Human stays present in a California river have been recognized as being a 13-year-old New York woman who vanished 50 years in the past.
The partial skeletal stays have been first found in a riverbed off a freeway in Watsonville nearly precisely 30 years in the past, however the case ran after preliminary DNA testing solely confirmed they have been of a feminine.
However extra superior testing has now confirmed the physique was Laura O’Malley, a 13-year-old Queens woman who was reported lacking in August 1975, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Workplace introduced this week.
Nevertheless, “it is not known when, or under what circumstances, Laura O’Malley arrived in California,” the sheriff’s workplace pressured.
It was additionally unclear how she is assumed to have died.
The younger teen was recognized when the chilly case was reopened in 2019, with extra forensic testing — together with carbon courting — now displaying the decedent was possible born within the Nineteen Sixties and died between 1977 and 1984, cops stated.
In 2022, superior genetic testing was used to determine potential members of the family, lastly confirming it was the long-missing New York woman, police stated.
Since she went lacking, O’Malley’s siblings — two sisters and a brother — continued looking for her for years, circulating her image throughout Manhattan, the place they initially assumed she may need fled to.
The sheriff’s workplace stated it was “deeply grateful” to have lastly “provided long-awaited answers to Laura’s family.”
