In March 1976, Stephanie Sampell was at her home in Boca Raton, Florida. Her mother, Dorothy Appel, had just moved the family of eight children there from Pompano Beach.
The free-spirited 15-year-old approached her mother with plans for a fun weekend trip down to the Florida Keys. When Dorothy asked who Stephanie would be travelling with, she told her it was some ‘new friends’.
Because she frequently left home or ran away for extended periods, Dorothy did not try to stop her or even request contact details. She assumed her daughter would be back eventually.
Stephanie walked out the front door without taking any significant belongings or luggage and was never seen again. No one ever established whether the girl hitched a ride, nor the real identity of the person who picked her up.
Nine months later, on December 30, 1976, a camper from Lake Worth was setting up a temporary site at the Gaines Rock Pit area. Just as they were settling down, a hippie-looking man approached them, offering to show them a human skeleton for a quarter.
The campers were mortified and immediately declined, but they reported the incident to the Monroe County sheriff’s office. Detective Richard Roth of the sheriff’s office was dispatched to investigate.
He hiked into the brush and officially located the scattered remains. At the scene, he also found a single item of clothing: a black T-shirt.
It was knotted so that the detective believed it had been tied around the person’s head, possibly as a blindfold. The hair was also tangled in the knot.
The bones were photographed where they were found and collected. Dr A. J Fernandez, the medical examiner, found no signs of violent death.
The victim’s cause of death was also listed as unknown. However, Detective Roth claimed he had always suspected foul play. Considering there was no evidence to identify any suspects, the investigation stalled almost immediately.
Dental records were also compared to law enforcement reports on missing women across the country, but the search did not produce any results. The remains were then stored in a cardboard box at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in Key West.
It would be three decades before these remains were linked to Stephanie Sempell.
Reaction at Home
Because she was widely known as a chronic runaway, her empty bedroom did not signal any danger after the weekend trip. A household of eight children was also very busy, and Dorothy was managing it as a single mother.
Though as the days turned into weeks, the atmosphere shifted to anxiety. They knew that Stephanie tended to be independent, and she had even spent the previous summers working at a family hardware store in New York on her own.
But she had never before cut off communication so completely. Once the timeline stretched past the normal, Dorothy and the other children realised that something was wrong.
The family logged her disappearance with law enforcement, but the runaway label often pinned on teens meant they never officially submitted a missing person report. Hence, the household was left in limbo with no active police investigation.
A Name Without a File
In 1976, many parts of the Florida Keys were sparsely populated. Grassy Key, at Mile Marker 55, sat at the midpoint of the chain.
The place where the bones were found was frequented by campers and partygoers. It was a part of the Keys where transient people came and went without notice.
No one was keeping tabs on those who arrived or left. This context matters for understanding why, even though Stephanie made a traceable statement that she was going to the Keys with Friends, the bones were never connected to her months later.
The bones in the cardboard box in Key West had no name or case file that linked them to a missing girl. There was also no way to generate one from the other direction.
Investigators could not find the girl without a missing person record or alert. The bones could not have been connected to Stephanie because there was no alert out in the first place.
The case froze in a bureaucratic loophole until a phone call changed everything.
Kim Quinn Makes the Call
Stephanie’s sister, Kim Quinn, began looking into the status of her case in 1997. By then, Kim was 50 years old, and twenty-one years had passed since Stephanie had left for the Keys.
Kim began a campaign to have Stephanie identified. But the more significant breakthroughs came when she started making inquiries to law enforcement and discovered the gap that proved to be the blockage.
When Kim began making inquiries, she found there was no official missing persons report in existence. Her sister was not in the nationwide missing child database.
With no official police records, zero active investigators, and no paper trail to follow, Kim decided to look for spiritual solutions. These were psychics that she contacted to get a location on her sister.
None of the psychics or the mediums Kim consulted ever successfully directed her to the Grassy Key or gave actionable clues. It was ultimately solved by bureaucratic persistence and science.
The DNA Sequence of Events
In November 2001, the Monroe County case evidence became relevant again. The mother of a girl who went missing in 1974, in the Keys, became convinced that these bones belonged to her daughter.
Detectives took DNA samples from her and tried to match them with DNA obtained from the bones found in Grassy Key. It was not a match.
But what this did was enter the Grassy Key bones’ DNA profile into the FBI Mitochondrial DNA Missing Persons Database. The hope was that sometime later, the database would help identify the victim.
Kim Quinn’s inquiries in 1997 also resulted in Stephanie’s information finally being entered into the missing child database. The pieces were all there; it just needed a connecting factor.
Once her name was registered, state investigators at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reached out to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. They asked the cold case experts to review newly entered files against remains found in Florida over the previous years.
The investigators also used forensic tools to create a visual reconstruction of Grassy Key and Jane Doe, showing how she would have appeared if she were alive then. This would allow them to compare Stephanie’s face to the unidentified remains.
Gerry Nance, an investigator with the NCMEC, visually compared Stephanie’s traits and facial structure with the forensic profile of Jane Doe from Grassy Key and determined that the resemblance was striking. This visual match provided investigators with the necessary probable cause.
In 2003, the NCMEC called the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office to report a potential hit. This prompted the detectives to contact Stephanie’s mother for the definitive cheek DNA swab, which legally closed the case in August 2004.
Detective Jim Giumenta from Palm Beach County and FBI Agent Chuck Wilcox helped in getting the DNA samples from Dorothy Appel.
The mtDNA testing used long bone samples from the remains and from samples taken from Dorothy and Kim to complete the identification. Sheriff Rick Roth, who had investigated the scene as a detective in 1976, released a statement,
“New technologies, better networking between law enforcement databases, and a caring family have allowed us to finally identify this body as that of Stephanie Sempell. This investigation is still active, and now that we have an identification, we hope we can go on to find out why Stephanie was found dead on Grassy Key 28 years ago.”
Suspected Homicide
In 1976, the medical examiner ruled the cause of death of the remains as unknown. By 2004, this classification had not changed, though the framing around it had shifted.
It remains undetermined. The investigators suspect homicide, but there is no physical evidence to support this case.
The factors that point to homicide as opposed to an accidental death are also circumstantial, but they are difficult to dismiss. Remains of a 15-year-old girl were found scattered across a wooded area.
Roth never believed the death was accidental, though, because the events do not align with that.
The absence of a full skeleton at the site and the scattering of the bones are consistent with a body that was moved or even dismembered. However, decomposition and animal activity within the Florida environment could also account for the scattering of the bones.
What cannot be accounted for, though, is the company that Stephanie was travelling with. To date, no one has been questioned in connection with the case.
This is a significant gap because it is difficult to assess the likelihood that she was a victim of those around her. It has also been several decades since the fact occurred, so it would be difficult to identify the exact individuals unless someone comes forward.
The Case is Still Open
Stephanie Sempell would be 65 years old in November 2025. As of today, the case remains unsolved.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Department has continued to work on cold cases using DNA technology, closing decades-old cases in the Florida Keys in recent years.
The tools available to investigators, including forensic genealogy, expanded DNA databases, and digital cross-referencing, are now more powerful than any available in 1976. However, no arrests have been made, and no suspects have been publicly named.
Detective Sergeant Patricia Daily, who headed the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office homicide division at the time of the identification, stated, “Somebody knows her and knows what happened to her back in 1976. We want that person, or those people, to call us. A young girl lost her life, and both she and her family deserve to have some type of explanation for that.”
If you’re interested in similar stories on unsolved mysteries and heroic escapes, explore our articles on the Disappearances of Lauren Spierer and the Tromp Family.