Homicide Victim "Trunk Lady" Identified 50 Years After Being Strangled With a Bolo Tie
Police used newly discovered DNA evidence to give a name to the mystery woman.
Florida police have solved part of the 53-year-old "Trunk Lady" cold case mystery with newly discovered DNA evidence. Police in St. Petersburg, Florida, identified the woman found dead in a trunk in 1969 as a 41-year-old mother who disappeared and left behind five children, police announced last week. Here's what you need to know about this long-standing mystery.
St. Petersburg police found the body of a woman inside a suspicious black steamer trunk in the woods behind a local restaurant on Halloween night in 1969. The woman's body was dressed in a pajama top and wrapped in plastic. She had been strangled with a man's Western-style bolo tie, police said.
The woman was buried in a grave marked "Jane Doe" after police initially failed to identify her. Her body was exhumed on February 10, 2010, for DNA testing, but teeth and bone samples proved too degraded for successful identification, police said.
St. Petersburg cold case detective Wally Pavelski in 2023 discovered heretofore unknown original samples of the victim's hair and skin taken during an original autopsy. He sent it to a lab in Texas, which resulted in a DNA profile in April, police said.
Comparison of the profile with others linked the woman to her children, allowing police to identify her: Sylvia June Atherton, who was 41 at the time of her death.
Pavelski contacted one of Atherton's surviving children, daughter Syllen Gates of California, who was 9 when her mother disappeared. "It was shocking because it had been so many years, and we had no idea what happened to her," Gates said at a news conference.
Gates told police that Atherton left Tucson, Arizona, for Chicago with her husband, Stuart Brown; daughter Kimberly Anne Brown, 5; adult son Gary Sullivan; daughter Donna Lindhurst, 20, and her husband, David Lindhurst. Syllen and her 11-year-old brother remained in Tucson with their father from a previous marriage, police said. Sullivan eventually returned to Tucson to live with them, police said.
Police still do not know who killed Atherton. Stuart Brown died in 1999 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Police have still not located Kimberly Brown or Donna Lindhurst. The St. Petersburg Police Department asked anyone with information to contact it about the ongoing case.
