Their Work Gives a Life to Jane Doe

Jane Doe No. 18-02 was discovered two years ago, when an unleashed dog and its owner found her weathered, toothless skull at the bottom of a heavily wooded wash in the San Bernardino Mountains just off California Highway 330.

Hampered by dense undergrowth and steep terrain, sheriff’s search teams recovered her femur, cracked pelvic bone, and a vertebra scattered in the brush near the skull -- but there was nothing to reveal Jane’s identity.

Then, last autumn, the Old fire reduced the scrub oaks in the creek wash to ashes, priming the area for bone-hunting by David Van Norman and Alexis Gray, who handle Doe cases for the San Bernardino County coroner’s office.

“I don’t mean to say I’m glad these areas burned, but fires are an amazing opportunity to look for remains,” said Van Norman, a supervising deputy coroner.

He and Gray, the county’s forensic anthropologist, have made a mission of stalking skeletons. The pair usually hunt on their own time, venturing up into the canyons and out into the desert to follow leads and hunches.Their goal is to return San Bernardino County’s more than 300 unidentified dead to their families. Together, Van Norman and Gray have identified 15 Does, but Gray’s morgue workroom is lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets packed with neatly numbered cardboard boxes containing hundreds of bone sets dating to 1937.

“To most people, it’s just a number on a box,” said Van Norman, who keeps the Does’ paper files jammed into three file drawers next to his desk. “To us, every one has a whole history,” he said.

Above his desk, Van Norman has a large map of San Bernardino County dotted with red flags marking where bones or other clues have been found. One flag, tacked along the winding path of Highway 330 from San Bernardino to Running Springs, marks where the dog found Jane Doe No. 18-02 in late 2002. No local missing-persons reports match what was found, and nothing on her bones suggests how she might have died, or how long the skeleton was in the brush.

Gray’s working hypothesis is that the woman, who was between 25 and 50 years old, was dumped over the edge of a brush-covered embankment along the highway, 60 feet above the creek bottom. As her body decomposed, Gray believes, the skull and leg bone dropped through the bushes to the rocky wash below.

Jane Doe No. 18-02 was the second Doe in 10 years to be found in the canyons along Highway 330.

The first, No. 99-5544, was found in September 1999 by workers laying pipe behind a small outcropping about 120 feet away from the highway, about 10 miles up the mountain road.

Van Norman said her bones were scattered in a way that suggests her body was dropped where it was found, not thrown from the roadside or dragged downhill by animals.

Analysis of her remains suggested she was 25 to 50 years old, and may have been Latina or Asian, but revealed nothing conclusive about how she died, Gray said.

The remains of other women have been found along the same stretch of Highway 330 in the last 20 years and identified, Van Norman said. He can only guess at how many women there have been, because files from before 1995 aren’t compatible with the coroner’s current computer system.

“I know there have been others,” he said, frustrated. “But I just can’t say exactly how many or when.”

The only one whose history he knows is Rachel Lopez, a 34-year-old mother from Los Angeles whose lower torso, with a tattoo that read “Lynette,” was found by hikers in October 1992. It was about 20 feet from a highway call box. Her mutilated arms and upper torso were found soon after, also near call boxes along the highway.

Lopez was reported missing by her family in Los Angeles several days before her remains were found. According to news reports, she was last seen by her then-13-year-old son leaving home on an errand wearing a white tank top and jeans.

She was identified by the tattoo, but nothing about her remains indicated what killed her. San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies said her murder was never solved.

Because they have so little information about these women and their deaths, Van Norman and Gray can’t say whether the cases are the work of a serial killer or coincidences. “The only thing that ties them together is where they were found,” Van Norman said.

One recent Saturday, he and Gray went up to the mountains to look for bones and clues before mudslides, snow, or new plant growth obscured the landscape again.

When they go bone-hunting, Van Norman, a high-strung 46-year-old who served two tours in the Army, carries a blue rucksack packed with a digital camera, a global positioning unit, a compass, a laser distance-meter, a short-handled shovel and a few plastic bags. He also carries a pocketful of latex gloves and a walking stick, which he uses for balance, pointing and poking around in the dirt.

Gray, a lanky 32-year-old with cat’s-eye glasses and a jet-black bob, carries only her badge, a jacket emblazoned with a large “Coroner/Investigator” patch and a tube of lipstick.

Their search produced no human bones, but they did find a dog skull, a deer jaw, a deer hoof, and a bear skull.

“We know there’s more there,” Van Norman said. “Sometimes you just feel you’re close to it -- you can just feel it.”