HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Detectives call her “Jenny,” an otherwise unidentified murdered woman. Hunters found her partially nude body on Oct. 20, 1967, near 52nd Avenue and Fillmore Street, in Blendon Township.
Police describe her as black female, between 16 and 22 years old, standing 5-foot-7 tall, weighing between 90 and 100 pounds when she died — murdered by someone who used blunt-force trauma and strangulation to end her life.
Investigators found she’d died from what Ottawa County Sheriff’s Capt. Mark Bennett said she’d been dead between three and seven days when the hunters found her body.
“This poor victm has been in this grave since 1967, unmarked, unidentified,” he said, adding it’s important to give “at least some closure to a family that lost a loved one 53 years ago is part of the process.”
He’s asking people from the general public to stay away from the exhumation. The cemetery will be closed to the public, he said.
“Even though it’s 53 years later, it’s still somewhat of a crime scene, and secondly out of resposect for the deceased and all others in that cemetery
He said he expected the exhumation to take “a few hours.”
though genealogy websites, detectives are hoping to connect her to a family who may know more. He said she has a few identifiable characteristics, included a second tooth growing behind another. Over the years, he said, that kind of information helped police rule out other missing women, whose families had contacted police.
On Wednesday, police will exhume her remains from the Blendon Township unmarked grave
“We just weren’t able to make a correlation between a missing person and this particular victim,” he said.
Bennett said his office has “a number of cold cases,” including the Deb Polinsky investigation, but the cold-case team typically works on one case at a time. He said “Jenny’s case” benefitted from the pandemic, because detectives were able to review files, looking for best-chance candidates.
Ottawa County detectives have shared case information on Jenny with police agencies in Grand Rapids, Detroit, Muskegon County, Michigan State Police, and the FBI, as well as with police in surrounding states.
Without any leads on the case in 1967, “Jenny” was buried on Nov. 3, 1967, at Blendon Cemetery, after a service by an area pastor, Bennett said,
The investigation remained open, with the Sheriff’s Office Cold Case team adding Jenny’s information to the national database NAMUS, in 2018. NamUS aims at identifying missing persons and garnering clues to unsolved homicide cases.
In May 2020, the cold-case team looked into possibily exhuming the unidentifiedvictim’s remains in hopes of extracting DNA
In June, detectives got a disinterment order from the 58th District Court.
By sharing the DNA on geneaology websites and elsewhere, Bennett said, police may be able to find relatives of the victim and get details on her life.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is providing resources, including forensic anthropology, to further this investigation.
Investigators have now assembled a team from the funeral home, the cemetery, the medical examiner’s office, a Michigan State Police human remains analyst, the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children anthropology consultants, and Michigan State University.
Bennett shared a computer-generated image of what the victim is thought to have looked like at the time of her death in 1967.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact Silent Observer at (877) 88-SILENT or mosotips.com.
