Remains Found Over 40 Years Ago Finally Identified as Missing Teen After Clerical Error
Losing a loved one is one of the hardest things we have to do in this life. But even more difficult than saying goodbye is not knowing whether or not they’re actually gone.
Going to a funeral for someone you once knew provides closure. It’s a time of sadness and loss, but also of remembering and thankfulness.
But what if your loved one simply disappears? What if you hear nothing and know nothing, and have no answers?
The questions could drive you mad. The wondering, the not-knowing would grate on you every day that passed, and your grief would be tempered with the fear that they’re still out there somewhere and you could be helping find them.
That was the case for one family, regarding a mystery that started back in 1974.
It was September, and a man and his stepdaughter were in the middle of a fight in Akron, Ohio. She was a short 17-year-old with blonde hair and blue eyes, and her stepfather kicked her out of the house.
She never came back, and the family has wondered for decades what became of Linda Pagano.
In 1975, three boys were poking around in the woods of Strongsville, Ohio. They wandered along a sandbank and found something horrible.
A skeleton. The lower jaw was missing and the victim had been dead several months. Cause of death was determined to be a gunshot wound in the head.
But they couldn’t figure out who she was. After the police department found no matches, they buried the remains in a pauper’s grave.
Decades later, in 2015, someone found the cemetery listing for that “Jane Doe” and thought it was interesting. The mystery was posted to Reddit, and redditors got to work to help solve it.
People began to ask for her files. A forensic artist used the information and skeletal structure to draw what she might have looked like.
It became clear that this particular Jane Doe had never been entered into a database for missing persons because of a clerical error: a misspelled word.
Links started to form. The artist of the facial rendering saw a photo on the database of missing people that looked a lot like his mock-up. The police were on the job.
The body was exhumed and DNA testing was run. It was a match! A grizzly discovery, but one that would allow her relatives to have some peace about the long and drawn-out situation.
“I pretty much figured it was her,” her brother Mike Pagano said. “I wasn’t really surprised. Relieved. It’s basically over — and we get some closure.”
Her body will now get a decent burial, and concerns about her status will be laid to rest. Only one mystery remains to be solved: her murder.
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