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After 33 years, missing woman identified in Bone Lake murder case

On Friday, authorities identified the "Bone Lake Jane Doe" as Denise Elaine Sexton Hartley, a 27-year-old mother who disappeared from St. Paul in 1993, ending a nearly 33-year mystery.
The case began on June 12, 1993, when Washington County Sheriff's Office investigators discovered a decapitated head near Bone Lake in New Scandia Township, followed shortly by a severed foot in the Mississippi River.
Detective Clayton Evens collaborated with the DNA Doe Project to secure funding and analyze samples, successfully matching DNA from the remains to Hartley's daughter after decades of uncertainty.
Evens described the identification as a "sigh of relief," while investigators are now rebuilding a timeline of Hartley's final days and interviewing friends and acquaintances to determine who killed her.
Although identified, the mystery of the perpetrator remains unresolved, as Hartley was not on the sheriff's radar as a missing person when she disappeared, complicating the decades-old investigation.

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After 33 years, missing woman identified in Bone Lake murder case

BONE LAKE, Minn. — For two years, Washington County Sheriff’s Office Detective Clayton Evens has been working to identify a decapitated human head and a foot from the Bone Lake Jane Doe case of 1993. With new developments in DNA testing, Evens became involved after the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit genetic genealogy organization, reached out in 2024, saying they were interested in the case if they could raise the money. After the funds were acqui…

16 hours ago·Cherokee County, United States

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