On the morning of November 10, 1979, a farmer in Caledonia, New York, walked into his field and noticed something red near the ground. It looked like fabric. He thought it might be a trespassing hunter. What he found was the body of a teenage girl, fully dressed, face down in the dirt.
She had been shot twice—once in the head and once in the back. There were no signs of sexual assault. Her clothes were undisturbed, but her pockets were turned inside out. There was nothing on her that could tell police who she was.
Her age wasn’t obvious. Somewhere between 13 and 19, the medical examiner guessed. She was about 5’3″, 120 pounds, with light brown hair and brown eyes. Her toenails were painted coral pink. Her face showed acne. She had freckles across her shoulders. Her third molars hadn’t come in yet. There were cavities in several of her molars, but she’d never had dental work.
The scene offered few clues. Blood on the roadside suggested she was shot first while standing or walking near the field. Then she was dragged into the corn rows. That’s where she was shot again, this time in the back. It rained that night. Heavy enough to destroy most forensic evidence. Whatever traces her killer left—footprints, fingerprints, fibers—were washed away.
Her clothing raised questions. She wore a red windbreaker made by Auto Sports Products Inc., with black racing stripes down the arms. It was a promotional item, likely handed out at a racing event. The trail went cold there. The jacket couldn’t be traced. Underneath she wore a boy’s multicolored plaid shirt, tan corduroy pants, blue knee socks, and a 32C bra. Her shoes were brown with ripple soles. Around her neck was a silver necklace with three turquoise stones. It looked handmade. The style was common in the American Southwest.
She also had two metal keychains clipped to her belt loops. One was shaped like a heart, engraved with the phrase “He who holds the key can open my heart.” The other was the key. These weren’t specialty items. Investigators found that vending machines along the New York State Thruway sold them in the late 1970s. Still, no one came forward to say they had given them to her or traveled with her.
Her stomach held a meal of sweet corn, canned ham, and potatoes. Investigators suspected it came from a local diner. A waitress in Lima, New York, said she remembered serving a girl matching that description. The girl had been eating with a man. He was white, wore black wire-rimmed glasses, and drove a tan station wagon. He paid the bill. No one ever identified him.
There were more questions than answers. Who was she? Where had she come from? Why had no one reported her missing?
Police called her Caledonia Jane Doe. The public shortened it to Cali Doe. She was buried under that name in Greenmount Cemetery in Dansville. Her gravestone read “Unidentified Girl.” For the next 35 years, that’s who she remained.
In the early years, the investigation stalled quickly. In 1984, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed to the crime. He had confessed to many murders by then—most of which didn’t check out. This one didn’t either. His timeline didn’t match, and there was no other evidence connecting him to the scene.
One of the original deputies on the case, John York, later became sheriff of Livingston County. He kept the file open and followed every tip. None of them led anywhere. By the time DNA forensics became useful, most of the physical evidence had degraded.
In 2005, investigators managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from her remains. They didn’t have a match yet, but they stored the profile, hoping it would be useful later. They also sent samples of her teeth to be tested. The oxygen isotopes in teeth reflect local water supplies from where a person grows up. Her results pointed south and west—likely Florida, California, Arizona, or northern Mexico.
More evidence came from her clothes. In 2006, an investigator arranged to send her garments to a lab at Texas A&M. They were analyzed for pollen. The results were precise.
The clothes contained pollen from Australian pine, spruce, birch, and oak. Oak grows in many parts of the country, but the others told a more specific story. Spruce and birch were not growing near the dump site in New York. Australian pine doesn’t survive New York winters at all. It only grows in warm places like South Florida, South Texas, and limited areas in California and Mexico. Researchers narrowed it further. They believed she had spent recent time in San Diego or the surrounding area. Possibly even parts of Arizona. Not just passed through—lived there long enough for the pollen to embed into her clothing.
Investigators believed she may have traveled across the country, possibly hitchhiking. Her route may have taken her through the Sierra Nevadas, where she picked up the mountain pollen, and eventually east through Nevada and into upstate New York. The theory fit with what her body and belongings suggested. But it didn’t get them closer to a name.
By 2010, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office uploaded her profile to NamUs, the national database of missing and unidentified persons. They included a facial reconstruction created by Carl Koppelman, a California artist and volunteer forensic illustrator. His drawing was based on the shape of her skull and known traits. It showed a teenage girl with tired eyes and long hair, her features balanced but forgettable in a way that might explain why no one recognized her.
The drawing sat online for four years. People viewed it. Some wondered about it. No one connected it to a real missing person.
Then someone finally started asking questions.
Giving Her Back Her Name
Tammy Jo Alexander was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1963. She moved to Brooksville, Florida, where she lived most of her life. Her home was unstable. Her mother, Barbara Jenkins, worked at a truck stop and struggled with mental health and prescription drug use. Tammy’s biological father wasn’t in the picture. Her half-sister, Pamela Dyson, had a different father and lived with her grandmother after age eleven. Tammy stayed behind.
She ran away often. Hitchhiking was common. Sometimes she would disappear for days. Other times, longer. Her friend Laurel Nowell remembered them traveling together, sometimes getting rides from truckers. Once, they made it all the way to California. When they got there, Nowell called her parents, and both girls flew home. That trip was the kind of thing Tammy did—leave, drift, come back.
In the spring of 1979, she left home again. This time, she never returned.
Years passed. No one filed a missing person report. Pamela Dyson believed Tammy had simply started over somewhere else. Their mother died in 1998. Her obituary listed Tammy as already deceased, though it was more assumption than fact.
In the early 2010s, Laurel Nowell tried searching for Tammy online. Social media had made it easier to reconnect with old friends. But there was nothing—no marriage record, no address, no online presence. She reached out to Pamela, who confirmed she hadn’t heard from Tammy in decades. Together, they contacted the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office in Florida.
It turned out no one had ever filed a missing person report for Tammy. The police opened one in August 2014. It was decades late, but it was something.
That same year, Carl Koppelman—who had drawn the 2010 facial reconstruction of Cali Doe—saw Tammy’s newly listed missing profile on NamUs. He recognized her almost immediately. The resemblance between the missing girl’s photos and the drawing he had made was striking.
He emailed the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office and included others at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They took it seriously. Investigators arranged for mitochondrial DNA testing using a sample from Pamela Dyson. That DNA had already been extracted from Tammy’s remains back in 2005.
In January 2015, the results came back. The match was confirmed. Thirty-five years after she died, Tammy Jo Alexander got her name back.
Sheriff Thomas Dougherty held a press conference to announce the identification. Dyson decided not to move her sister’s remains. Tammy would stay buried in Dansville, New York. A new headstone was placed, this time with her real name and dates. In June 2015, about a hundred people came to the cemetery. Some were family. Some were locals who had followed the story for years. Others were investigators who had worked the case since the beginning.
The funeral home that had buried her paid for the new marker.
Pamela Dyson spoke about closure. She said she had always hoped Tammy had found a better life somewhere, maybe a husband and children. She hadn’t expected the truth to come like this. “It hurts to know she died that way,” she told reporters. “Nobody should be shot and dragged out into the woods.”
Knowing her name answered one question, but the biggest one remained.
Who killed Tammy?
The man she was seen with at the diner has never been found. Witnesses described him as white, around five-foot-eight or nine, with wire-rimmed glasses. He paid for their food. He drove a tan station wagon. That’s all anyone knows.
Police investigated more than 10,000 leads. None of them led to an arrest. DNA evidence was taken from Tammy’s clothing, including a male sample. By 2016, three people who had known Tammy were identified and tested. None of their DNA matched.
One theory pointed to serial killer Christopher Wilder. He was active in the early 1980s and had been linked to other women who disappeared while traveling. Tammy’s jacket—a red racing-style windbreaker—matched merchandise Wilder was known to hand out at racing events. But he died in a police shootout in 1984. He was never questioned about Tammy.
Another confession came from Henry Lee Lucas. His statement also fell apart. He had admitted to dozens of killings he didn’t commit, and nothing in his account matched her case.
The FBI joined the investigation after Tammy was identified. They put up billboards, shared her story nationwide, and began checking the male DNA sample against national databases. One truck driver from Tennessee called in a tip after hearing her story on the radio. Police called it significant but didn’t release further details.
In 2015, police uncovered another detail. Tammy had ties to a prison ministry group based in Young Harris, Georgia. The group worked with people on parole or probation. That connection raised new questions about who she might have been traveling with before her death. It also expanded the circle of possible suspects, but no new names came out of it.
As of 2020, the male DNA sample had not been matched to any known individual. Investigators started using familial DNA testing, hoping to find relatives of the unknown male. Results are still pending or undisclosed.
On November 2, 2020, Tammy’s 57th birthday, the sheriff’s office released audio recordings of her voice. They came from a cassette tape she made in July 1979. She had mailed it to a boyfriend, who kept it all these years and gave it to investigators after she was identified.
Her voice was young. Friendly. Recorded just months before she died.
Today, her headstone sits quietly in a New York cemetery, no longer anonymous. Her story has been covered in podcasts, local news, and national media. A multi-part series called Finding Tammy Jo was produced by WXXI News and the Democrat and Chronicle. It included interviews with her family, former classmates, and investigators.
Still, no one has been arrested. No one has confessed. And the man she ate dinner with in Lima has never been seen again.
Tammy Jo Alexander is no longer missing. But her case is far from closed.
