In April 2022 the sheriff’s office in Santa Clara County, California, announced the name of a woman who had been dead for twenty-nine years. She was Patricia Skiple, 45, a mother of two from Colton, Oregon. For fifteen of those twenty-nine years a man had stood convicted of her murder while the court record held no name for her. Keith Hunter Jesperson had pleaded guilty in July 2007 to killing a woman nobody could identify. He had called her Carla, or Cindy.
The same order of events recurs. A conviction, a plea or a suspect arrived first, sometimes decades first, and the person at the center of it remained a number, a physical description or a name the killer had made up. Then a laboratory, a volunteer genealogist, a cold case unit or a relative who would not stop asking did what the original investigation could not. The legal position in each case is given as the courts recorded it. Where a man is only suspected, or was never charged, that is said plainly.
Jesperson, a Canadian-born long-haul trucker, is held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. He has pleaded guilty or no contest to murders in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming and California. Between killings he wrote to The Oregonian and to prosecutors in Portland, and he put a smiling face on the letters. By his own count there were eight women. Three of them were known for years only by names he supplied, by descriptions, or not at all.
Patricia Skiple was the first of the three to be named. Her sister told ABC7 in 2022 that the family had been "holding hope that she was going to be alive." Skiple had been in her mid-forties, and Santa Clara County investigators had known her for three decades by a label drawn from the color of her clothing. In 2006 Jesperson wrote to the county’s district attorney and admitted killing a woman in the county. He pleaded guilty the next year, at a time when no one in the courtroom could say who the victim was.
The identification, in April 2022, came from the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer group that uses genetic genealogy, working with the sheriff’s cold case detectives. Cairenn Binder, a forensic genealogist and one of the project’s team leaders, sorted through dozens of DNA matches. The sheriff’s office credited the people who had uploaded their own DNA to GEDmatch, a public database, strangers whose cousins turned out to matter. Binder said she hoped the name would give Patricia "some of her dignity back."
The second was Suzanne Kjellenberg, 34, of Wisconsin. Jesperson had admitted the killing in February 1996, and he had given the woman’s name as Susan or Suzette. "We had him as a suspect early on," Sheriff Eric Aden said in 2023, "just didn’t have an identity for our victim." For nearly three decades the case sat with the district medical examiner. In 2022 the sheriff’s office brought in Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy company, and in 2023 the medical examiner’s office sent it samples, with the cost covered by the federal missing and unidentified persons system, NamUs. The Chief Medical Examiner, Deanna Oleske, said the identification took six weeks.
On October 3, 2023, the sheriff announced her name and Jesperson was charged with her murder the same day. She could now, Aden said, "finally leave the Medical Examiner’s Office" and be returned to her relatives.
The third woman was the last. Jesperson called her Claudia, and no investigator ever confirmed that this was her name. On January 8, 2010, he pleaded guilty in Riverside County, California, to her murder, and the district attorney’s office gives the sentence as 25 years to life. In January 2024 the office released drawn renderings of her face and asked the public for help. Genealogists had already traced some of her family, among them a biological father who had died, from Cameron County, Texas, and several half-siblings who did not share her mother. "This woman is the last of all his victims to remain unidentified," District Attorney Mike Hestrin said.
It took until August 27, 2026. A new lead to a relative on her mother’s side produced a DNA match, confirmed that week, with help from the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office in Texas and the California Department of Justice’s missing persons DNA program. Her name was Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter. Her family in Texas, including her sisters, had never known what became of her. "I hope this will finally bring closure to Lydia’s family," said Billy Hester, the supervising investigator of the Riverside County cold case unit. The office said her identification closed the last case tied to Jesperson’s convictions.
When Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in King County Superior Court on November 5, 2003, he admitted to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder. Forty-four counts named women and girls. Four did not. They were entered as Jane Does B-10, B-16, B-17 and B-20, because no one knew whose lives the pleas covered. Ridgway added a 49th count in February 2011, for Rebecca Marrero, 20. He is serving consecutive life terms without release.
The names came slowly, and they came through methods that did not exist when he was sentenced. Sandra Majors was identified by DNA in 2012 as the woman behind Jane Doe B-16. In January 2021, the King County sheriff announced that genetic genealogy, worked with a forensic anthropologist and the DNA Doe Project, had identified Wendy Stephens, a 14-year-old runaway from Denver who had left her family in 1983. CBS Colorado reported that she is believed to be the youngest of his victims. She was one of the four unidentified counts.
In December 2023 the sheriff’s office named Lori Anne Razpotnik, one of the four counts, 15 when she ran away from her family in Lewis County, Washington, in 1982. Parabon NanoLabs built a new DNA profile, and the University of North Texas compared it with a sample from her mother. Her family never saw her again. The identification gave her mother an answer 41 years after the girl left.
Tammie Liles was the last. On January 22, 2024, the sheriff’s office announced that the Texas laboratory Othram, working with the University of North Texas and a DNA sample from her mother, had identified the final unnamed count as Liles, 16, of Everett. Part of her case had been settled in 1988, when dental records tied her to evidence in Oregon, which is why her death had been among the seven left out of the 2003 pleas while a Jane Doe count carried the same woman under no name at all. United Press International reported the announcement on January 24. Three other women on the Green River list, Kassee Ann Lee, Kelly Kay McGinnis and Patricia Ann Osborn, have never been located. Ridgway has not been charged in their cases.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was convicted of one murder. In 2003, under the name Curtis Kimball, he was sentenced in Contra Costa County, California, to 15 years to life for the death of Eunsoon Jun, a chemist he had lived with. He died in prison in December 2010, and the authorities who held him did not know his real name.
The rest was pieced together afterward. In January 2017 the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office linked the California case to the deaths of a woman and three girls in Allenstown and to the case of Denise Beaudin, a Manchester woman whose whereabouts have been unknown since 1981. The man it had known as Robert "Bob" Evans, it said, was the suspect. DNA showed that one of the girls was his own daughter. In August 2017 investigators established that Evans was Rasmussen, born in Colorado in 1943. Jeffery Strelzin, then the state’s chief homicide prosecutor, called him "a chameleon." He was never charged with any of the New Hampshire deaths, and the deaths are attributed to him, not proved.
Three of the four victims were identified in June 2019. They were Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, born in 1954, and her daughters Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and Sarah Lynn McWaters. The Associated Press gave their ages when they left California as 24, 6 and 1. Her family in La Puente did not hear from her or her daughters after Thanksgiving 1978. Her youngest brother was 6. Her siblings, scattered by 2019 across California, Oklahoma and Oregon, spent more than forty years without knowing. Strelzin later explained the lack of official attention: an adult woman missing from California, he said, and little the authorities there could do. A Concord Monitor account in November 2019 described a mother and her daughter finally laid to rest in New Hampshire.
The fourth victim waited until September 2025. Investigators announced then that she was Rea Rasmussen, Rasmussen’s own daughter, born in 1976 in Orange County, California. Her birth certificate, which investigators located only in 2025, lists Rasmussen and a woman named Pepper Reed as her parents. The DNA Doe Project had named Reed, born in 1952 and from Texas, whose records stop in the 1970s. A woman who had known her in Houston told New Hampshire Public Radio’s Bear Brook podcast that Reed was a friend who went missing in the 1970s, had been dating Rasmussen, and was pregnant when the two moved away. Investigators believe she is likely another of his victims. Her whereabouts have never been established, and the inquiries into her case and Denise Beaudin’s stayed open as of September 2025.
Beaudin’s story ran a second track. She graduated from Goffstown High School and was 23 in 1981. On Thanksgiving, November 26, 1981, she had dinner with her family in Goffstown, and nothing was said about leaving. No one reported her missing at the time. The family assumed she and Evans had left town to escape money troubles, and a missing person report was filed only in late 2016, more than thirty-five years later. The state lists her case as suspicious and says a suspect has been identified. Her infant daughter had gone with Rasmussen, who presented himself as the child’s father. In 1986 he left the girl at a California RV park, where an older couple had been looking after her. She entered the child protective system and was adopted. Years later, DNA research traced her to the New Hampshire woman who had left with Rasmussen in 1981. That daughter is not missing. Her mother still is.
Joel Rifkin, an unemployed landscaper from East Meadow, Long Island, told New York State Police in June 1993 that he had killed 17 women over about four years. He was arrested on June 28, 1993, in Nassau County, and charged with the murder of Tiffany Bresciani, 22. A Nassau jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him on May 9, 1994. Guilty pleas followed in Suffolk, Kings and Queens counties, and news reports give nine murder convictions in all. All four judgments were affirmed on appeal on December 3, 2001.
The first woman he killed went without a name for twenty-four years. Her death had come to light in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, in March 1989. Heidi Balch was 25. She had used many names and Social Security numbers, among them Susan Spencer and about fifteen others, which is partly why no one could match her to a report. Her parents lived in Maryland and Florida.
An aunt had filed a missing person report in 2001. It was set aside, because it described a sighting in 1995, six years after the death in New Jersey. When detectives finally sat down with the aunt, they concluded that the sighting she had been told about was a mistake. The forensic anthropologist Donna Fontana compared a reconstruction of the woman’s face with an arrest photograph and pointed to matching features, a mole, a scar on the eyebrow, the hair. The aunt recognized her niece in the photograph. DNA from Balch’s parents confirmed it, and New Jersey State Police announced the identification in March 2013.
"It’s fitting the story exactly how Mr. Rifkin described it," said Lieutenant Bill Springer of the Hopewell police. Detective Michael Sherman said the team had come to treat her almost as one of its own after so many years. The Hopewell police chief, George Meyer, said only, "She was young." New York authorities had no interest in prosecuting, Meyer told The Times of Trenton, because Rifkin was already in prison. He has never been charged with her death.
Rifkin’s count of 17 still has two gaps. State Police say the task force identified 15 of the women he described. Two are known to investigators only as Number Six and Number Nine, and neither has been named.
Shelly Andre Brooks was 37 when Wayne County prosecutors charged him in 2006 with seven killings of women in Detroit over five years. Kym Worthy, the prosecutor, called him "a quintessential serial killer." Police had arrested him on July 30, 2006, after a tip from a woman who survived and identified him. He was convicted of first-degree murder in two deaths at two trials in 2007, and he was sentenced to life without parole on each. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed one of the convictions on June 24, 2008. The court record names none of the women.
Darylnn Washington, born on June 15, 1959, was identified in January 2025. Her death had come to light in Detroit in June 2006 and had been ruled a homicide. The description released at the time put her between 20 and 30 years old. Her case went into the national missing and unidentified persons system as UP7935 and stayed cold for nearly two decades.
In April 2022 the Detroit Police Department turned to Othram, the private laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, which built a DNA profile and carried out genealogy research. NamUs, financed by the National Institute of Justice, paid for it. The work led investigators to members of her family. Detroit police announced the identification in January 2025 and said the family had been notified. "Technology is amazing," a department spokesman, Jackson Vidaurri, told the Associated Press. Othram said it was the tenth case in Michigan in which an identification made with its methods had been announced.
Othram wrote that her family had long believed she was killed by a serial killer but had never learned where she was, and described her as a confessed victim of Brooks. The AP linked her death to him. Whether her death was among the seven charged in 2006 has not been reported, and no court has ruled on it.
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in March 1980 of 33 murders of young men and boys in the Chicago area and executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994. Eight of the dead went without names for decades. Three have since been identified by DNA between 2011 and 2021. One, James Haakenson, 16, of Minnesota, was named in July 2017, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced another in October 2021. Five are still without names.
In Cleveland, the families have no verdict to wait for. Between 1935 and 1938 at least a dozen people were killed in Cleveland in the series known as the Kingsbury Run killings. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History counts about seven men and five women. Only two were identified with certainty, Edward Andrassy, 28 or 29, by his fingerprints, and Florence Polillo, 42, also by fingerprints. A third, Rose Wallace, about 40, was named only tentatively, from dental work. The rest were poor, often transient men and women from the shantytowns of the Depression, and no one claimed them.
Nobody was convicted. In July 1939 county deputies arrested a bricklayer, Frank Dolezal, 52, in Polillo’s death; he confessed, said he had been beaten, and died in jail in August 1939 before a trial. In August 2024 the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office and the DNA Doe Project began genetic genealogy work on the unnamed. The first to be tested were the cases the project lists as Kingsbury Run John Doe #4 and #6. One of the unnamed men, in his early twenties, had six tattoos, among them a bird and band with the names "Helen and Paul" and the initials "W.C.G.", details police first circulated in 1936. As of June 2026, two victims were still undergoing testing and neither had a name.
A name does not alter a sentence, and in these cases it often alters nothing about the verdict. Jesperson’s pleas in California were entered before anyone knew whom they covered. Ridgway’s four anonymous counts were already part of a life sentence. Gacy was executed 27 years before the last of the identifications in his case. What changes is a family’s ability to say a name and be answered.
Some are still unanswered. Number Six and Number Nine have no names. Pepper Reed and Denise Beaudin have not been located. Two people in Cleveland were still in a laboratory queue in 2026, and the daughter in New Hampshire who was left at an RV park in 1986 has a mother whose fate no court has established.
• 1935: Edward Andrassy and a second man die in Cleveland; Andrassy is later identified by fingerprints.
• 1978: Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters are last in contact with their family, at Thanksgiving in California.
• November 26, 1981: Denise Beaudin has Thanksgiving dinner with her family in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
• 1982 and 1983: Lori Anne Razpotnik and Wendy Stephens leave their families; both later become unnamed counts in the King County case.
• 1986: Rasmussen leaves Beaudin’s daughter at a California RV park.
• March 1989: Heidi Balch’s death comes to light in Hopewell Township, New Jersey.
• June 28, 1993: Joel Rifkin is arrested in Nassau County, New York.
• May 9, 1994: A Nassau County jury convicts Rifkin of murder.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy, convicted of 33 murders in March 1980, is executed.
• 2001: Heidi Balch’s aunt files a missing person report that is set aside.
• June 2003: Rasmussen is sentenced to 15 years to life in California.
• November 5, 2003: Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts, four of them for unidentified women.
• July 2007: Jesperson pleads guilty in Santa Clara County to the murder of a woman not yet identified.
• January 8, 2010: Jesperson pleads guilty in Riverside County to the murder of the woman he called Claudia.
• December 2010: Rasmussen dies in a California prison.
• 2011: The first of three Gacy victims to be named by DNA is identified.
• February 2011: Ridgway pleads guilty to a 49th count.
• 2012: Sandra Majors is identified.
• March 2013: New Jersey State Police name Heidi Balch.
• January 2017: New Hampshire links the Allenstown and Manchester cases to Rasmussen’s California conviction.
• July 2017: James Haakenson, 16, is named as a Gacy victim.
• August 2017: Evans is identified as Rasmussen.
• June 2019: Honeychurch, Vaughn and McWaters are identified.
• January 2021: Wendy Stephens is identified.
• October 2021: The Cook County Sheriff announces another Gacy identification.
• April 2022: Patricia Skiple is identified.
• October 3, 2023: Suzanne Kjellenberg is identified; Jesperson is charged.
• December 2023: Lori Anne Razpotnik is identified.
• January 22, 2024: Tammie Liles is identified.
• August 2024: DNA Doe Project work begins on the Cleveland cases.
• January 2025: Darylnn Washington is identified in Detroit.
• September 2025: Rea Rasmussen is identified.
• August 27, 2026: Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter is identified.