Cold Cases of the Golden Coast

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...

UPDATE: On April 3, 2026  it was announced that Jane Doe has been identified as Victoria Jean Hargrove.  For more details, a full update can be found here . This post was originally published on Aug. 18, 2025. Aside from this update (in bold), I have not edited the contents in any way since Feb. 16, 2026. This post will remain standing as it is, containing all information about the victim prior to her identification that was known as of Feb. 16, 2026. Furthermore, due  to her identification, some of the links may no longer work or have since been edited to reflect the recent developments. At about 11:00am on Monday, February 18, 1980, three tourists from Canada stopped at a mountain viewpoint on Highway 74 about four to six miles south of Palm Desert, Riverside County, CA. As the tourists peered over a guardrail, they spotted a body either at the bottom of a 20 to 30 ft gully, or about 35 ft down a ravine near a turn-out in the highway. The body was determined to be that ...

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: On July 28, 2026, it was announced that Jane Doe has been identified as Michelle Louise Collier. For more details, a full update can be found here . Michelle’s murder is still unsolved. This post was originally published on July 16, 2025. Prior to this update (in bold), I had not edited this post since June 17, 2026; it will remain standing as is, containing all information about the victim prior to her identification that was known at that time. Furthermore, as a result of her identification, some of the links below may no longer work or have since been edited to reflect the recent developments. On Wednesday, June 21, 1978, the partial skeletal remains of a young female were discovered in Arvin, CA in southern Kern County. The body was discovered in a shallow grave in a grape vineyard after cultivation of the fruit. The condition of the remains was partial skeletal parts only. One or more limbs, as well as one or both hands, were not recovered. It has been estimated that J...

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 ...