A mystery writer planned to retire. Now she’s leading a team of genetic detectives – and giving murder victims back their names

Working from her California bungalow, Margaret Press, 77, leads a pioneering team of volunteers in the field of genetic genealogy. Thus far, they’ve identified the remains of more than 100 Jane and John Does

For 37 years, the young woman remained nameless. She was known only as “Buckskin girl” for the leather poncho she wore when she was found, strangled, in an Ohio ditch in 1981.

That was until almost four decades later, when two women in California took up her case. In 2018, Margaret Press, a retired linguist, author and computer programmer, and Colleen Fitzpatrick, a nuclear physicist and forensic genealogist, ran DNA evidence from the crime scene through an ancestry database, looking for the victim’s closest relatives.

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