KNOWLTON — Investigators were confident, at first, that she would be identified. Somebody would have to know something about a dead teenager with the distinctive tattoo dumped near a rural New Jersey highway.

But 23 years later, the “Tiger Lady” remains unidentified – and the New Jersey State Police are releasing new sketches in the hope of bringing attention to the unsolved cold case.

A sketch artist has drawn new renderings of what the young woman must have looked like in 1991, at the time she was apparently killed and abandoned.

“We can reach a half million people or more through social media. Please like and share this post. Someone knows something,” troopers said over a Facebook post.

The woman’s body was found partially decomposed by the side of I-80 in Knowlton Township on Oct. 26, 1991. She was white, age 17 to 19, and she was petite – somewhere between 4 feet 10 inches to 5 feet 1 inch, and weighing 95 to 110 pounds. She was stripped of clothes, jewelry and earrings from several piercings in her ears. But the most unique feature remained a tantalizing clue to investigators – a crouching Bengal tiger crawling down the calf of her left leg, authorities said.

Authorities dubbed her “the Tiger Lady,” and confidently followed leads, put out lines to find out who she was, using the tattoo as an important identifier. But the days, weeks, and then months dragged on, and nothing came back.

Investigators found that the "Tiger Lady's" namesake tattoo was not rare - and was probably done by someone who was not a professional artist, they said early in the investigation.

“For the first few months, we all were feeling good that there was such an identifier as the tattoo, and we thought it would be only a matter of days until we identified this person,'' Detective Richard Clayton, of the Warren County Prosecutor's Office, told The Star-Ledger at the time.

“We’re getting to a point now where we’re not getting a break,” said State Police Detective Christopher Andreychak, back in 1992.

The body was decomposed to the point that police were unsure of how the woman died, they said at the time.

The tattoo itself was a focus of the investigation – but didn’t lead anywhere. The detectives on the case found it wasn’t rare, and wasn’t of high quality, probably having been done by a nonprofessional, someone who was just learning the business, they told The Star-Ledger at the beginning of the investigation.

Another sketch shows the "Tiger Lady" with different hair color.

In 1993, authorities told the newspaper they suspected that the “Tiger Lady” might be connected to the infamous serial killer Joel Rifkin, who was eventually convicted of killing nine women in the New York area – but who is suspected in 17 or more murders.

The "Tiger Lady" is not alone in the Warren County area. In 1982, a girl was found bludgeoned to death in a Blairstown cemetery, and she came to be known as "Princess Doe." In 1997, and less than a mile from where the Tiger Lady was found, the headless torso of a woman was found floating in Columbia Lake. However, that victim was later identified as Rosa Delgado, a Hartford, Conn. woman who was last seen heading to a store with her 4-year-old daughter to buy diapers. Her murder was never solved – and the girl was never found.



Seth Augenstein can be reached at saugenstein@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SethAugenstein. Find NJ.com on Facebook.