Cold Cases of the Golden Coast

Yesterday, July 28, 2026, it was announced that  Arvin Jane Doe 1978  has been identified as Michelle Louise Collier, a 15-year-old girl from Fresno who had been missing since February 1978. Her remains were found three months after her disappearance, and she was unidentified for nearly 48 years.  This is the fourth formerly-unidentified decedent featured on this blog to be identified since I first posted about them. Michelle Collier. Photo released by KCSO. Accessed from Bakersfield Now . With Kern County law enforcement (LE) unable to make an identification, the girl found in the grape vineyard on June 21, 1978 was buried in Arvin Cemetery in November 1978 as a Jane Doe. The investigation was reopened and Arvin Jane Doe's remains were exhumed in August 2007, and samples of her DNA were obtained at that time. Those bone samples were sent to the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ) in April 2008; the CA DOJ then submitted them to Othram by March 2025. Using Forensic ...

Yesterday, April 3, 2026, it was announced that Palm Desert Jane Doe 1980 has been identified as Victoria Jean Hargrove. This development makes me so happy, as Jane Doe's case was one that stuck out quite prominently in my mind. This is also the third formerly unidentified decedent to be identified since I first posted about them, and all three identifications were announced just this past month!  Victoria Hargrove was 29 years old when she went missing from her home in Opelika, Alabama, on January 28, 1980. She was reported missing to LE soon after she was last seen. Her remains were found less than three weeks later in Palm Desert, Riverside County, CA on February 16, 1980. The distance between her last known location and the site where she was found is more than 2,100 miles. Victoria's identity was confirmed through a DNA match in March 2026. She is believed to be the victim of a homicide. Why/how she ended up in California, as well as the identity of her killer, are sti...

The NamUs profile of Josephine County John Doe 1978 was removed on March 6, 2026, indicating that he had been identified. On  March 24, 2026 it was announced that  John Doe has officially been identified as Mark Smith , who had been missing since 1974. Close-up of Mark Smith from a photo taken at his sister's wedding in September 1973. Image from the Unidentified wiki and other sources. Mark was born on October 4, 1954. Sometime before his birthday in 1974, when he was 19 years old, Mark left his home in the city of Billings, Yellowstone County, Montana, having told his family that he intended to travel. He was never seen or heard from again.  It seems that he had never been reported missing. DNA research began on Josephine County John Doe 1978 in 2020, with investigative genetic genealogy being used starting in 2023. In 2025, researchers were able to identify a specific family line in John Doe's tree, for which one of the siblings, "appeared to have disappeared from rec...

I am happy to say that Emigrant Gap Jane Doe 1977 has been officially identified through DNA as Melinda "Pip" Beardsley. I have been in contact with a member of Pip's family who had reached out to me, her niece Janet, throughout part of this process, but had been waiting for confirmation from law enforcement before following up on this here on my blog.  Melinda was born in Michigan in 1946, the youngest of six siblings. She was a 31-year-old mother of two at the time of her death; one of her children was adopted out of the family at birth, while the other was in the care of relatives when Melinda disappeared. Melinda was reported missing to the Reno Police Department in November 2025 by two of her nieces and a half-nephew after the latest confirmation of life that they could find was notification of a DUI charge in Reno in December 1976. She was last known to be living in Carson City, NV.  A fingerprint match was made between Melinda and the then-unidentified decedent so...

UPDATE: Josephine County John Doe's NamUs page was removed on March 6, 2026, indicating that he has been identified. For more details, a full update can be found here .   On Tuesday, May 9, 1978, a crew working for a logging company was in the area of Holcomb Peak in Josephine County, OR, near the town of Williams in the same county. There they discovered partial human remains, including a skull and other bones in a wooded area. One or more limbs, as well as one or more hands, were not recovered. The remains were not recognizable, as they were partial skeletal parts only. Because of this, many things such as hair color, height, weight, and eye color could not be determined. Officers from the Josephine County Sheriff's Office, as well as search and rescue teams, scoured the area around the discovery site, "for clues to the identity of the victim and the cause of death." Despite this, no clues were found, and the cause of death is still undetermined.  According to c...

UPDATE: It was announced on March 18, 2026 that "Emigrant Gap Jane Doe" has been identified as Melinda "Pip" Beardsley. For more details, a full update can be found here .   At about 4pm on Saturday, December 17, 1977, a married couple walking their dog nearly four miles west of the Highway 20-Interstate 80 interchange, east of Emigrant Gap in the eastern part of Placer County, CA, discovered the recognizable remains of an unidentified woman in a snowbank. They spotted the body about 30 ft off a wide section of Highway 20 and/or approximately 30 ft from a roadway turnout, in Bear Valley near the Nevada County border. Finger marks on the victim's neck indicated that she had been manually strangled. She had apparently also sustained a blow or blows to the head, though the official cause of death was strangulation. Jane Doe was nude when found. She had been dead for two to six days at time of discovery, putting her date of death somewhere between Sunday, December ...