Buckskin Girl
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In April of 1981, the body of a young woman was found alongside a road in Troy, Ohio. She had been strangled and beaten to death, but her identity remained a mystery for almost four decades. It wasn't until the authorities used advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy that the girl once known only as the "Buckskin Girl" finally got a name.

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 255, the story of Buckskin Girl. ♪

Thank you.

April 28, 1981. The police are called about the possible discovery of a young female in a ditch on Greenlee Road in Newton Township near Troy, Ohio, a small town with less than 3,000 people. Three young men had called, saying they found the girl in the ditch curled up in the fetal position with no shoes or socks. When the police got there, this is what they had to say.

According to one of them, a guy named Greg Breidenbaugh, he first noticed a distinctive buckskin poncho lying in the ditch just off Greenlee Road. So he told one of his friends, Neil Hoffman, they should go over and have a look. But when they got close enough so that they could touch it, that's when they realized it wasn't just a piece of clothing.

Later that same day, the girl was taken for an autopsy. And this is really where the mystery of this story begins. You didn't even have to perform one to know that this was a murder. Without even cutting into her body, you could see the visible injuries to her head and face. She very clearly suffered a violent death before ending up in that roadside ditch. But here's what the autopsy did find.

Based on the condition of her body, the medical examiner theorized that she was probably killed less than 48 hours before being discovered. And on top of blunt force trauma, she had also been strangled to death. She had bruising covering most of her neck and petechiae or tiny blood spots in both of her eyes. But here's one of the many strange parts.

She had a lacerated liver that no one could quite explain why or how that happened. There were also no signs of a sexual assault. This girl had suffered a very brutal death. Blunt force trauma to the face and head. She'd been strangled, her liver lacerated. But now the question became, who was she?

Besides the clothes that she wore on her back, she had nothing on her. No wallet, no purse, no ID, nothing. So the only thing they had to work with was what she looked like. She was somewhere between 5'4 and 5'6 inches tall, weighed about 125 to 130 pounds, and

She looked like she could be anywhere from 18 to 26 years old. She had naturally reddish brown hair, parted down the middle, and braided into pigtails. Her eyes were light brown, and she had freckles. Some of the other notable features were a quote, very pointed nose, and a skin complexion that looked like she had spent a lot of time outdoors in the final weeks of her life.

Another thing that stood out about this girl was that she was well cared for. She took good care of herself. She was clean. And all of her teeth, including her wisdom teeth, were in great condition and showed no signs of major dental work. The only thing she had was one porcelain crown.

Sometimes a person's teeth can tell a lot about a person. If they're well taken care of, then maybe this person is connected somewhere. They have the financial means and the financial resources to go to the dentist. And if they're not, then maybe this young girl could be some type of runaway. Now, that's not always the case, but in this situation, they felt pretty confident.

Now, besides her teeth, the medical examiner also noted a couple of scars and marks on her body. She had a scar on her chin and several smaller ones on one of her wrists, both of her arms, and on one of her ankles. But all of the scars and the marks were old, so there was no way of knowing how she got them.

On top of her physical appearance, the authorities also had what she was wearing. A pair of blue bell-bottom Wrangler jeans, a brown turtleneck pullover sweater with an orange crisscross design on the front of it, a white bra, and a hoodless deerskin poncho with purple lining.

Now, the poncho was something that really stood out to investigators. Remember, this was the first thing that those three boys discovered her. They saw it lying in the ditch, just the poncho, and they went over to go take a look at it. It was a very distinctive and almost looked like it could be handmade. It didn't look like something that you could just drive down to the store and buy.

Once the authorities knew they had a homicide on their hands, they got to work trying to identify her. The first thing they did was take her fingerprints and get an impression of her teeth. The hope was they could match the prints or her dental impressions to someone in the missing person database.

But no luck there. Her dental records didn't match anyone in the system, and her fingerprints didn't match any police reports, suggesting that she had never been arrested before. Or, if she had been arrested, she wasn't required to submit her fingerprints, so they weren't there.

At first, the authorities thought this young girl would be identified pretty quickly. Surely someone out there had to be missing her. A mom, dad, friend, someone. And it would just be a matter of a couple of days before someone came forward looking for this girl. But that simply didn't happen. The days turned to weeks, and then eventually months passed, and not one single person came to identify her.

So after the dental impressions and the fingerprints failed, that's when they turned to a forensic sketch artist to help create a photo of how she might have looked before she was killed. And once they had the composite sketch, they published it everywhere. Local newspapers, television networks in the area, anywhere and everywhere they could possibly think of.

After the photo aired on television on April 28, 1981, the police got a lot of tips. Over 200 people called into the police department saying that they thought they might know who she was. So one by one, very tediously, the police investigated all 200 tips, but all of them turned out to be a dead end in one way or another.

As the tips dried up and interest in the case began to fade, the girl got her nickname, Buckskin Girl. That's because of the distinctive tasseled buckskin jacket she was wearing when her body was first discovered. That was it. No first name, no last name. She was just Buckskin Girl. But even though they couldn't identify her, the authorities weren't short on coming up with possible theories.

One idea was that she probably wasn't from the area. This became a popular theory for a couple of reasons. One, that would explain why no one came forward looking for her.

If she wasn't from there, then that probably meant that the people who were looking for her weren't anywhere nearby. They probably lived all the way across the country and they were out there looking for her. They had no idea that she ended up in Troy, Ohio. It's possible that she didn't even have any connections to that part of the country.

And number two, her body was found in a very remote location. She probably didn't have any business even being out there. So the police wondered if she could be from somewhere else. Another theory related to that one was that she was probably murdered elsewhere and then her body was just dumped there. That's because there was no other evidence around her body suggesting that that's where she was killed.

That theory could also explain why she was missing her shoes and socks. If she was killed somewhere else and had her body dumped in that particular ditch, she might have lost them somewhere along the way. Then there was this. At the autopsy, her bare feet were completely clean.

they didn't have a single spot of dirt on them, which again supports this theory that she was killed somewhere else before her body was dumped. You also have to consider the location of the dump site itself. Interstate 75 is five miles away from where her body was found, making that particular spot a really good spot for someone to discreetly dump a body after you just killed her. No one would have even seen it happen.

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The police also consider the possibility that a buckskin girl might be a runaway or some type of transient. She could have also been hitchhiking her way somewhere when someone picked her up and killed her. But the bigger rumors and the bigger theories were that her case could be connected to others.

For a while, the authorities speculated whether there was a possible connection between Buckskin girl's murder and the murder of a 27-year-old woman just two months earlier in February of 1981. But the police never found any credible evidence suggesting that they were actually related. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that both of the victims were young females. But other than that, there was nothing.

Now came the rumors about a serial killer. By 1985, the police thought that Buckskin Girls' murder might be linked to a nationwide series of murders of young white females, many of which were either sex workers or exotic dancers, all known collectively as the Redhead Murders. Here's how that story goes.

During the late 1970s and 1990s, a lot of young women with red hair were discovered dead along major highways across the states of Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. And a lot of them even remained unidentified for years.

But even to this day, we don't know how many actual victims there are because the person responsible hasn't been caught. The actual number of victims could be as low as five or as many as 14. We just don't know.

But the victims we do know about include 28-year-old Lisa Nichols, 21-year-old Tina Farmer, 15-year-old Tracy Walker, 23-year-old Michelle Inman, and 28-year-old SB Pilgrim. On top of not knowing how many redhead murder victims there really are, we also don't know if the same person is even responsible for all of the murders or not.

Maybe it's just pure coincidence that these victims have red hair and their bodies are being dumped along major state highways, but they've all been committed by different people. Or at least a couple different people and the same person didn't do all of them. But when it came to Buckskin Girl, the authorities wondered if she could be one of the victims. Here's why.

She had reddish-brown hair, and of course, her body was discovered just off a major state highway. So at first glance, it seemed to check off all the boxes. But no evidence ever surfaced linking her to the other redhead murders. And just like I mentioned, the suspect's never been caught.

He's also sometimes been called the Bible Belt Strangler because the area where the bodies were found, at least most of them, are a part of the Bible Belt. But we still don't know who he is. The Bible Belt Strangler isn't the only serial killer that the police thought about. They also wondered if an unidentified serial killer who was active between 1985 and 2004 may have also been responsible. Here's why.

This particular serial killer targeted known and suspected sex workers, and all of the victims had been murdered by either being bludgeoned to death or strangled, just like Buckskin Girl.

Something else unique about his crimes was that he usually stole some of their clothing or their jewelry right after he killed them. Now, of course, this particular detail really piqued the attention of investigators. Buckskin Girl, as we know, was missing her shoes and some of her jewelry.

So, so far, we've got two boxes checked. One, buckskin girl was strangled and bludgeoned to death. And box number two, she was missing her shoes, socks, and some of her jewelry. But other parts of it didn't match. Like how this serial killer only targeted known and suspected sex workers. There was absolutely zero evidence suggesting that buckskin girl had ever worked as a sex worker of any kind.

She showed no signs of sexual assault or really any signs that she had recently engaged in any type of sexual activity. And unlike most of this serial killer's victims, she was very well groomed and taken care of, something that all of the other victims of this unknown serial killer were not. Without any more leads, the police had no choice but to bury Buckskin Girl without a name.

Even many of the police officers who worked the case became pallbearers at her memorial service. For them, it had become a case they just couldn't forget about. Who was this girl, and who killed her? By 1991, 10 years had passed, and investigators were still no closer to getting any solid answers.

But things were slowly starting to look up. A newly established task force in London, Ohio, was created to help solve some of the area's cold cases, including this one. Not only were they looking at cases from the state of Ohio, but they also had lists from New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. It was the first big move in the case in practically a decade. But here comes the bad news.

Despite the group's best efforts, nothing new was learned about who Buckskin Girl really was. She was still nameless and her murder unsolved. Fast forward another decade, the case is still cold. At this point, people started to wonder if Buckskin Girl might have known her killer.

Since there was no evidence of sexual assault, this led some to wonder if this was some type of domestic crime. Maybe a boyfriend, maybe a husband had done this to her. It could also explain why no one came forward to identify her. If a boyfriend or a husband was really all that she had, and they were the ones who did this, then maybe that's why no one came forward looking for her.

By 2001, there was another breakthrough. By then, DNA testing had become more and more common in criminal investigations, and this case was no different. The authorities were able to extract some of the girl's DNA from the blood sample taken during her autopsy back in 1981.

And once they had the DNA, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab generated a DNA profile of Buckskin Girl and uploaded it to the newly established National Missing Unidentified Person System, or NAMIS, in 2008. They partnered with the University of North Texas to generate the DNA profile and upload it to NAMIS, becoming one of the first people entered into the university's database.

So now, her fingerprints, dental records, and DNA are all nationally accessible to law enforcement agencies all across the country. If any department had the same profile and uploaded it to NamUs for comparison, then they could finally get a match. But an exact match never happened. Although, this was still considered a major step forward in the investigation.

That's because since Buckskin Girls' DNA profile was uploaded to NamUs, the police could officially rule out 226 missing teenage girls and young women as being her. So just because they weren't able to get an exact match didn't mean that all of this was for nothing. They were able to rule out hundreds, 226 other girls, and this allowed them to keep moving forward.

By the following year, 2009, a mitochondrial DNA sample was submitted to the FBI to be uploaded to CODIS, the National DNA Database. But unfortunately, there were no immediate hits there either.

Then less than a year later, NamUs' case management department assigned Buckskin Girl's case to Elizabeth Murray, a forensic anthropologist from Cincinnati. She was being tasked with trying to identify her based on where she was originally from.

Now it's April of 2016, a full 35 years since Buckskin Girl was first discovered. And by this point, we might be getting close to finding out who she was. In April of 2016, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released two versions of an updated forensic facial reconstruction. They were put up on their website and distributed to the media.

One of these images showed a young girl with freckles all across her face and her reddish brown hair tied in two pigtails. The other one looked almost identical, it just didn't have the two pigtails. The hope again would be that someone would come forward and say they recognized her. But nothing significant came from these new forensic facial reconstructions.

Later that year, things started to heat up again, this time involving lesser-known forensic techniques. The first were pollen tests. In late 2016, the Miami County Sheriff's Office approved forensic pollenology testing to study the pollen on her clothes. It works like this.

Scientists examine someone's clothing or their body to see if they have any pollen, and based on the type of pollen they find, they can sometimes determine where they're geographically from or where they've spent time right before they died.

This can be really useful because one, pollen is highly resistant to decomposition, which means that it can quite literally last thousands, if not millions of years. And number two, it's microscopic and not visible to the naked eye. So pollen is easily trapped in surfaces, which again makes it stick to clothing for a long, long time.

In Buckskin Girl's case, detectives hoped that they could find pollen on her clothing to help figure out where she lived because they already suspected that she wasn't from the Troy, Ohio area. They just had no idea where she was from. So in 2016, the testing on her clothes was done by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. And here's what they found.

The pollen suggested that she had spent time in an arid climate, like the southwestern part of the United States or northern Mexico right before she died. Also interesting, the tests revealed that her clothing had high levels of soot exposure similar to high traffic areas or industrial activity, like maybe she traveled through a densely populated urban area.

but testing the pollen on her clothes wasn't the only thing that they did. They also performed isotope tests on her hair and her nails, another lesser-known forensic technique. This process is similar to looking at the pollen because scientists can study someone's hair or their nails to figure out things like what a person's diet looks like, what their lifestyle was, or where they're geographically from.

So in Buckskin Girl's case, the thing investigators were most interested in finding was where she was originally from or where she was born. So after looking at her hair and nails, scientists determined that she was likely born somewhere in the northwestern part of the United States. And that's where she spent most of her childhood.

The test also revealed that she had spent time in northern Texas at least twice during the year right before her death. So now, with all of this geographical information, investigators started to draw some conclusions about her.

Number one, this confirmed their earlier suspicions that she was living life somewhat as a transient before she was killed. She may have even been a habitual hitchhiker, and that explains why she was found where she was. And two, this information just served as further confirmation that she wasn't from the area, and that's why no one came to identify her.

Now, all of this was very helpful to investigators, and it was information they didn't previously have, but it still didn't say who she was. She was still just Buckskin Girl. So two years later, 2018, her case was submitted to the DNA Doe Project.

an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased people using forensic genealogy. They started working on the case by submitting Buckskin Girl's DNA profile to GEDmatch, a free DNA database, to see maybe if they could find any of her relatives.

Now, before I go on, in case anyone is new to this show, Forensic Genetic Genealogy uses DNA analysis and genealogy to help law enforcement agencies either solve crimes or help identify missing or unidentified people.

It usually works by uploading unknown DNA to publicly accessible databases like GEDmatch and 23andMe to identify relatives of the unknown person. From there, law enforcement can create family trees of people related to the person that they're searching for. This is the same type of DNA testing that eventually caught the Golden State Killer several years back.

And ever since then, police departments have used it to help solve cold cases and help identify previously unidentified people, just like Buckskin Girl. So in 2018, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab, the DNA Doe Project, and another private corporation called the Full Genomes Corporation all worked together on the same team and uploaded her DNA profile to GEDmatch.

And within just four hours of researching, they found out who Buckskin Girl really was. They matched her DNA to the DNA of one of her first cousins, solving an over three decade mystery.

On April 9th, 2018, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab held a press conference announcing that buckskin girl had finally been identified as 21-year-old Marcia King of Little Rock, Arkansas. Just a note here, some reports report her name as Marcia, while most of the other reports remark it as Marcia. So for the sake of this episode or the rest of it, we'll use Marcia.

Now here's everything that we know about her. According to family, Marcia was last seen sometime in 1980. She was born on June 9th, 1959 in Arkansas and regularly hitchhiked before her disappearance.

After she left home back in 1980, her family says they never saw or heard from her again. Even though her family continued to search for her for years, Marcia was never officially reported as a missing person. Almost two years later, in February of 2020, the police announced that after more investigating, they determined that Marcia King frequently hitchhiked in the months leading up to her death.

They believed that she used it as a primary way of transportation. She had ties to both Pittsburgh and Louisville, Kentucky, but had no known ties to Troy, Ohio. Their best guess is that she might have been traveling to Ohio to attend a religious event for The Way, a non-dominational Christian ministry group based in New Knoxville, Ohio, although that's never been confirmed.

They also have eyewitness reports who said that they saw Marcia in Louisville, Kentucky about 14 days before her death. But other than that little bit of information, very little is known about her or her last days alive or who she spent it with. Could she have been murdered by someone that she knew or at least someone that she was involved with? Or could it just have been someone who offered her a ride, a complete stranger?

There are so many people who played a part in Marcia's identification. The original detectives, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab, the DNA Doe Project, the Miami County Coroner Office, the Miami County Sheriff's Office, the Full Genomes Corporation, countless volunteers, and that's just to name a few.

Over the last three decades, hundreds, if not thousands of people worked this case in some way or another. And without forensic genetic genealogy and advanced DNA testing, we still might not know the true identity behind Buckskin Girl. But thanks to forensic science, we now know her as Marcia King. As of today, the investigation has shifted.

we now must figure out who's responsible for this brutal murder. However, according to the latest articles about the case, the police don't have any viable suspects or persons of interest at this time. But that doesn't mean this is the end of the road. Forensic science was used to identify her, and I think it can also be used to catch her killer.

In February 2020, the same time that the police announced more about Marcia's whereabouts before her murder, they also said that hair collected at the crime scene just might be the key to identifying her killer. Advancements in technology now mean that nuclear DNA samples can be retrieved from hair samples that are missing the actual root.

So all the hair collected back at the crime scene, including ones without the root, was now uploaded into CODIS. This essentially means that someday, somewhere down the line, those hair samples, again, even without the root, could be used to identify a promising suspect. Or at least tell us who Marcia might have been spending time with right before she was killed.

But as of right now in November of 2024, the hair collected from the crime scene and uploaded to CODIS hasn't resulted in any suspects or arrests yet. But it could just be a matter of time before we get that fresh new tip.

Addressing this latest announcement, the Miami County Sheriff told reporters, quote, We always have hope to bring justice for homicide victims and their families. We never have, nor we will ever forget, and we'll continually work the case, and as new technologies are developed, we'll review our evidence to learn if it is worth resubmitting, end quote.

For Marcia's family, her identification is still just the first step, and the police say Marcia's mother lived in the same house for over 37 years, didn't change her phone number simply in the hope that her daughter would someday come home. Weeks after her discovery, Marcia was buried as a Jane Doe at Riverside Cemetery in Miami County, Ohio.

But since she's been identified, her family has chosen to keep her there with her stepmom saying, quote, this is Cindy Sussman, quote, it's her family's belief that it had been God's plan for her to be murdered and to remain unidentified for so long.

They believed Marcia was blessed to have died within a community which has shown such consideration and dignity to her while she remained unidentified, end quote. She also described her stepdaughter as a, quote, very trusting young woman, end quote. On July 20th, 2018, a memorial service was held for Marcia King in Troy, Ohio.

At the service, her stepmother and eight surviving family members replaced the headstone simply reading Jane Doe with a headstone with the name Marcia King on it. Anyone with information about the case is asked to submit a tip on the Ohio Attorney General's website. You can also submit information on the Miami County Sheriff's Office website. To share your thoughts on this week's episode, follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.

To find out what I think about this case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode sharing my personal thoughts. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love this show, consider leaving us a positive review. You can also help support the show through Patreon.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

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If you'd like to become a producer of this show, head over to our Patreon page or send me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.