Cold Cases of the Golden Coast

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...

At the time of her disappearance, Kimberly Ann Stewart (nee Morgan), 21, was estranged from her husband, Steven Michael "Mike" Stewart, whom she married when she was 15 and he was a freshman in college. They had met while attending Lincoln High School together. Kimberly was last seen on Tuesday, May 24, 1977, in Sheridan, Placer County, CA. She left her home on Rioso Rd in Sheridan and dropped her two young daughters off with their babysitter, a family friend named Monica Wooden. Kimberly told Monica that she would be back to pick up her daughters later that evening. Photo from NamUs. Kim then left in her gray 1975 Chevy Vega hatchback to meet with her estranged husband Steven. The two had arranged to meet at a pizza parlor for dinner to discuss their impending divorce and/or for Steven to give Kimberly some money (sources vary). Witnesses at the pizza parlor in Wheatland, Yuba County, CA stated that the couple argued, then left soon after arriving. According to Kimberly'...

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 ...

Reconstruction. Photo from NamUs. At about 9am on Thursday, October 30, 1980, a hiker discovered a badly decomposed body in a brush-covered field near the intersection of Colfax & Iowa Hill Rd.s in Colfax, Placer County, CA. Traffic on the Colfax-Iowa Hill Road was halted that morning while sheriff's investigators examined the scene, which was less than a mile west of the Iowa Hill Bridge. It was determined that the body, which was that of a young woman, had been deceased for at least one year, and her estimated year of death is 1979. Her COD is undetermined, and there were no weapons or signs of violence at the scene, but her case is being investigated as a homicide. Investigators were unsure whether she died at the scene, which is a known dumping site for trash, or at a different location. Jane Doe was estimated to be a white female, 18 to 27 years old; however, a newspaper article from the time stated that she was believed to be 18 to 22 years old. She was 5'0 to 5'5...