Solved: The 47-Year Mystery of a Murder Victim's Many Identities

(a truly fascinating story, amazing forensic and research work--Holmes would approve. this story has everything, including gender identity, poverty, drugs, family. . . .

I am disappointed that the nyt did not point out that orangeburg was the site of a mass police shooting (before Kent State) in 1968))


Solved: The 47-Year Mystery of a
Murder Victim’s Many Identities

A murdered drug dealer dressed as a man, had lovers of different genders and
used several aliases, successfully concealing her identity even well past her death.




She was buried Nov. 7, 1970, in plot No. 537 of a potter’s field in Middletown, N.Y. In the cemetery’s record book, where her name should have been, someone wrote a single word.
“Unknown.” The police had found her a few weeks earlier, dead in the woods. Her hands had been tied behind her back with a length of electrical cord. She had been shot, her body left unrecognizable by months of exposure to the elements. She carried no identification. For more than 45 years, the woman’s body has lain in a grave marked only by a number on a metal plate.

Then, in late 2015, a breakthrough: The woman’s fingerprints, run through a new police database, were matched to those of a woman arrested several times in the 1960s in Harlem.
But arrest records, a half-century old, brought little clarity. The woman had several identities, giving the police a new name with each arrest. One file contained a police photo, possibly mistakenly placed: It appeared to be that of a man. Instead of leads, state police investigators found only more questions.







. . . .

Or perhaps she passed through the heroin kingpin’s neighborhood of choice as invisibly as she would pass from life a few years later. Having cycled through her many identities — little baby Evelyn with the misspelled name, and Fannie and Shirlene and A. C. — she would spend a far longer span of time with the label scrawled on the ledger of the potter’s field beside grave No. 537, one both factually lacking and yet wholly accurate in describing who she was, how she came to be in that grave and who put her there.

Unknown.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/unsolved-harlem-murder.html?_r=0