WALLIS, Texas – Forensics experts have identified a woman found decades ago in a river west of Houston.
He never met her. But “Jane Doe” changed Dennis King’s life.
“The only time a person truly dies is when they’re forgotten,” he said.
The Austin County Justice of the Peace has spent the better part of his career wondering who the woman was buried in the corner of the Wallis Cemetery.
“It’s like she became a part of the family,” King said.
Two boys who were fishing found the body in the Brazos River near Sealy back in 1975. Her facial features were unrecognizable and the case went cold quickly.
There was no DNA evidence back then and no matching missing person reports.
King—a rookie investigator at the time—was left with nothing but persistence. The mystery haunted him for decades.
Then, in 2009, he scrounged up county money to have the woman’s body exhumed and for a sketch artist to draw a picture of what she might have looked like.
Then last year came a bizarre twist.
Reports of a mass grave in Liberty County turned out to be a hoax. But the story was enough to get a curious woman in Tennessee to Google missing women in Texas.
She found the sketch.
That woman was the sister-in-law of Gloria Faye Stringer—a 22-year-old single mom who’d disappeared from her Texas City home almost 37 years ago.
“It took a long time for it to soak in,” King said. “That it was actually her.”
And if that wasn’t odd enough: the long-lost relative left a voicemail for investigators on the same day they’d gathered at the Wallis gravesite to pray.
It was June 7, 2011 – 36 years after the body had been found.
“A lot of angels got to get together to make that happen,” said Scott Minyard, an investigator with Austin County Sheriff’s Office who joined the case a few years ago.
Now, detectives are working to figure out how and why she died. But for one man, the biggest mystery is solved.
“I just wanted to know who she was,” Dennis King said.
And now, he does.
She is “Jane Doe” no more.
