How this headline may connect to industries in Arizona. Technical scores are below — click any ? for what a metric means.
Rural Arizona rabbi leads charge to identify Jewish Jane Doe murdered more than 35 years ago.At the end of a long row of graves in the Mountain View Cemetery in Kingman, in northwestern Arizona, rests the remains of a woman known only as Mohave County Jane Doe.On the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1989, a couple walking their dog in the desert, about a mile south of Kingman, came upon a body hidden in the brush.She wore earrings and red nail polish on her fingers and toes.Markings in the dirt showed there may have been a scuffle and that the body was dragged to the area.Several days later, her blouse and sunglasses were also found nearby.The couple contacted the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), and an autopsy revealed that the woman was likely between 25 and 30 years old and had been brutally beaten to death.It was estimated that she had been dead for three months before her body was found.Her fingerprints did not match anything in state or national databases, and no one claimed to have known her, so she was laid to rest under a gravestone that read, “Jane Doe 89-4351; Found 11.24.1989.” The case went cold, but as genetic tracing technology evolved, Lori Miller, lead investigator of the cold-case unit, recently circled back to Mohave County’s mysterious Jane Doe.Her DNA was sent to a lab in Texas that found her to be 96% Ashkenazi, the daughter of two Jewish parents.MCSO released Jane Doe’s Jewish heritage with the hope that members of the Jewish community would come forward with further leads or information to identify her.Unfortunately, though Mohave County is the fifth-largest county in the United States by land area, it’s only sparsely populated, with an estimated 1,500 Jewish residents across the rural population centers of Kingman, Bullhead City and Lake Havasu City.The county only has one rabbi: Rabbi Mendel Super, who moved to Lake Havasu City in 2022 with his wife, Itta, to establish western Arizona’s first Chabad center.Chabad of Lake Havasu City now hosts regular participants from Bullhead City, Kingman and other small communities in the vicinity.Super read MCSO’s notice that they were seeking help identifying a long-dead Jewish woman, and he took it upon himself to lend a hand as the only rabbi in the county.“I began by spreading the word as widely as I could,” Super said.“It’s been covered in Israel and in New York-area Yiddish publications, and that’s something the county can’t really do on its own.” Super also visited the grave and recited a few Psalms.“I have visited her grave in Kingman, and I said some prayers there, which I’m sure is the first time that any Jew actually came and prayed for her soul.” In response to his outreach efforts, Super recently received a “very strong lead” from a family in Brooklyn.“They read my story, and they gave me some information about a loved one of theirs who had disappeared around the same time,” he said.“There were a lot of facts that pointed to it being her.Right now, they’re just waiting for DNA test results to come back.” Super expects the family’s DNA test results to be made available in the next three or four months, and Jane Doe’s DNA is simultaneously being studied at Ramapo College of New Jersey by investigative genetic genealogists.Her fingerprints were also sent to Israeli authorities with help from ZAKA, an Israeli organization that handles search, rescue and disaster victim identification.The difficulty in tracking Ashkenazi heritage remains the largest obstacle.“It sounds a little bit counterintuitive because you’d think that if you have managed to isolate this Jane Doe to a relatively small community then it should make things easier, but in fact it can make it a lot harder,” Super said.Jews with Ashkenazi heritage often take an ancestry test and learn that they are closely related to a Jewish celebrity, but in reality, Super said this is usually untrue.There are many theories about the origin of Ashkenazi Jews, but most agree that they originated from Levantine populations in the Middle East and southern European groups in Italy, forming a community of about 350 families around 1,000 years ago in the Rhineland of western Germany and northeast France.“All the descendants of these families just kept marrying each other until today, so we have a lot of shared DNA,” Super said.In DNA testing, algorithms measure the amount of shared DNA between two people using a unit of genetic measurement called centimorgans (cM).However, according to Super, “all of that breaks down when you’re talking about Ashkenazi Jews because there’s a lot of shared DNA that comes from a really long time ago.If this were somebody who was not Jewish, they might have 1,000 or so DNA matches.When you’re talking about someone who’s an Ashkenazi Jew, there could be more than 200,000 DNA matches, and then to sift through that and actually try to build a family tree could be incredibly time consuming.” Most consumer DNA testing platforms do not share information with law enforcement, so if any Ashkenazi Jew wants to help find Jane Doe’s identity, Super recommends uploading their DNA profiles to FamilyTreeDNA or GEDmatch and giving their consent to allow their results to be accessible to law enforcement.Another way to help would be contacting Super at rabbi@chabadhavasu.org or MCSO’s Special Investigation Unit at 928- 753-0753 ext.4408 (reference DR# 89-4351) with any information on a female Jew who went missing or lost contact sometime around 1989 and was never reported missing.