This article includes a post-mortem facial reconstruction of the victim. While it is an artist’s sketch and not an original photograph, some readers may still find it distressing. Sensitive readers are advised to proceed with caution.
It was the summer of 1969, having developed a taste for freedom, a 19-year-old lovestruck Canadian brunette arrived in Los Angeles in her quest for a man named John or Jean she had met at a coffee shop.
Reet Jurvetson, born to Estonian immigrant parents, was “very artistic,” according to her sister Anne. The teenager sang in a youth choir and preferred to sew her own clothes.
Upon arrival, Reet sent a postcard home assuring everyone she was happy and that they shouldn’t worry about her.
“It seemed that she decided to stay there, because my parents received a postcard from her saying she was happy, had a nice apartment in Los Angeles and told them not to worry,” according to Reet’s sister. However, this will be the last time anyone ever heard from Reet.
In autumn of that year, on November 16, a young bird-watcher on his afternoon hike spotted the lifeless body of a white woman dumped within the dense bushes off the picturesque Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, California. The victim was fully clothed, dressed in a blue corduroy jacket, jeans and brown leather boots.
The Woman With No Name
Failing to identify the body–since no missing persons report had been filed–the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) dubbed the victim as Jane Doe No.59. As per the coroners’ report, the woman’s lifeless body had been stabbed in the neck, chest and torso more than 150 times.
There were no traces of drugs or alcohol in her system and believed to have been killed nearly two hours after having eaten a meal.
“I don’t think robbery was a motive because she was still wearing her rings,” noted LAPD cold case detective Lou Rivera. “It looked like rage. It was a maniac or love gone wrong.” he further elaborated.
Furthermore, defensive stab wounds were discovered over her hands. “More than likely she was unable to defend herself any other way other than to … use her hands to either block the attack or actually grab on to the knife,” as per Rivera.
Investigators initially believed the victim to be between 20 and 23 years old, weighing 112 pounds and 5 ft 9 tall.Her eyes were green while her hair was a shade of dark brown. Vaccination scars were found on both her left arm and left thigh.
“A one-quarter-inch horizontal scar was also visible beneath her left breast, and a birthmark was located upon her right buttock. She had also received several silver amalgam fillings in both her upper and lower jaw,” as per the unidentified missing person’s record.
The evidence also indicated the victim’s body had been put in the back seat of a car, dragged out and then thrown down the ravine.
While it was clear she had not been the victim of a robbery or sexual assault prior to her murder—since no drugs or alcohol in her system at time of her death—she was believed to have been transported to the location where her body was discarded in an upright position. Investigators also suspected the murderer to be a right-handed individual.
The Curious Case Of The Missing Glasses
In a bid to trace the victim’s identity, the woman’s face was forensically reconstructed to produce a close estimation of her real-life appearance.
Artists created several composite drawings shortly after the victim was found and released to the media. Later sketches were created by Project EDAN member Barbara Martin-Bailey to solicit tips from the public.
However, Jurvetson’s sister later calls these reconstructions as “clearly inaccurate, as anyone can see.” She noted the initial sketches bore very little representation as to how her sister had appeared in life and did not resemble her in the least.
Nearly five days after the victim’s lifeless body was found brutally stabbed to death, a street maintenance worker chanced upon a pair of black prescription glasses close to where the woman’s body was discovered along the hills off Mulholland Drive. Could the owner of the glasses discovered near the victim’s body be tied to the killer?
Investigating officers consulted with an expert and other sources who advised that the glasses appeared to be for a man who was “very nearsighted.”
The prescription was –75 for both eyes “at 20/30 and 20/40.” The frames were manufactured by a US-based company named Liberty, widely available across the country at the time.
Former lead detective Cliff Shepard notes it’s “very probable” that the glasses could belong to the murderer.
“You have a man who has to get rid of this body of this girl. He’s afraid that someone will see him so he’s in a hurry and going as fast as he can. It’s possible that the glasses fell out of his pocket or he dropped it and he was in such a panic he didn’t notice. And when he did notice he doesn’t recall where he dropped it. It was probably pitch black up there,” says Shepard.
Another Manson Family Victim?
The fact the body was discovered only a few kilometres from the site of a string of deeply disturbing Manson family murders fuelled speculation that the murderer was connected to the notorious American criminal cult leader Charles Milles Manson.
Jurvetson’s body was found approximately six miles from the site of the murders of Sharon Tate and three others, as well as the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by Manson’s followers just months earlier.
The Manson murders were still unsolved at the time Jurvetson’s body was found. The city of Los Angeles was spooked with fear that people were going into houses and gruesomely killing people and nobody knew why.
A caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, where Manson Family had established their base, told police that Jane Doe 59 resembled a hippie named Sherry who hung out at the ranch.
The 81-year-old cult leader was interviewed by LAPD detectives Luis Rivera and Veronica Conrado at the Corcoran State Prison but the “encounter with Manson did not produce anything fruitful and the investigation remains open and ongoing,” the LAPD said, according to a newspaper.
As efforts to identify her failed, the case went cold for the next 46 years.
The Trail Goes Cold For The Next 46 Years
The lack of leads and absence of the true victim’s identity severely constrained lead generation, as no matching missing persons reports emerged, leaving the case largely dormant from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
The lack of viable DNA databases as well as other technological limitations of the era left Jane Doe 59’s identity shrouded in mystery for years to come.
Jurvetson’s parents, now deceased, also never thought to report Reet missing to the police.
“As incredible as it seems, my parents never thought to report Reet missing to the police. They thought that she was just living her life somewhere and that eventually news from her would turn up,” according to her sister Anne.
The postcards she had sent to her parents and closest friend on October 31 had informed them she was content, and had decided to stay in California having found an apartment within a four-storey building named the Paramount Hotel.
These postcards would prove to be the final message her family and friends ever received from her.
Furthermore, Jurvetson is not known to have established any other close acquaintances throughout the relatively short period of time she had lived in Los Angeles.
Jane Doe Finally ID’d as Reet Jurvetson
Jurvetson’s sister observed her mother checked regularly with her daughter’s friends to see if she had been in touch.
“Not once did we suspect that she had been killed,” she remarked. But as the years rolled past, Anne lost hope that she would hear from her sister again.
“It is such a sad, helpless kind of feeling to always question, to never know, to imagine scenarios, all the while still hoping and dreaming that one day there would be an answer,” she further observed.
Until a DNA sample changed it all.
In 2003, when LAPD detective Cliff Shepard reopened Reet’s case, he discovered a lot of the evidence in the case had been destroyed, including clothing with tags that said “Made in Canada.” But her blood-stained bra still remained.
Shepard had Jurvetson’s blood analyzed to develop a DNA profile. Over the next few years, he worked relentlessly to get the victim’s photo and information into every portal across the country, namely databases, missing persons, unsolved murders, the FBI, Interpol.
“She might have hung out with the wrong people. But my guess was that she had brothers or sisters who might have spent years asking what happened to her,” noted Shepard.
This ultimately led to her identification in 2015 through DNA matching.
In April of 2016, Anne’s friends who had been browsing the US Justice Department’s unidentified persons database spotted a post-mortem reconstruction photograph and description that appeared to match that of her long-missing sister.
Anne, who provided a DNA sample confirming the match via preserved blood evidence. Moreover, a unique red garnet ring found at the scene, a 1965 Christmas gift from their father originally sourced from Estonia, further confirmed the identification.
Following the devastating discovery, Anne expressed profound sorrow, stating, “Finally, after all these years, we are faced with hard facts. My little sister was savagely killed… It is devastating… I am horrified to think of how terribly frightened and alone she must have felt as she died.”
While the discovery brought partial closure it was overshadowed by grief and unanswered questions about the killer and their motive. A memorial service was held for Reet Jurvetson on June 22, 2016, at St. John’s Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Montreal.
Person Of Interest
In the wake of Jurvetson’s identification, both her family and the case detectives named “John” or “Jean” as a person of interest in the case.
Jurvetson had first got acquainted with a French man named “Jean”when she had worked at a Toronto post office several months prior to her murder.
According to both her family and a Los Angeles cold case detective Luis Rivera, Jurvetson had been absolutely “smitten” by this individual. She had scrupulously saved her earnings from her post office job in order to visit him in California.
Investigators are also pursuing his friend, also named Jean, who stayed in the same one-room apartment while Jurvetson was there.
One of the two Jeans told Jurvetson’s best friend, Gilda Green, months later in Montreal that Jurvetson left after staying with them for two weeks. She didn’t tell them where she was headed next.
She had planned to visit her elder brother, Tonu, his wife, Tiiu, and their maternal grandmother, Johanna Pats, in Scottsdale around November 1969.
Though Reet Jurvetson’s murder remains unsolved, detective Rivera and his partner detective Conrado are determined to solve Reet’s murder. Detective Rivera insists the mystery man named John, or Jean, is the best lead they have.
“No one deserves what happened to her. Someone might be out there who is responsible and it is our job to find out who it is and bring them to justice,” said Rivera.
Following the 2016 reveal, media coverage has intensified highlighting the case’s likeness to the Manson murders. Jurvetson’s sister Anne has expressed hope that the renewed public interest could yield leads in relation to the man called Jean.
“My little sister was savagely killed. It was not what I wanted to hear. I can hardly grasp how she could have been stabbed over 150 times. It is devastating. I try to draw comfort from the coroner’s report that at least she was not raped, nor were there traces of drugs or alcohol in her system…. Nevertheless, I am horrified to think of how terribly frightened and alone she must have felt as she died,” observed Anne.
In her memorial address, Anne recalled Reet’s bright, fun-loving, artistic, and musical temperament. How she will always be remembered for her free-spirited and happy nature by both family and friends.
