquiring about the 1968 "Jane Doe".

"He (Lindloff) was able to find quite a bit of records about her case. The remains of 'Jane Doe' were found by a group of children on May 25, 1968," Turner said. The 'Jane Doe' was buried Sept. 4, 1968, according to investigative reports.

"The physical characteristics, the weight and height, and her age, have similarities," he said of the badly decomposed body of the Caucasian woman found in a drainage ditch.

The "Jane Doe" was 5-foot, two inches and weighed an estimated 132 pound. The remains were deemed to be quite old by the then Montgomery County Coroner's Office in Dayton, possibly up to 10 or 15 years, according to newspaper reports.

Vangilder weighed 155 to 170 pounds as last reported by her family and was estimated to be 5 foot to 5-foot, 7 inches tall, according to Turner's search.

"Jane Doe, when she died was 40 to 50 years old. Mary Jane was 35 years old when she disappeared in 1945," Turner said.

The Shelby officer said Lindloff has been helping him on this cold case.

"The stars are aligning on this case because of Lindloff," Turner said. The City of Eaton has waived the cost of the exhumation. The only cost the city will incur is to buy a new casket for 'Jane Doe,' because she is more than likely buried in a cardboard box which obviously would be disintegrated," he added.

BCI will perform the DNA tests for free, Turner said, crediting Lindloff's footwork for assisting him with contacting the necessary agencies and getting a search warrant.

Turner said it may take BCI a couple months to determine who the "Jane Doe" in Eaton is, due to their busy caseload.

The son of a Shelby funeral director, Turner said he doesn't give up easily. "I'm just now starting to go to outlying states. There are 50 states with hundreds of thousands of these unknown cases....," he said.

"I'm just getting started," Turner said, showing a 4-inch notebook of documents he collected. "This is book No. 2."

Turner said he is getting hopful that Vangilder's daughter and granddaughter, who have worked tirelessly on their own to try and find out what happened to their mother and grandmother, will find closure.

Anyone with information about Vangilder is asked to contact Turner at 419-347-2242.

lwhitmir@nncogannett.com

419-521-7223

Twitter: @LWhitmir