An elderly Chicago woman who went missing nearly 40 years ago has finally been found.
Using DNA evidence, authorities have identified a body recovered along the shoreline of Lake Michigan near New Buffalo, Michigan in April 1988 as Dorothy Glanton, 71, of Chicago, the Michigan State Police announced this week.
“This identification brings closure to a family that has wondered for nearly four decades what happened to their loved one,” said John Moore, the lead detective on the case.
Glanton was reported missing after leaving her Chicago home on Dec. 9, 1987, the MSP said in a statement. They said despite “extensive investigative efforts” at the time, the identity and cause of death of the “New Buffalo Jane Doe” couldn’t be determined.
Assessments in 1988 suggested that the woman was a white female in her 40s or 50s. But in 2023, when investigators reopened the case and enlisted help from the nonprofit DNA Doe Project, the genetic genealogy process showed that Glanton was actually African American and in her early 70s, police said.
“Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes were relatively common in the era prior to DNA analysis and the widespread use of forensic anthropology,” the DNA Doe Project said.
There were a number of steps to reaching this breakthrough, the organization said. It first generated a DNA profile for the then-unidentified woman and uploaded it to two genetic genealogy databases. A team of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists then worked to build a family tree.
They said, as is common with cases of missing Black people, genealogy records become difficult to find during the period of enslavement. But they eventually found the correct family and determined Glanton had been born and raised in Alabama. She and her family moved to Chicago in the 1920s during the Great Migration, a mass movement of Black people from the rural south to the urban North.
“At first, we thought we were looking for a daughter of Dorothy, based on the expected age of the deceased,” said team leader Lisa Needler. “When we narrowed our search directly to Dorothy, we were surprised to learn she would have been in her 70s at the time she was missing.”
When investigators sought proof of life for Glanton they found a “heartbreaking clue” — a newspaper advertisement from a relative of Glanton’s elderly mother placed in August 1988. It said “your mother is ill, lonely & afraid” and “she needs you desperately,” said co-team leader Robin Espensen.
“Unfortunately, Dorothy’s body had already been found a few months beforehand,” Espensen said.
