July 13, 2011
Vol 13 No 28
September 30, 2015
Looking for leads in a cold case Recipes
Spice up game day
Business
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Home building trip
Photo by Brett Auten St. Charles County Police Detective Stephanie Fisk stands in Oak Grove Cemetery holding a composite image of Jane Doe, an unidentified little girl whose body was discovered in Alton Lake in 1968.
St. Charles County Police are working to identify a girl whose body was found in Alton Lake in 1968 By Brett Auten Detective Stephanie Fisk wasn’t even born when a heinous crime was committed in this region. It was the winter of 1968 when two fishermen discovered the haunting remains of a little girl stuffed into a suitcase. The questions that baffled police then continue to baffle 47 years later; who is the little girl and who was it that killed her? Fisk is dogged and determined to find out some answers. It was the first day of February in 1968 when two fishermen at Alton Lake (or Alton Slough as it is known), saw the tip of a suitcase in about three feet of water and about 12 feet from the shore. Once they gathered the suitcase they opened it to reveal a deceased female child inside. The suitcase had been weighted down with barbells, according to a newspaper report from that time. The fishing lake is near Highway 67 and the Clark Bridge over the Mississippi River. Fisk came across the case while working in the records room. Fisk eventually worked her way to patrol duty and five weeks ago she was promoted to detective. Now she is trying to solve the coldest and oldest of the nine cold cases in the St. Charles County department.
“I stumbled across that report 13 years ago when I was on light duty back in records and once I was assigned here, I asked my sergeant if I could take a look at that case again and he allowed me to do that,” Fisk said. “Just the fact that someone could do that to a child; and the fact that it’s been unsolved and she has been unidentified for so long, it bothered me.” She was buried in an unmarked grave one week later in the children’s’ section of Oak Grove Cemetery in St. Charles. Police exhumed her body last week to recover DNA evidence that might help them figure out who she was. “We’re looking to extract DNA from her that way if we do get a tip or if there is any data already on file we can compare and maybe use for identification. University of Tennessee will hopefully do a better recreation from her skull, which is always better than the computer programs so we can get an even more specific picture of what she might have looked like.” Police now have a better idea of what the child looked like after a photo-recreation was done by forensic artists using a computer program at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They worked from an autopsy photo to create the picture and have determined she was
likely two-to-three-years old. The photo is the freshest lead police have had in a number of years. Going over a case that is nearing 50-years old is arduous. “Looking at an old report is definitely a challenge,” Fisk said. “Those reports are either typed or handwritten. There was no databases, no computers back then so that’s been a little interesting, seeing how they documented things in law enforcement 40 years ago opposed to how See LOOKING FOR LEADS on page 3
Moore on Life
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It’s highly debatable
Around Town
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70 miles on 70th birthday
Movie: ‘Back to the Future’
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