Imagine you were driving down the road heading home. Everything is completely normal and then out of the corner of your eye you see something that makes you want to stop and investigate. You’re not sure if what you are seeing is a poncho or a jacket but it definitely doesn’t belong on the side of the road. As you walk closer to it you discover that what you are seeing is a fringed buckskin jacket and it is being worn by a young woman with reddish-brown hair who appears to be dead.
On April 24th, 1981, Police respond to a call of a dead body being found in a ditch on Greenlee Road, Newton Township just west of Troy, Ohio. A passer-by had spotted what they originally thought was either a poncho or a jacket and decided to investigate. They discovered that the jacket was being worn by a young woman with reddish-brown hair in braids and no signs of life.
Upon arriving on the scene, police set up a crime scene and began their investigation. The woman did not look to be any older than 25 years old, had reddish-brown hair that had been braided in two braid on either side of her face that were held in place by two blue hairbands. Her eyes were light brown, she was estimated to be between 5ft 4in and 5ft 6in (163cms-168cms) and weighed between 125-130 pounds (57kgs-59kgs).
Except for her missing shoes and socks she was fully dressed in wrangler style jeans, a patterned orange and brown turtleneck sweater, white bra and a suspected handmade buckskin jacket with purple lining, and there was no form of identification found on the body.
Facial Reconstruction of Buckskin Girl.
Picture Credit: Wikipedia Commons
Examinations of the body at the scene provided the police with the knowledge that she had not walked to where she was found as her feet were clean, leading the police to come to the conclusion that she had been left here. Interstate 75 was 8kms or 5 miles away so the place where she had been discovered was an easy drop off point for someone who was passing through.
At the autopsy later that afternoon they discovered a lacerated liver, blunt force trauma and evidence of strangulation, all of which could have caused her death, but the coroner officially ruled her cause of death as blunt force trauma and strangulation.
The police obtained her finger prints, dental information and DNA because she had not been dead for too long, and a sketch was made of her face so it could be distributed to TV stations and Newspapers in the hopes that someone would be able to identify her. On the 28th of April the sketch began to make the news; from that around two hundred leads were followed up but nothing ever panned out.
With no identification made and no one to charge for her murder, the young woman who was nicknamed the Buckskin Girl was laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery.
Her burial didn’t stop many from theorising on how she had died.
Some people believed that she was a teenage runaway or a wanderer who had managed to get her hands-on hygiene products before she was killed. However there were others who didn’t believe this to be an accurate theory at all and Authorities were a part of this group. It was their belief that the only reason why she had not been identified as quickly as they had hoped was because she wasn’t from Ohio.
Because she was so far away from her home or where she started it made it a lot more difficult to identify her and they were also of the belief that she hadn’t been in Ohio for very long at all. Rumours also hung around that her death had been the result of an abusive significant other but there had been no evidence to either confirm nor deny that line of investigation.
Not all investigators believed that her death was the result of a significant other. Some believed that she was one of the first victims of a serial killer who was active between the 1980s and 1990’s and continued on until 2004 in the Ohio region.
Facial Reconstruction of Buckskin Girl.
Picture Credit: APP
The serial killer they believed was involved was suspected to have killed between 7 to 10 women who were all involved in sex work of some kind. A task force was set up in 1991 that hoped to connect murders from Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois, which were all originally connected by a reporter.
Unsolved Mysteries did an episode on the case and briefly linked the Buckskin girl to the murders of the other women. There were parts of the serial killers MO what did fit what had happened to Buckskin girl – the victims (Shirley Dee Taylor, Anna Marie Patterson, Herbron Jane Doe or Patrice Corley) had been beaten and strangled and they had clothing and jewellery missing. The Buckskin girl had been found with no jewellery, missing her shoes and socks and had been killed in a similar way.
However that is where the similarities between the two cases end. While she had been killed in a similar way her body was not disposed of like the others – for example Anna Marie Patterson’s body had been wrapped in a sleeping bag and is suspected to have been kept in a refrigerator before her disposal nearly a month after her death. There is also no evidence that Buckskin Girl was a sex worker as her autopsy showed no signs of sexual assault, rape or sexual activity like the body of Corley showed.
Patterson’s boyfriend told police about a customer of hers names “Dr No” whom she was very wary and concerned about, and while he remains a suspect in both Patterson’s and Buckskin Girls murder the police have revealed no other information on this line of investigation.
For a while Police also looked into the possibility that she may have been a one of the victims of the Redhead murders but there was no evidence to connect the cases and the Police soon ruled that out. There was also speculation for a time that her death was connected to the death of a 27 year old woman who died in February 1981 but the Police have revealed nothing more on whether or not the two cases are related.
For years the case went cold but the police kept all the evidence they had collected with the hope that one day it would help to identify her or her killer. Slowly over time technology upgraded and the police were able to start making some more steps towards this.
In 2008 her information was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified persons systems, which allowed all of her DNA, fingerprints and dental information available to a lot more people in law enforcement. From this they were able to rule out 266 missing girls.
In 2016 the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children released an updated facial reconstruction of her with and without her braids. Then later in 2016, Miami County Police approved Palynology tests on her clothing. From these tests they were able to discover that she spent time in North Eastern United States as well as Western United States, possibly in North Mexico. Soot samples found on her clothing suggested that she stay in populated areas and mostly around vehicles while Isotope testing showed she was around Fort Worth Texas and South Oklahoma, spending two months in both places at two different times.
Reconstructions of Buckskin Girl, including what she was found wearing.
Picture Credit: Crime Scene Database
It wouldn’t be until 2017 that the DNA Doe Project would be given a sample of Buckskin girls DNA. They didn’t have very high hopes for the DNA as it had been stored in an unrefrigerated storage in anti-coagulant heparin since 1981. To their surprise the sample held enough DNA for full genome sequencing.
Once the sequencing was completely they discovered that only half of the genome remained but there was still enough for them to upload to GEDMatch. Once it was uploaded to the site, all they could do was wait for their sample to be added to GEDMatch’s database and hope that they would be able to find a genetic link.
Twelve hours after they had added the data, they began finding 2nd and 3rd cousins that were related to Buckskin Girl and then a woman appeared that seemed to be a half cousin or a 1st cousin once removed, which lead the DNA Doe Project to believe either a Grandparent had remarried or this woman was one of Buckskin Girl’s parents cousins.
From here the DNA Doe Project had two paths in which they could take. Either they could try to recreate Buckskin Girl’s family tree, which could take a lot of time, or hope that they were able to find the first cousins family free that they had created. After some searching, the DNA Doe Project were able to locate the cousins family tree on an ancestry site and they started to search through it for possible candidates.
First they searched through Grandparents, hoping to see a remarriage but that line of investigation went cold as they discovered that none of the Grandparents on the family tree had remarried. This left the final line of investigation and they began to search through the cousins and they got lucky.
They found a member on the tree who had a daughter, whose daughter’s birthday matched the presumed age that Buckskin Girl had been at the time of her death. Her date of date was record as: Missing – presumed Dead.
And just like that, after 37 years Buckskin Girl finally had a name: Marica Lenore King. 21 years old at the time of her death.
Marcia King.
Picture Credit: ABC News
Once the family had been contacted more information about why it had taken so long to identify Marcia started to become available. She had never been reported as missing, which was why she hadn’t shown up in the National Missing and Unidentified persons system but this didn’t mean that her family had stopped searching for her. Her mother had never moved house nor changed her phone number in the hope that one day Marcia would return home.
At this time Marcia King’s family is asking for privacy and to remain confidential, a request that the Police are more than happy to respect. She will remain buried at Riverside Cemetery but her family plans to change her headstone from the one that read Jane Doe to one that holds her name.
Marcia King’s murder investigation is still active so not much more information is available at this time.
If you or anyone you know have any information, please contact the Miami County Sheriff’s Office on its tip line: 937-440-3990 or you can submit tips through their contact page on www.miamicountysheriff.org
Sources:
Crime Scene Data Base. (2016) The Buckskin Girl [Photo]
http://crimescenedb.com/the-buckskin-girl/
DNA Doe Project. (2018). What did the DNA Doe Project do that led to the identification of “Buckskin Girl” as Marcia King? [Facebook Post]
https://www.facebook.com/DNADoeProject/posts/ 2048512292074212 (please remove space between / and 2 in the address if you would like to read the full statement)
Eustachewich, Lia. (2018). Murdered ‘Buckskin Girl’ finally identified 37 years later. [Article] New York Post.
https://nypost.com/2018/04/12/murdered-buckskin-girl-finally-identified-37-years-later/
Mullen, Shannon. (2018). Was strangled ‘Buckskin Girl’ from New Jersey? [Photo]. App.
https://www.app.com/story/news/crime/jersey-mayhem/cold-cases/2016/04/29/buckskin-girl-murder-pollen-nj/83707116/
Spain, Jamie. (2018). 37 Years After Young Woman’s Mysterious Slaying, She Is Finally Identified — But Who Killed Her? [Article]. People Crime.
http://people.com/crime/buckskin-girl-found-dead-ohio-identified-37-year-later/
Wikipedia. (2018). Murder of Marcia King. [Article].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Marcia_King
Winsor, Morgan. (2018). Body of ‘Buckskin Girl’ found in Ohio in 1981 identified as Arkansas woman. [Article] ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/US/body-buckskin-girl-found-ohio-1981-identified-arkansas/story?id=54417156
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