Laguna Beach ‘Jane Doe’ identified after more than four decades

The identity of a woman killed in a hit-and-run incident in Laguna Beach more than four decades ago has been released.

Authorities have named Virginia Irene Nelson, originally from Yonkers, New York, as the decedent from a fatal hit-and-run incident that occurred along Pacific Coast Highway in 1982.

Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators Robert Taft and Lauren Felix collaborated with DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that works on cases involving unidentified remains. Since being established in 2017, the group has worked on more than 250 cases.

Margaret Press, a co-founder and acting executive director of DNA Doe Project, said in a phone interview on Friday that the timeliness with which Nelson was found following her death helped with the identification process.

“There were actually pieces of [human] tissue that had been retained in what we call histology blocks,” Press said. “Those are little paraffin-embedded blocks that contain the tissue. In fact, that’s all that was left of her, if I recall. Those blocks were sent to a lab we work with, Genologue in Atlanta, Georgia.

“They then extracted her DNA from those little bits of tissue. We only need a few cells, actually, and then that DNA was put through a sequencer. It was sequenced, so that the entire genome was extracted from those cells, so a big digital file, three billion base pairs in your DNA. That digital file was then processed down to a more manageable size that contains the information we need to compare with other people.”

Press said the file was uploaded to multiple DNA databases, including GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. The results revealed people who shared some DNA with Nelson.

“Those people could have been separate cousins, third cousins, whatever,” Press said. “We then figured out who they were and built out their family trees, knowing that Virginia would be somewhere in their trees. We just had to go back far enough to find common ancestors and then build forward generation by generation, looking for some female in that tree that was not accounted for, whose death was never recorded.”

Nelson was born in Jacksonville, Fla. She was age 46 at the time of her death, and she had last been known to be living in Fresno. The hit-and-run incident occurred on Jan. 30, 1982; a passing motorist discoverd the body along the side of the road. Investigators at the scene noted the deceased had died only hours beforehand and estimated that she was between the ages of 50 and 65.

A team of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists noted that Nelson’s paternal grandparents were Scandinavian immigrants to the United States. Laguna Beach Jane Doe’s DNA results suggested substantial heritage from the region.

“Based on the estimated ancestry, we knew that Virginia had significant Scandinavian ancestry,” Taed Wynnell, who worked on the case, said in a statement. “We were able to quickly identify a few matches which also had Swedish ancestry, but finding the connection between them proved difficult.”

After finding multiple DNA matches, Nelson’s name was presented to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Investigators contacted a living family member of hers, compared their DNA profile to that of Laguna Beach Jane Doe, and the results confirmed Nelson as the previously unidentified woman.