Twenty-seven years ago, Chattanooga police Sgt. Tim Carroll stood beside a creek off Cannon Avenue as investigators recovered the body of a woman.
She’d been dead for months.
Partially clothed and found near Interstate 24, she wore red shorts, a red ponytail holder and a rubber band around her left wrist. A ligature – the instrument of her death – remained around her neck.
No one knew who she was.
Carroll now sits in a different office. He’s Hamilton County’s medical examiner, and after nearly three decades he could be closer than ever to solving the mystery that’s followed him since that day in 1999.
Carroll is waiting for a single phone call – the one that tells him DNA has confirmed the identity investigators have spent decades trying to uncover.
“We’re closer than we’ve ever been,” Carroll says. “If the DNA confirms who we think she is, that’ll be a very good day.”
A face without a name
For most of the past 27 years, the case appeared destined to remain unsolved.
A cleanup crew working along the creek discovered the woman’s body on March 29, 1999. The location immediately complicated the investigation.
Because the creek lies just yards from Interstate 24, investigators suspected the killer might have been passing through Chattanooga rather than living there.
“Our thought was she was a homicide victim who’d been dumped near the interstate and abandoned,” Carroll says. “That was the general consensus.”
The woman’s body had remained in the water long enough that her face could no longer be recognized. Although investigators eventually created a facial reconstruction and distributed it to the media, no one came forward.
The victim was estimated to be between 30 and 45 years old, about 5 feet, 4 inches tall and 130 pounds. She also showed evidence of numerous old injuries, including healed fractures in both feet, a finger, a rib and her nose, and might have walked with a slightly bowlegged gait.
Investigators checked missing persons reports in Chattanooga and beyond, but nothing matched the victim’s description. With no viable leads and no indication of who she was, the case gradually went cold.
Then science changed.
DNA enters the chat
Years later, investigators sent DNA from the victim’s remains to Othram, a Texas-based forensic genealogy company. The results upended one of the central assumptions in the case.
For decades, investigators had believed the victim was white. The DNA analysis indicated she was approximately 80% African American, forcing investigators to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about who she was and where she came from.
The revelation reopened a case that had seen little movement for years. One consequence of the DNA findings was that investigators began questioning the facial reconstruction that had guided the case for decades.
Carroll called Emily Craig, the forensic artist who had created the original reconstruction. Craig, a former intern at the Hamilton County Medical Examiner’s Office who later built an international reputation in forensic identification work, including efforts related to the Sept. 11 attacks, had been involved with the case from the beginning.
Carroll posed a simple question: What if the woman wasn’t white after all?
Craig’s response was equally straightforward. If the DNA was correct, her reconstruction was wrong and investigators would need to start over.
The original reconstruction had been in circulation for nearly three decades, spreading far beyond official law enforcement databases to websites and online communities devoted to cold cases. There was no practical way to pull it back. Instead, investigators focused on creating a new image that reflected what the DNA evidence now revealed.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation assigned forensic artist Glen Glenn to create a new reconstruction from scratch. When Carroll and former homicide detective Mike Mathis delivered the victim’s skull to the TBI in 2022, Carroll had one request:
“Don’t get on the internet and look for the old one. Start from scratch.”
The new effort four years.
Rebuilding Jane Doe
To better understand the victim’s likely appearance, Glenn studied biracial faces, paying close attention to subtle features.
He incorporated details investigators knew about the woman, including the fact that she’d lost nearly all of her front teeth before death. He also considered other physical characteristics revealed during examination of the remains, including evidence of multiple healed fractures.
“You use every clue available,” Carroll says. “Because she didn’t have those front teeth, he gave the front of her face a more sunken appearance than you would see in someone whose teeth were still there.”
When the finished reconstruction was released publicly on April 16, the response was immediate.
The next morning, while pumping gas into his county vehicle, Carroll’s phone began ringing with messages from investigators.
“My phone was going ‘Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,’” he recalls.
Many of the calls came from people who believed the reconstruction resembled a missing relative. As investigators compared their accounts with evidence from the case, they found a growing number of details that appeared to match the victim.
One detail in particular caught investigators’ attention.
The woman found in the creek was missing all of her front teeth and had only eight teeth remaining. Examination of her lower jaw revealed evidence of a severe abscess that had developed before her death.
Possible family members describing a missing relative told investigators that the woman had struggled with dental problems for years. Carroll recalled them saying she had been missing teeth since high school and frequently complained about her worsening dental health.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Carroll recalls her saying. “They’re just falling out.”
For investigators who had spent decades working with little more than skeletal facts, those details were striking.
While investigators are careful not to draw conclusions before the DNA results are complete, Carroll says the pieces appear to be falling into place.
“We’re finding a lot that’s consistent with who we think she is,” he says. “Now we’re waiting for that one phone call.”
Light at the end of the tunnel?
That call could come within weeks.
Investigators are now working to compare DNA from the unidentified victim with samples provided by biological relatives of the woman they believe she might be. While earlier testing efforts produced limited results, additional samples have since been submitted to another laboratory in hopes of obtaining a definitive answer.
If the DNA confirms the family’s suspicion, it will answer the first and most important question:
Who was she?
Only then can investigators fully reopen the homicide investigation and begin asking the next question:
Who killed her?
“You have to have a name before you can really begin an investigation,” Carroll says. “Without one, you don’t know who her family is, who she knew or what might have been happening in her life.”
For Carroll, the case has become something rare in law enforcement: a mystery that has followed him through nearly every stage of his career.
When the woman was discovered, he was a Chattanooga police sergeant. He later helped build the department’s early cold-case efforts, helping solve homicide cases from the 1970s. After retiring as assistant chief in 2012, he joined the medical examiner’s office the following year.
Now, more than a quarter century after he stood beside that creek, he finds himself once again trying to answer questions about the same victim.
“Identifying her is half the battle,” he says.
Even if investigators never identify her killer, Carroll believes restoring the victim’s identity would still matter.
“People talk about closure – but I don’t know that closure ever really happens,” Carroll says. “There are still birthdays and Christmases, and you’re always thinking about the people who aren’t sitting at the table anymore.”
But families can still gain something.
“They can find some peace,” he says. “And they can finally lay their loved one to rest.”
For nearly 27 years, the woman found beside Interstate 24 has been known only as Jane Doe. Investigators now believe that might soon change.
“There are plenty of hard days in this line of work,” Carroll says. “But when somebody calls and says, ‘We’ve got a match,’ that makes for a very good day.”