La Vergne, TN – Eighteen years after the body of a woman was found in La Vergne, Tennessee, the DNA Doe Project has identified her as 40 year old Mary Alice Maloney. Maloney, a native of Connecticut, had been living in the Nashville area prior to her disappearance.
On November 14, 2007, a police officer discovered the body of a woman in a remote wooded area in La Vergne, Tennessee. Investigators found no clothing at the scene, but some jewelry was found with the remains. The woman was believed to be African American or multiracial, and it was determined that she was between 25 and 49 years old at the time of her death. Investigators also estimated that the woman died in the spring or summer of 2007.
After exhausting all leads, the La Vergne Police Department contacted the DNA Doe Project, whose expert volunteer investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does. The lab work needed to generate a DNA profile for La Vergne Jane Doe was complicated by the degradation of her DNA, but eventually a profile was created and uploaded to GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA.com.
When her DNA results came through, however, it was clear that all of the unidentified woman’s matches were very distantly related to her. The team assigned to the case could tell from her matches that she had recent roots in Puerto Rico as well as African American heritage, but figuring out how these distant matches were connected to her proved challenging.
“Our work is often complicated by the lack of people who have uploaded their DNA profiles to the public databases we can use for our cases,” said team leader Jenny Lecus. “That’s why one of the recommendations we make to families of the missing is to make sure your DNA profile is in GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNA Justice.org”
Then, in April 2021, a new DNA match appeared in the GEDmatch database. This match was of African American descent, and she shared nearly 2% of her DNA with La Vergne Jane Doe. While she was still only a distant cousin, she was a substantially closer match to the unidentified woman than anyone else in the databases, and the team immediately began building out her family tree.
Within weeks, they made a crucial discovery – a distant relative of the new match had married a man of Puerto Rican descent in 1963, and four years later they’d had a daughter named Mary. Further research revealed that Mary had been living in the Nashville area up until 2007, but after that she had disappeared from the records. This information was passed on to the La Vergne Police Department and they later confirmed that the woman formerly known as La Vergne Jane Doe was in fact Mary Alice Maloney.
The DNA Doe Project is grateful for the contributions of the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the La Vergne Police Department and the late Sergeant Bob Hayes, for entrusting this case to the DNA Doe Project; the University of North Texas for DNA extraction; HudsonAlpha Discovery for whole genome sequencing; Kevin Lord for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA for providing their databases; and our dedicated teams of investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our Jane and John Does home.
