Cobb Police said Monday that the remains of a woman whose body was found along the Chattahoochee River 41 years ago have been finally identified.
Police said that the woman’s name was Veronica Jane Miller, and she would have been 61 years old. She was from Mableton, close to where her body was found near the river on May 10, 1984.
Miller was 20 years old at the time of her death, which was ruled to be a homicide, and her family has been notified of the identification, Cobb Police said Monday.
A combination of old-fashioned investigating techniques and more recent technology helped authorities identify Miller, whose case was recently reopened by the Cobb Police Crimes Against Persons Cold Case Unit.
According to DNASolves, a website that tracks such cases and that uses the testing platforms of Othram Labs, a private forensic genetic genealogy laboratory and technology company, this is the 24th Georgia “Jane Doe” identification, and is the second-oldest.
It’s also the second such cold-case identification of a murder victim in Cobb County in as many years.
Last year, Marietta Police identified the remains of a woman found dead in 1993 at a construction site off Scufflegrit Road as Patricia Howard, who had gone missing in 1980, shortly after moving from Los Angeles.
For years, Miller had been known to investigators only as Cobb County Jane Doe (1984), and in 2012 her case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database, after a traditional DNA profiling process turned up no matches.
Police said that Miller’s body was found in a wooded area near the Chattahoochee three months after her death, and it was transported to the Cobb Medical Examiner’s Office.
But the autopsy did not reveal an identification, nor the cause or manner of her death. DNA testing was submitted to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Miller’s DNA profile was entered into the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), NDIS (National DNA Index System), as well as the NAMUS databases.
“For decades, no positive matches were found,” Cobb Police said in the release, which said that as the case was reopened, Othram Labs, which works with law enforcement agencies, was consulted to develop a more sophisticated profile that initially identified distant relatives of the deceased.
“However, these results were insufficient for conclusive identification,” police added.
Further police investigations yielded a DNA sample from Miller’s possible half-sister, and Othram Labs “confirmed a close maternal match between the sample and the decedent’s DNA establishing a strong familial link.”
Cobb Police said that Cobb Chief Medical Examiner Christopher Gulledge reviewed the available evidence—”including genetic genealogy results, DNA confirmation, and supporting testimony from family”—and confirmed Miller’s identity.
Police said the case remains under active investigation and anyone with information is asked to call the Cobb County Police Department Major Crimes Unit at (770) 499-3945.
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