Her skull sat in a Chico State lab for 24 years. Now, she’s finally been identified
A 1973 missing person case has been solved after DNA testing was performed on a skull found more than two decades ago in Nevada County, sheriff’s officials announced Monday evening.
Human remains found in May 1993 have been identified as Joanne Dolly Burmer, who was reported missing nearly 20 years earlier in March 1973, according to a news release by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.
The remains – the top part of a human skull – were analyzed at an anthropology lab at California State University, Chico, following the discovery. But that lab was not yet conducting DNA testing, a new technology at the time.
It wasn’t until August 2017, more than 18 months into a renewed effort to centralize and investigate open missing person cases, that the sheriff’s office discovered that the skull “had never been returned to the Sheriff’s Office Property Unit, entered into the State or National Databases for unidentified remains or submitted for DNA testing,” Monday’s news release said.
The skull was sent to the state California Department of Justice DNA lab in Richmond, where a DNA profile was successfully extracted and positively matched to Burmer’s relatives. Surviving relatives of Burmer have recently been notified of the discovery, the sheriff’s office says.
Burmer, then a 25-year-old Colfax resident, was reported missing March 8, 1973, according to the sheriff’s office. She had been dropped off by friends along Highway 20 near Excelsior Point Road, and was last seen walking an approximate 3-mile hike to an acquaintance’s home in that area, east of Nevada City, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
While the sheriff’s office at the time considered the death to be suspicious, it became a cold case with “no viable leads,” according to the news release.
The skull fragment remained at a Chico State anthropology lab from 1993 until sheriff’s personnel reached out to the university after the August 2017 records review, at which point it was finally retrieved, as reported by The Union newspaper in Grass Valley.
A retired cold-case investigator working for the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office also took reference DNA samples from Burmer’s relatives in late 2002 and early 2003, uploading them to FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). Those profiles did not produce a match with an existing unidentified human remains case in that database.
