Chicago murder victim identified 50 years after she was found in box in Indiana cornfield
A murder victim found in a box found in an Indiana cornfield has been identified – 50 years on from the shock discovery, investigators announced this week. The woman – who had been shot in the back of her head – was named as 69-year-old Jane Hart – who was born in 1906, the DNA Doe Project revealed Wednesday.Hart, a housekeeper, was the daughter of a Croatian woman, who emigrated to the US the previous year before giving birth in Ohio.She then moved to Ohio to Chicago – before vanishing from public databases in the 1970s. Hart’s body was found in a box by cornfield farmer Norman Skoog and his 16-year-old son Curtis on Oct.8 1976 – and at the time authorities believed the box had only been in the field for around 12 hours. She was wearing a double knit pant suit, a green jacket, and slacks — and there was a smashed vial of perfume near her remains, the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported. Investigators suspected the woman inside had been killed a week before the box was found.She was found with a large scar due to a radical mastectomy. The scar was about eight centimeters in length, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.But Harold Konzelman, who was the Benton County coroner at the time, told the Journal and Courier on Oct.
9 1976 “We have so few clues to go on” and authorities never tracked down a suspect.Speculation also flourished on the circumstances leading up to her death.“As for theories?” Matt Rosenbarger, the current Benton County coroner who helped exhume her body in 2019, said.“There’s the wide variety that everyone has.
Possibly a mob hit? “Was it one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time things? Who knows, for sure? We just know we had no missing cases around here at the time.And someone went way out in the middle of Benton County to leave her.” Curtis Skoog even speculated that someone may have traveled on a helicopter and dropped the box. Locals never saw a car in the area or so...