Police identify remains of Arizona woman strangled and left in trunk in Florida in 1969

Authorities have identified the remains of an Arizona woman who was strangled to death and left in a trunk in St. Petersburg, Florida, more than 50 years ago, and are now seeking the public’s help in identifying her killer and finding her daughters, police announced Tuesday.

Police used genetic genealogy to identify Sylvia June Atherton — long known as the ‘Trunk Lady’ due to where her body was found — as the victim of what the St. Petersburg Police Department called the city’s “oldest and most infamous cold case.”

Atherton, a mother of five from Tucson, Arizona, was 41 at the time of her death in 1969, police said. A pair of officers found her partially clothed body wrapped in a large plastic bag and strangled with what police described as “a man’s Western’s-style bolo tie” in a black steamer trunk in a wooded area behind a restaurant at 4200 34th Street South on Halloween, the St. Petersburg Police Department said in a Facebook post. She also had “visible injuries to her head,” the police department’s Facebook post said.

Witnesses said two white men left the trunk in the area after carrying it from a pickup truck, Assistant Chief Michael Kovacsev told reporters Tuesday.

Trunk Lady Murder
Sylvia June Atherton. St. Petersburg Police Department

The trunk was the property of Atherton and her husband, Scott Brown, Kovacsev added. Brown died in 1999 in Las Vegas without leaving any mention of a wife in court records, police said in the Facebook post. He also did not report her missing and did not list her on bankruptcy records, Kovacsev said.

“You can see there’s some inferences there that we have to kind of fill in the gaps,” he said, adding that police are still seeking the public’s help in bringing forward any information they may have.

Atherton’s body was exhumed from a local grave — where she was buried as “Jane Doe” — in February 2010 as part of what authorities said were multiple unsuccessful efforts by investigators over the years to identify the remains using degraded teeth and bone samples.

“Especially with the older cases, DNA wasn’t thought of,” Kovacsev told NBC affiliate WFLA of Tampa. “Preservation of evidence wasn’t necessarily as well thought of as well thought of as the way we do things today.”

But the advent of genetic genealogy — which has been used to identify several victims, and suspects, in recent years — has presented a new opportunity for investigators working on cold cases. (The St. Petersburg Police Department on Tuesday also announced the identification of a now-deceased suspect in the 1997 murder of then-18-year-old Richard Evans.)

A St. Petersburg police detective discovered an original sample of Atherton’s hair taken during the autopsy that had not been tested and sent it to a lab in Texas earlier this year, according to police. The samples turned up a DNA profile and investigators ran it through a DNA database, identified her relatives and obtained DNA samples from some of her kids to ultimately confirm her identity.

One of Atherton’s daughters, Syllen Gates of California, told investigators that her mother left her and her brother with their father in Tucson when she left for Chicago with Brown, her husband; her 5-year-old daughter Kimberly Anne Brown; her adult son Gary Sullivan; and her adult daughter Donna and her husband David Lindhurst.

Police are still trying to track down Kimberly and Donna, who they believe “may have additional information regarding the case,” they wrote in Tuesday’s announcement.

Gates, who was 9 at the time of her mother’s murder, told WFLA that her mother’s fate had remained a mystery until she was identified.

“We had no idea what happened to her,” she said.

source: nbcnews.com