For four decades, Princess Doe was known only as a girl whose short life ended brutally.
Her body was dumped in a New Jersey cemetery in 1982, where her slender, 5-foot-2-inch frame was found. was partially decomposed by the time a grave digger found her after discovering a cross and necklace lying nearby. She was beaten to death, and was wearing nothing but a red and white dress and shirt.
A year later, she became the first person to be included in the FBI’s nascent missing persons database, and her identity remains one of the country’s most enduring murder mysteries.
On Friday, investigators revealed that they finally learned her name: Dawn Olanick. She was 17 years old when she was killed; a middle school from Long Island.
A convicted murderer, Arthur Kinlaw, confessed to the crime from prison in 2005, the Warren County prosecutor’s office said. But it was not until this week, after DNA evidence was used to confirm Ms Olanick’s identity, that Mr Kinlaw was charged with her murder.
Residents living near the cemetery in Blairstown, NJ, helped with the burial and care of her grave. A stele inscribed a gentle message – “Princess Doe. Lost at home. Die among strangers. Be remembered by all”. – can often be found surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
Eric Kranz, a retired police lieutenant who was one of the first officers to arrive at the cemetery after her body was found on July 15, 1982, said at the time of her murder, from all over the country and the world.
“You will have people coming from other states just to visit the grave,” Mr. Kranz said.
“People from Ohio. Nebraska. Texas,” he continued. “It’s a pretty amazing thing to see.”
On Friday, relatives of Ms Olanick wore pictures of the young woman pinned to her chest at a news conference as they thanked law enforcement officials for never giving up. Can’t contact them for additional comment.
“They are just pleased that this is over,” Mr. Kranz said in an interview. “Even though it got bad, at least they know how it goes.”
“The whole thing was really a kind of obsession,” he added.
Dawn Olanick was a senior at Connetquot High School in Bohemia, NY, when she disappeared from Long Island, where she lived with her mother and sister. Officials said she died after resisting Kinlaw’s attempt to lure her into prostitution.
“When she refused, he drove her to New Jersey, where he ended up killing her,” prosecutors said in a statement. statement.
The news comes on the 40th anniversary of the day George Kise, a worker at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, found Mrs Olanick’s badly beaten body in a wooded area near a bank A steep embankment leads to a stream. Officials said she was wearing a skirt and short-sleeved top, but no underwear, socks or stockings.
Six months later, she was buried in the same cemeterynot far from where she was first found, in a grave that Mr. Kise had dug.
In 1998, Mr. Kinlaw was charged in New York City with the murder of a girl found in the East River 14 years earlier. At the time, the New York Police Department said he was suspected of operating a prostitution ring in the Bronx.
He is currently serving a sentence in a New York prison for two unrelated first-degree murders, officials said.
Kinlaw, prosecutors said, wrote a letter to authorities in 2005, saying he wanted to confess to the murder of a young woman found in Blairstown.
But he could not be charged until Ms. Olanick was identified, a process that began in 2007, when the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas tested her skeletal DNA.
Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offered financial assistance to retest the DNA, and accurate results were available in April.
Matthew Platkin, acting attorney general of New Jersey, praised the perseverance of the investigators.
“In New Jersey,” he said, “there is no time limit for justice.”
Mr Kranz said the search for Olanick’s killer soon sparked interest in a database dedicated to finding missing children.
“The missing people are not at the top of the list,” he said. “The only people who cared, mostly, at the time were the people who were missing that person.
“Her life, or her death in this case, was very instrumental in moving matters forward.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
