Dorothy Gay Howard: Disappearance, Identification, and Suspect

Dorothy Gay Howard was an 18-year-old woman from Phoenix, Arizona, whose beaten, naked body was found along Boulder Creek in Colorado on April 8, 1954. She remained unidentified for 55 years, buried under a headstone that read “Jane Doe, April 1954, Age About 20 Years,” until DNA testing in October 2009 matched her to a surviving sister. Investigators have since built a circumstantial case linking her murder to Harvey Glatman, a serial killer executed in California in 1959.

Who Dorothy Gay Howard Was

Dorothy was born on March 26, 1936, in the Texas Panhandle, the oldest of three sisters born to Roy E. Howard and Eunice G. Howard. The family moved to Phoenix in 1942. Her surviving sister later described her as “petite and attractive with blond hair” and “extremely strong-willed.”¹

She married young and twice. At 15, still in the ninth grade, she married David G. Powell; they divorced the following year. At 17, she married Kenneth Kirkman, an older man she met while working at the Strand Theater in Phoenix. Her family only learned about the second marriage years after she disappeared.²

Dorothy had run away from home at least once before, traveling to Portland, Oregon, before her father brought her back. She was working as a live-in nanny in Phoenix when she vanished in the fall of 1953. Because of her history of leaving, her family initially assumed she had taken off again, and she was not formally reported missing until March 1954, after she failed to show up to take one of her sisters to the movies.¹³

How Her Body Was Found

On April 8, 1954, two University of Colorado students hiking along Boulder Creek, roughly eight miles west of Boulder near Boulder Falls, discovered a young woman’s body at the bottom of a 29-foot embankment. She had been stripped naked and severely beaten. All identification had been removed. The only items found on or near her were three bobby pins in her hair.⁴

Investigators estimated she had been dead and exposed to the elements for roughly three to four days before discovery, though some accounts suggest as long as a week. Animals had damaged her face and fingers, making visual identification impossible. Boulder County Sheriff’s Detective Steve Ainsworth later stated that the cause of death was blunt-force trauma.¹

Why She Stayed Unidentified for 55 Years

One obvious identification tool, dental records, was useless in Dorothy’s case. She had perfect teeth with no fillings, a trait later explained by the high-fluoride water supply near where she grew up in the Texas Panhandle.²

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, then under undersheriff Dorse “Dock” Teegarden, issued nationwide missing-person requests and searched Boulder Canyon for clothing or personal effects. Nothing turned up. Several parents of missing daughters traveled to Boulder to view the body; none identified her.⁴

With no name, the community raised money and arranged donated services to bury her in Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery under the “Jane Doe” headstone.⁵ The case went cold, and surviving documentation from the period was later described by one researcher as a “big blank” extending through the 1960s.⁶

How She Was Finally Identified

The case was reopened because of a civilian. Silvia Pettem, a local historian, encountered the Jane Doe grave at a cemetery event in 1996 and spent the next 14 years working the case, reconstructing a file from newspaper archives, coroner’s records, and genealogy sites.⁶

In 2003, Pettem persuaded Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and Lieutenant Phil West to formally reopen the case and approve an exhumation, which she helped fund through the Boulder Historical Society. The exhumation took place in June 2004. A DNA profile was extracted from one of Jane Doe’s teeth in 2005, and a forensic sculptor built a three-dimensional facial reconstruction from her skull. The reconstruction was featured in People magazine and on America’s Most Wanted in 2006.⁶

The identification came through a family member who found the case online. In September 2009, a 24-year-old college student named Michelle Marie Fowler was researching her family history for a school paper when she came across an article about Boulder’s Jane Doe. Fowler was Dorothy’s great-niece and had long been curious about her great-aunt’s disappearance. She contacted both Detective Ainsworth and Pettem, telling them she believed Jane Doe was Dorothy.⁷

Fowler then persuaded Dorothy’s surviving sister, Marlene Howard Ashman, to provide a saliva sample at her local courthouse in Polk County, Arkansas. The sample went to Mitotyping Technologies LLC in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Terry Melton compared it against the 2005 profile. An initial result appeared negative because a technician had compared the sample against the wrong profile; when Dr. Melton re-examined the data, she recognized a clear match.² On October 23, 2009, the DNA match was confirmed. Five days later, Sheriff Pelle publicly announced that Boulder’s Jane Doe was Dorothy Gay Howard.³

Who Likely Killed Her

From the moment the case was reopened, Harvey Glatman emerged as the primary suspect. Glatman posed as a professional photographer, luring women into staged photo shoots before binding, sexually assaulting, and strangling them. He was convicted and executed at San Quentin on September 18, 1959, for the murders of Judy Dull, Shirley Ann Bridgeford, and Ruth Mercado in California.⁸

Glatman had a documented history of violent crime in Colorado well before his California killings. In May 1945, he held a woman named Eula Jo Hand at gunpoint and tied her to a telephone pole. While out on bail, he bound, gagged, and sexually assaulted a woman named Norene Lauer in Boulder. He was convicted and served eight months in prison.⁸ He was living in the Denver area around the time Dorothy was killed.

Several pieces of circumstantial evidence point at him. Ligature marks on Dorothy’s body were described as “strikingly similar” to marks found on Glatman’s known California victims.² Detective Ainsworth developed a theory that Dorothy was struck by a car while trying to escape, and a forensic examination of her skeletal injuries matched calculations based on the dimensions of a 1951 Dodge Coronet, the model Glatman was known to drive at the time.⁷ In a transcript of his post-arrest interrogation in California, a detective asked Glatman whether certain women he had encountered in Colorado were “alive or dead.” Glatman replied: “Unless they’ve been run over.”⁹

Where the Case Stands Now

Because Glatman was executed in 1959, he can never be charged in Dorothy’s death. The case remains classified as an open, unsolved homicide by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office under case number 04-4822.⁴

On May 22, 2010, more than 25 of Dorothy’s family members traveled to Boulder for a memorial ceremony at Columbia Cemetery. Her sister Marlene Ashman designed a new grave marker that incorporated the original “Jane Doe” headstone while adding Dorothy’s full name, birth date, and a Bible verse from Numbers 6:24. Ashman told reporters: “This is something I wanted to do for closure and because my parents would have wanted me to. It’s my mission in life.” Michelle Fowler called the day “bittersweet,” adding, “It’s exciting knowing that it’s been figured out. But it’s still a woman’s life that was taken.”¹⁰

1
NBC News. Boulder Jane Doe Identified After 55 Years
2
SilviaPettem.com. Epilogue
3
Daily Camera. Boulder Jane Doe Identified as Dorothy Gay Howard
4
Colorado Cold Case Files. Dorothy Howard Case Detail
5
City of Boulder. Columbia Cemetery History
6
University of Colorado Coloradan. Sleuthing Jane Doe
7
Denver Post. After 55 Years, Boulder Jane Doe’s Story Finally Coming Together
8
LASD Retired. Glamor Girl Slayer
9
Denver Post. Lonely Hearts Killer Confessed to 3 Murders
10
Denver Post. Family Gathers for Jane Doe Memorial in Boulder