A body discovered in Lake Michigan 37 years ago was finally identified as a Chicago woman who had been missing since December 1987, according to the Michigan State Police and the DNA Doe Project.
The body was originally recovered from Lake Michigan on April 8, 1988, near the “small seaside city of New Buffalo, Michigan,” according to the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit humanitarian initiative that “helps identify Jane and John Does through advanced genetic genealogy techniques.”
When the remains were discovered in 1988, authorities at the time were “unable to identify her despite exhaustive efforts,” officials said. The victim, known as “New Buffalo Jane Doe,” was believed to have died the previous year, but a “cause of death could not be determined,” officials said.
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But that all changed on Wednesday when officials announced the body had been identified as 71-year-old Dorothy Glanton, a missing Chicago woman who had left her home on Dec. 9, 1987, and “never returned.”
In the summer of 2023 — after police brought the case to the DNA Doe Project — a team of genetic genealogists with the nonprofit “came together at a retreat to work on building a family tree for the unidentified woman,” the organization said.
The team of genealogists determined that “initial assessments from 1988 were inaccurate,” with authorities originally believing the victim was a “Caucasian woman in her 40s or 50s, but she turned out to be African American and in her 70s at the time of her death,” the organization said.
While attempting to build a family tree for the victim, the team came across Glanton, who was “born and raised in Alabama before she and her family moved to Chicago in the 1920s as part of the Great Migration,” the organization said.
“At first, we thought we were looking for a daughter of Dorothy, based on the expected age of the deceased. When we narrowed our search directly to Dorothy, we were surprised to learn she would have been in her 70s at the time she was missing,” Lisa Needler, a team leader for the DNA Doe Project, said in a statement.
Upon taking a deeper dive into Glanton’s life, genealogists found their “breakthrough” — a newspaper advertisement from August 1988 by a relative on behalf of Glanton’s mother, the organization said.
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“It said, ‘your mother is ill, lonely & afraid’ and ‘she needs you desperately,'” Robin Espensen, a co-team leader for the organization, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Dorothy’s body had already been found a few months beforehand.”
Police thanked the detectives and the DNA Doe Project for their ongoing work with this case, saying it was “great assistance by all those involved.”