‘Marin County Jane Doe,’ whose body was found in Tiburon in 1966, has been identified
A body found on a cliff near Paradise Beach Park in 1966 has been identified using stored DNA samples and advanced testing by a Texas laboratory.
The slight, red-haired woman, who was about 5-foot-2 and 105 pounds in her late 40s, was wearing a red-cotton dress, an off-white trench coat, white loafers and a Westclox wristwatch with a yellow band on her left wrist. She wore no rings and had a pack of cigarettes and a scarf in her pocket.
For the past six decades, she has been known only as National Missing and Unidentified Persons System No. UP12018, or “Marin County Jane Doe.” Now she’s known to be Dorothy Jean Vaillancourt, nee Williams, who was originally from Tasmania.
The cause of death could not be determined, and authorities at the time said there were no signs of foul play. She was buried at Mount Tamalpais Cemetery and Mortuary in San Rafael before her identification, according to a March 19 press release from Othram, which specializes in forensic geneology to solve cold cases, via its DNASolves platform, a crowdfunded DNA database that works with law-enforcement agencies.
Vaillancourt’s body was originally spotted on Dec. 18, 1966, about 25 feet below the 3400-3500 block of Paradise Drive by 15-year-old Michael Hunter O’Hara of Paradise Cay, who was shooting his BB gun in the area, according to a Daily Independent Journal of San Rafael article the following day. The Ark could not locate O’Hara by press time.
Authorities at the time believed she had been in the underbrush for at least eight to 10 weeks.
No other agencies responded to a statewide bulletin for a matching description of a missing person. Authorities traced a report that a woman fitting the description had recently stayed at the Tiburon Lodge hotel and had been a patient at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, though by January 1967 the FBI had ruled that out.
In the meantime, Tiburon Peninsula Fire District firefighter Thomas Murphy came forward to say he saw her at the Trestle Glen fire station, at the corner of Paradise Drive, about three or four months before her body was found, according to news articles. Murphy said she was walking by when she approached him and said she had no money for a taxi. She asked if she could spend the night at the fire station.
“Rebuffed, she asked to borrow his automobile. Rebuffed again, she walked off toward Tiburon Boulevard,” news reports said.
DNASolves announced that in 2022, the Sheriff’s Office, working with the California Department of Justice, submitted evidence to Othram, which developed “an ultra-sensitive DNA profile using forensic-grade genome sequencing” that led to relatives of the woman.
“The coroner has told me today that the woman in the ditch is in fact my mother, Dorothy Jean Williams, identified by a DNA match. I am in shock right now,” a user on cold-case site Websleuths posted Dec. 19.
One of the woman's identifying characteristics was a stainless or silver medical implant in her eye socket, which drew online speculation of abuse, but the Websleuths user said their mother had been in a car accident and had surgery.
The user could not be reached by The Ark’s press deadline.