A woman's mission for "Jane Doe" leads to exhumation in Blue Earth

As I was combing through the NamUs database for my Sunday column about the ever-rarer phenomenon of unidentified bodies, one of the entries led me to a web site devoted to one of Minnesota's most unusual cases. Thirteen years ago, Deborah Anderson learned from a police officer she knows about the mystery of the "Jane Doe" buried in Blue Earth, after she was found, likely strangled, in a ditch in Faribault County in 1980. Anderson works in IT at Minnesota State University Mankato and has no connection to the case. But she has made it her personal mission to discover this woman's identity.

What makes this case remarkable is that someone has already admitted to killing her. Robert Leroy Nelson, a former Minnesota State Trooper, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1989 and is currently imprisoned in Texas, serving his sentence concurrently with a separate conviction of aggravated sexual assault on a child. He claimed to have picked the woman up from the side of the highway, strangled her with a cord and left her in a ditch.

Her age is estimated at 20 to 35, she stood 5 foot 3 and weighed about 128 pounds. She had brown hair, an overbite and a pierced left ear. "Jane Doe" was buried in Riverside Cemetery and that's where she lay, undisturbed and unnamed, for more than 34 years.

On Aug. 14, Anderson watched while the concrete vault containing the woman's remains was lifted out of the ground (photo above). Local and state investigators hope to use improved DNA analysis and other technology to try to identify her, and they credit Anderson for pushing them to take this step. "I still can't believe it happened," Anderson said. "I've wanted it for so long." Now comes the next wait, as the remains are shipped from laboratory to laboratory before the reinterment in a grave that, Anderson hopes, will someday no longer be marked "unidentified."