Remains of murdered Jane Doe #40 found in San Francisco 43 years ago identified as missing 14-year-old girl
SAN FRANCISCO: The remains of a murdered teenager, who had been found strangled and buried in a shallow grave around 43 years ago, has been identified as a missing teenager.
Her body was found by a man who was walking his dog in Lake Merced, San Francisco, in 1976. At the time, the body was only identified as a young Asian girl who was wearing a gold chain and she had an owl pendant necklace in her pocket. The girl has now been identified as Judy Gifford.
Gifford's half-brother William Shin had reported her missing to authorities in 2017. She shared that he recalled having a sister while growing up and that she had not been seen since she was 14. Gifford had moved to San Francisco to live with her father, his wife, and two half-siblings in 1976.
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Shin was only six years old at the time Gifford went missing. Shin was told that Gifford had moved to New Jersey to live with her aunt who had been taking care of her. However, when he was 18, he visited the aunt to find that she had never returned.
The person who had discovered Gifford's body, Donald McIsaac, had noticed a human hand emerging from the sand behind a pumping station when he had been digging for turtle eggs. The body was identified as Jane Doe number 40 and investigators had described her as a petite, brown-haired girl, aged between 14 and 20.
An investigation that was conducted earlier this year after the cops had hunted through unsolved missing person cases and found the report filed in 2017. This led them to notice that Gifford had disappeared in San Francisco around the same time that Jane Doe #40 had been killed.
The San Francisco Police are now attempting to figure out who killed her and why.