LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Patricia Eleanor Greenwood, born in 1948, had been missing for exactly 43 years before she was identified by a forensic genealogy team to be a body found in 1980 in Sandusky, Ohio. The woman, who had lived in Traverse City, Saginaw and Bay City, was a Jane Doe who was found partially decomposed near Cedar Point Road on March 30, 1980. Her body was found on the shores Lake Erie and she was believed to have been murdered.

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Ohio law enforcement didn’t know whose body they had found until March 30th of this year. They also didn’t know much about her except that she was Caucasian, between the ages of 20 and 30, she was about five feet, five inches tall and weighed 120 lbs. She was also wearing a light yellow size-12 “disco style” dress.

After decades of the case being cold, agents with the U.S. Marshals Service revived the case after finding an old teletype from 1980 in another missing person’s cold case file.

It was with the help of funding from the non-profit group, Porchlight Project, that solved the mystery of who Greenwood was. Porchlight is a group that is dedicated to funding DNA testing for cold cases. Their board of directors reviews cases every quarter and typically focus on providing services to one case at a time for a total of 3-4 cases a year. In 2021, they offered to completely fund the effort to discover Jane Doe’s identity.

According to the Morning Journal, Sandusky Police Department Detective Eric Costante sent a tissue sample to Bode Technology, a forensics lab which works closely with the Porchlight Project. Teresa Vreeland of Bode Technology said, “Bode received the skeletal remains in late 2021 at our Lorton, Virginia facility, and began the critical and sometimes challenging DNA extraction process. After having successfully extracted suitable DNA, high-density SNP testing was completed, which provided the starting point for the Bode FGG team. The Forensic Genealogy team utilized public databases, along with the other evidentiary information to generate a single strong lead for the Sandusky Police Department.”

Genealogy work by Bode led to a family tree with the 12 children, all given up for adoption in Michigan. Detective Costante spoke to a surviving brother who said he hadn’t heard from his sister Patricia since around the time that the body had been found. Discussions with a sister revealed that Greenwood might have been a sex worker at the time she disappeared.

Vreeland said about the discovery, “The Bode Forensic Genealogy team is honored to have supported the Sandusky Police, Cuyahoga County and Porchlight Project in this case and excited that it led to a successful identification of Patricia.” She continued, “This case, and similar cases, highlight the successful outcomes that can happen when advanced technology combined with the expertise and tools available to genetic genealogy are applied to cold forensic cases.”

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Porchlight Project board member Nic Edwards said, “Being able to give Patricia Greenwood her name back is the first step in finding justice that she so deserves.”

U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said in a news release, “The dedication and commitment of our partners in the Avon Lake Police Department, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, the Erie County Sheriff and Coroner’s Office, the Sandusky Police Department, Bode and the Porchlight Project solved this 43-year mystery and their outstanding teamwork brought closure to the family of Patricia Greenwood nearly five decades later.”

Now that Greenwood’s body has been identified, the difficult work of finding a potential murderer and uncovering answers about what happened to Patricia begin.

Police are asking anyone from Michigan or Ohio who may remember Greenwood and was around her at the time of her disappearance to contact the Sandusky Police at 419-627-5980.