Murder of Tammy Alexander

Most potential forensic evidence was washed away by heavy rain on the night she died, but they knew she had come to the Caledonia area from a distant, warmer locale because she had tan lines on her upper body.Advances in technology allowed investigators to make use of improving forensic techniques to evaluate trace evidence they had collected and, following a successful DNA extraction from her remains in 2005 and a palynological analysis of Alexander's clothing,[6] they concluded that she had spent time in Florida, southern California, Arizona, or northern Mexico prior to her death.In addition, a portrait was made of Alexander based on a facial reconstruction, in the hopes that someone would recognize her image, and it was uploaded to an online public database in 2010.Identification was achieved based on a combination of factors; in 2014, a renewed search for Alexander by her half-sister and a close high school friend resulted in the filing of a new missing persons report with police in Hernando County, Florida, as she had not been seen or heard from since the late 1970s.[7][8] The autopsy by the medical examiner indicated that Alexander had first been shot in the head while next to the road bordering the cornfield, at or near a blood spot found on the ground.Heavy rains on the night of Alexander's death washed away a large portion of potential forensic evidence, such as physical and DNA traces of the perpetrator on her body and clothes.[20] Alexander was wearing a red nylon-lined men's windbreaker jacket with black stripes down the arms, marked inside with the label "Auto Sports Products, Inc.", a boy's multicolored plaid button-up shirt with collar, tan corduroy pants (size 7), blue knee socks, white bra (size 32C),[3] and blue panties.Paul Chambers, a recently hired investigator in the Monroe County medical examiner's office, asked for and received permission to send her clothing to the palynology laboratory at Texas A&M University.Researchers believed the southern California and San Diego region to be the best geographical pollen print match location for the grains from the clothing.[5] Carl Koppelman, a California artist, came across the "missing person" report on Alexander as a moderator of the Websleuths online community, where volunteers try to solve cold cases including those of unidentified bodies.In 2010, four years earlier, he had sketched the portrait of "Caledonia Jane Doe" and posted it in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).In January 2015, the Monroe County medical examiner's office found that MtDNA from the unidentified body matched that of Dyson, confirming that the victim was her half-sister.A week later on January 26, 2015, the Livingston County sheriff, Thomas Dougherty, announced at a news conference that Caledonia Jane Doe had been identified after 35 years."[29] The Dougherty Funeral Home in Livonia, New York, said it paid to have the "Jane Doe" headstone removed and replaced with one reading "Tammy Jo Alexander".[33] Dyson has since urged family members of missing people to enter the subjects into NamUs, saying that this database was critical in achieving her sister's identification.Investigators located a spent slug in the dirt underneath the unidentified girl's body, which they compared forensically to hundreds of other bullets fired from confiscated weapons.By the end of February 2015, the Livingston County Sheriff's Department said they had received many more tips since Alexander's identification, enough to develop a scenario of events that led up to the girl's arrival in Caledonia.[39] In March 2015, the department said that Alexander had ties to a former "prison ministry" in Young Harris, Georgia, which specialized in working with individuals "on probation or parole.[44] After her discovery, two news organizations in Rochester, New York, partnered to produce a multi-part podcast in May 2016 detailing Alexander's murder and the ongoing investigation called Finding Tammy Jo.[45] It was hosted by reporters Veronica Volk from WXXI News and Gary Craig from the Democrat and Chronicle, who spent a year co-reporting on the case.