The maid rushed into the Roper’s Motel office, frantic. Something’s gone wrong. A body at the bottom of the pool. Fifteen-year-old Sandy Moore ran to the water and dove in, but she couldn’t bring the young woman up alone.
Guests helped drag her out, but she wasn’t breathing. Police arrived to find an unresponsive woman with a quarter-sized abrasion on her forehead. Someone noticed writing in ballpoint pen on the sole of her foot: Joe Lean. Nobody knew what it meant.
The couple had checked in earlier that day as Mr. and Mrs. Russell Betuyn. The girl looked around 20.
The man was maybe ten years older. He’d been drinking a beer; she’d had a soda. Three hours later, she was dead. When police knocked on the motel room door, the man opened it, looking like he’d just woken up.
He followed them to the front desk, where he asked for his registration card, claiming he needed it to identify himself to police. They handed it over. He followed the ambulance out of the parking lot—and never showed up at the hospital. No registration card meant no car description, no license plate, no trail.
A search for the name Russell Betts turned up one hit: an active duty soldier in Camp Lejeune. But they couldn’t be sure it was him. They figured he was traveling under an assumed name. In 1966, with limited resources and a small-town sheriff’s department, the investigation stalled.
The medical examiner ruled the death an accidental drowning. The local sheriff told the media the only thing the man did wrong was check out without paying his bill. They weren’t looking that hard. The funeral home in Pecos, Texas took the body.
Eighteen-year-old Pablo Carrasco helped pick her up. They kept her for weeks, hoping someone would claim her. Hundreds of people came to view the body. Mothers called, desperate to know if this was their daughter.
One couple from Odessa was so sure she was theirs that they established the drowned girl trust fund to pay for her funeral when dental records didn’t match. The town donated a dress, flowers, and a casket. Fifty people attended her burial. The headstone read: Unknown Drowned Girl 1966.
For more than fifty years, that’s who she was. Pecos Jane Doe. Pecos Jane. Sandy Moore, the teenager who found her, left flowers on the grave every time she returned to town.
In 2014, Todd Matthews at NamUs—the National Missing and Unknown Persons System—received a strange email from a Hotmail address in the Netherlands, signed only JCJ. It pointed him to the 1966 drowning. He entered the details, found no matches. No one had reported a missing person fitting her description.
Matthews connected with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which reached out to Pecos Police Chief Lisa Torango in 2019. “Would you be willing to restart the investigation? ”
Chief Torango said yes. She handed the case to Corporal Felix Salcedo.
“Boy, do I have a case for you to work. ”
They started with the original police file at the Reeves County Sheriff’s Department. It didn’t exist. Lost in a fire, a flood—nobody knew.
Gone. The museum had newspaper clippings. The funeral home had a file Pablo Carrasco had kept in the garage all these years. Inside, they found a death certificate, letters from families hoping she was theirs, donations for her burial—and Polaroid photographs taken for documentation.
They showed the abrasion on her face. They also showed burn scars. Burn scars on her knee and ribs. “She’s someone’s child,” Salcedo thought.
“Someone’s family. And she was left there alone. ”
They needed DNA. In August 2019, they exhumed her body.
Salcedo jumped into the grave himself to help collect the remains, counting bones in the dusty Texas heat. They sent the skeletal remains to the University of North Texas for testing. Then COVID hit. Lab personnel were sent home.
Everything ground to a halt. Eventually, a DNA profile was built using STR testing and uploaded to CODIS. No match. But the team at Astrium, a lab specializing in forensic genetic genealogy, saw Pecos Jane Doe in the NamUs database and reached out.
They explained the science: instead of twenty markers, they could build a profile with hundreds of thousands. Then upload it to a genealogy database. The city provided some funding. Astrium set up a crowdfunding campaign.
In less than a week, they raised enough. The remains were shipped to Astrium. From the skeletal remains, they selected molars—the best chance for preservation after decades underground. They extracted enough DNA to build a full profile.
Then genealogists went to work. They traced the DNA to a family in Kansas with fifteen children. In late 2020, a cold case investigator knocked on the door of a trailer in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A 74-year-old retiree named Joyce Hemmy answered. Did she have a missing sister? “My sister’s been missing 55 years,” Joyce said. She didn’t believe him.
He took a mouth swab. Two and a half weeks later, the results came back: 100% sibling match. Pecos Jane Doe was Jolene Hemmy. Joyce knew the moment she heard.
Not Jolene—Jolene. That was her sister’s name. And when the police said they were coming to Kansas, Joyce felt a mix of happiness and grief, because she already knew Jolene was gone. Chief Torango and Corporal Salcedo drove to Kansas in January 2021 to deliver the news in person.
In a living room full of family, with more on a Zoom call, Torango did what police officers dread most. “Jolene is our Jane Doe. Our purpose of coming here is I want to give her her name back. ”
Jolene was the ninth of fifteen children, raised on a 160-acre farm in Salina, Kansas.
She was scared of chickens but her job was gathering the eggs. She graduated high school at seventeen and moved to Kansas City to live with two older sisters. She worked two jobs at fast food places. That summer, she met an older man at work.
He claimed he wasn’t her steady boyfriend. Joyce took an instant dislike to him—she didn’t think he treated Jolene well. But Jolene liked him. On Friday, July 1st, 1966, Jolene never came home.
Joyce and her sister Carolyn put up signs, went to her job. Jolene never picked up her final paycheck. They went to the police, but officers dismissed them. “The couple probably just ran off by themselves.
They’ll come back. ”
Then a postcard arrived, postmarked Las Vegas, July 3rd. It said: “See you in a couple weeks. ” It was signed “Joe.
”
But Jolene always went by Jolene. Neither Joyce nor her mother believed Jolene wrote it. “I think that guy killed her,” Joyce says now. “Because Jolene was always scared of water.
She never wanted to go swimming. She would sit at the side and put her feet in. She never did like it. I think he hit her over the head.
That was why she had a bruise. ”
In 1966, a vehicle with Kansas tags was stopped. Law enforcement didn’t feel it was pertinent at that moment, so they let it go. They never found the man.
When Jolene was identified, her remains were sent to Kansas. Her family gave her a new burial—with her real name on a new headstone, buried beside her mother and father. “It was hard to let her go,” Joyce says. “She had become part of that community.
But she was finally back home with her family. ”
Jolene’s mother, Alberta, died in 2000. Her daughters say she talked about Jolene on her deathbed. She said she saw her, knew she was in heaven, and that she was going to be with her.
“I’m sad she’s gone,” Joyce says. “I still miss her. But I know she’s in heaven. I’m thankful for Lisa opening the case again, for bringing her home, for finding her.
”
Chief Torango still thinks about the rest of the story—the man, the name Russell Betts, the unknown. “We’re a little bit shattered,” she admits. “We feel like we’re not going to be able to provide the ending on this. We are very grateful we were able to identify her.
But I wish I could give the family the rest of what they need. ”
For Jolene, they did what they could. A name. A family.
A grave beside her mother and father. Someone finally called her by her real name.
