Linda Pagano Case: Jane Doe, DNA ID, and Unsolved Homicide

The Linda Pagano case involves a 17-year-old Akron, Ohio, girl who disappeared on September 1, 1974, after an argument with her stepfather, and whose skeletal remains were found the following February along the Rocky River near Strongsville but went unidentified for 44 years. DNA testing in 2018 finally matched the “Strongsville Jane Doe” to Pagano. Her death was ruled a homicide caused by a gunshot wound to the head, and no one has ever been charged.

Who Linda Pagano Was and the Night She Disappeared

Linda Marie Pagano was about to start her senior year at Springfield High School in Akron in the fall of 1974.¹ She was living with her stepfather, Byron Claflin, at his apartment on Carnegie Avenue in the Kenmore neighborhood.²

Claflin told police that Linda came home late from a concert on the night of September 1 and the two argued. By his account, he kicked her out of the apartment around 4 a.m., and she left saying she would stay with a friend. She was never heard from again. Claflin filed a missing person report the next evening, September 2, 1974, at 7:41 p.m.²

The Strongsville Jane Doe

On February 5, 1975, three teenage boys hiking in what is now the Mill Stream Run Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks came across a human skeleton beside the Rocky River. The remains were stuck in the mud on a sandbar along the east bank, roughly 800 feet west of Eastland Road.³ Most of the flesh was gone, part of the jaw was missing, and there was a small hole in the skull.⁴

Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Hirsch identified the remains as those of a white woman he believed to be in her early twenties and set the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head.⁵ The death was officially ruled a homicide on February 12, 1975. Nothing else was recovered at the scene.⁶ With no identification possible, the remains were buried on May 15, 1975, in an essentially pauper’s grave at Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Highland Hills.

For more than four decades, the Strongsville Jane Doe and the Akron missing person report sat in separate files. A national search on the remains produced no match, and Akron’s missing teenager was never connected to the body found five months after she vanished.⁷

How She Was Finally Identified

The break came from outside law enforcement. In 2014, genealogist and online researcher Christina Scates ran across a reference to “Unknown White Female Bones” in a cemetery index while doing family research, and she posted what she had found on the Reddit unsolved mysteries forum and on Websleuths.com. Forensic artist Carl Koppelman produced facial reconstructions of the remains to help push the case forward.⁸

On June 21, 2016, a user of the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) alerted the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office that Pagano’s case was missing from the database.⁵ By December of that year, Sgt. Jeff Smith of the Akron Police Department, who had entered Pagano’s report into the national database, was in contact with the medical examiner’s office about a possible match.⁹

Odontologist Dr. Kent Caserta compared Pagano’s dental records against the remains on December 13, 2016.⁵ In October 2017, the body was exhumed from Memorial Gardens Cemetery with help from the University of Akron, and bone samples went to the University of North Texas for mitochondrial DNA testing. By December 2017, that testing had matched the remains to DNA provided by Pagano’s surviving siblings.⁶ The identification was formally confirmed on June 29, 2018, and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office announced it publicly on July 12, 2018.

The Stepfather and the Unsolved Homicide

Once Pagano was identified, the Cleveland Metroparks Rangers took over an active homicide investigation.⁷ Lt. Don Sylvis said his team had hundreds of documents to work through and planned to re-interview people tied to the original case. He noted that no physical evidence had been recovered at the scene, but said “it’s a possibility that Linda Pagano’s killer is still alive.”¹⁰

Byron Claflin, the stepfather and the last person known to have seen Linda alive, is the only person of interest ever publicly named. Akron police considered him a person of interest at the time but never treated him as a suspect. Sylvis described him as “a person of interest of some type but not a suspect.”¹¹

According to Linda’s siblings, Claflin drank heavily and was violent with the children in his care. Her brother Mike Pagano recalled Claflin dragging the children out of bed to berate them and leaving marks on their necks from squeezing them, and said the beatings were the main reason their mother eventually separated from him. The siblings also said Claflin treated Linda differently, co-signing for a Mustang and buying her clothes.² Claflin, who owned an Akron bar called the Hillwood Grille, died in 1990 without ever being charged.⁶

As of January 2019, the Metroparks Rangers reported no new leads.¹² The case remains open and unsolved.

Laid to Rest

Linda’s siblings held a memorial service on January 17, 2019, at Adams Mason Funeral Home in Akron.⁹ Her cremated remains were later interred at Holy Cross Cemetery alongside her mother, Ann Marie Pagano Romaniello, who died in 2012. Had she lived, Linda would have been 61.¹

1
Akron Beacon Journal. Service Set for Teen Missing Since 1974
2
Akron Beacon Journal. Akron Teen on Top of the World
3
Ohio Attorney General. Cold Case Homicides – Doe 2019
4
Washington Post. A Skeleton With a Hole in the Head Found in 1975 Is No Longer Just a Jane Doe
5
Patch. Decades-Old Cold Case Finally Moves Forward in Ohio
6
News 5 Cleveland. Akron Missing: Linda Pagano
7
Ideastream Public Media. Missing Akron Teen Linda Pagano Identified 40 Years Later
8
InsideHook. Internet Sleuths Help Find Identity of Skeleton Found in 1975 With Hole in Head
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Akron Beacon Journal. Family, Friends Honor Life Cut Short
10
Cleveland.com. Officials Identify Missing Akron Teen
11
Morning Journal News. DNA Tests Link Remains to Teen Who Disappeared in 1974
12
Columbus Dispatch. Memorial Service Set for Ohio Teen Missing Since 1974