A Mohave County Rabbi’s Search for a Murdered Jewish Woman’s Identity

by Mendel Super – chabad.org

Under the rural northwestern Arizona scorching sun, I trekked through the dusty red rows of the cemetery, looking for a grave with no name.

The investigator had told me that the deceased person I was looking for rested at the end of a row in the county section. I walked past Jane and John Does, a small marker of one Ira Lebowitz, who passed away in 1997, and other indigent burials in the county section of Mountain View Cemetery in Kingman. I paused for a moment at one marker with some matchbox cars placed on it, a memory, I assumed, of a little boy.

Then I found her.

Jane Doe 89-4351

Found 11.24.1989

I recited some Psalms, likely the first time Jewish prayers were said at her resting place, noting that the silence of the vast desert belies the secrets beneath its surface.

What was I doing here?

Let me explain: I’m the only rabbi in Mohave County, Arizona, the fifth largest county in the country geographically, but isolated and sparsely populated. We’ve been here since 2022, when my wife, Itta, and I moved to the county’s largest city, Lake Havasu City, to open the first Chabad center in the region. Today, Jews from Havasu, Kingman, Bullhead City and the smaller towns in between are active in the Jewish community. The city’s former Reform temple is now home to Chabad of Lake Havasu City.

Early on, I found myself occupied with what Judaism calls a meit mitzvah. The Torah teaches that it is a mitzvah of the highest order to ensure that a fellow Jew with no family is given a full Jewish burial and dignity in death.

Maimonides explains that even the High Priest, who was prohibited from attending his own family’s funerals, was required to take it upon himself to personally bury a meit mitzvah, an abandoned Jewish body that had no one to attend to its proper burial.

Now, I was involved in yet another case, but one I’d never expected.

Until she is identified and can have a Jewish burial, Jane Doe's grave is marked with a number. — Until she is identified and can have a Jewish burial, Jane Doe’s grave is marked with a number.

On a Friday in 1989, the day after Thanksgiving, a couple walking their dog in the desert made a gruesome discovery in the brush just over a mile off the highway south of Kingman. It was a body. Deputies from the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office arrived and found that it was a woman. Markings in the dirt indicated a scuffle, and foot tracks showed she had been dragged to the area where she was discovered. A single tire mark was also evident.

The autopsy revealed she was between 25-30, and had been brutally beaten to death. Besides the red nail polish on her fingers and toes, her earrings, and a handmade blouse and sunglasses found several days later in the brush, investigators had little to go on. Newspaper reports and law enforcement bulletins provided no meaningful leads. Fingerprints, difficult to obtain from her body by that point, brought no hits from state and national databases.

And so for decades, the young woman with blonde hair remained known only as Mohave County Jane Doe, resting in a grave at the edge of the cemetery. All that was known about her sat in a box on a shelf at the sheriff’s office.

But in recent months, there was a breakthrough in the long-cold case. Genetic work done by a Texas lab showed that her DNA indicated she was 96 percent Ashkenazi Jew, the daughter of two Jewish parents. Her profile is now being studied by investigative genetic genealogists at New Jersey’s Ramapo College, who will try to build her family tree and discover her name.

Ashkenazi heritage is particularly difficult to work with because the population pool is so limited, explained Adina Newman, one of the few investigative genetic genealogists who specializes in Ashkenazi DNA, when I reached out to her. The challenges are compounded by law enforcement’s limited access to databases. Authorities can only access GEDMatch and Family Tree DNA platforms, and only view trees of users who opt-in to law enforcement access, something she says many people are wary of.

After reading a press release from the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, I reached out to Sheriff Doug Schuster, a friend of our community. The sheriff put me in touch with the lead investigator of the cold case unit, Lori Miller. I met with her and told her I’d do anything I could do to help.

“For the first time in six years of working on this case, I’m optimistic,” the investigator told me.

We discussed some new theories, and with the help of ZAKA, an Israel-based international organization that works to identify and recover the remains of Jews killed in terrorist attacks and accidents, we were able to send the fingerprints to Israeli authorities.

There is more work that needs to be done, and I share this story with the hope that someone reading it might be able to help.

First off, if you have a family member or know of a young woman who disappeared in 1989, please reach out to the Mohave County Sheriff’s office (or Chabad of Lake Havasu, if you’re more comfortable). Second, please consider uploading your DNA profile to GEDMatch to give investigators more Ashkenazi DNA to work with and help build Jane’s family tree.

The upcoming holiday of Shavuot, which begins on Thursday night, May 21, and ends on Saturday evening, teaches that the Torah was given to the Jewish people only when they stood together “as one people with one heart” at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Six hundred thousand Jews stood at Sinai when the Torah was given. The Zohar teaches that each soul represents one letter of the 600,000 letters of the Torah scroll. If even one letter is missing, a Torah scroll is incomplete. The Jewish people are one big family. And as long as one of its daughters is lying in the desert, her name a mystery, it is incomplete.

Perhaps you can help.