Fresh eyes cast on killing
HPD revives ’89 case in which body was dumped by office
The young woman’s body was found outside a Westheimer office building early one morning in late 1989.
She was slumped over the edge of the stairs, with her bruised face planted in the groundcover.
The landscaping and her dark brown curly hair concealed a gunshot wound in her head. She had no ID. Her remains were taken, customarily, to the Harris County morgue.
Houston police tried to determine her identity, even circulating a portrait just a month or so later by legendary forensic sketch artist Lois Gibson.
Eventually, the remains were buried in a pauper’s grave without a name in Harris County’s cemetery on Oates Road in an industrial part of east Houston.
The decades-old cold case continues to confound Sharon Derrick, a forensic anthropologist who leads identification efforts for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
“She’s quite attractive. She’s young. We estimate 20 to 25,” Derrick said. “Nobody claimed her. Why? That’s very odd.”
The woman is among dozens and dozens of uniden-
tified bodies that have passed through the forensic center, with some dating back as far as the 1950s.
New technology and renewed interest, however, is offering hope that the young woman could finally be identified.
Her blood card sample has been developed into a DNA profile by the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and added to databases, where it waits for a potential match.
And earlier this month, her case file was brought out of storage for a fresh look from a Houston Police Department homicide detective in hopes of finding new leads and making a positive ID.
Solving long-ago deaths and killings has become a priority for institute officials such as Derrick and the HPD’s reinvigorated cold-case squad.
In March, the police department launched a coldcase website to alert the public about deaths that remain unsolved.
“We put up a small synopsis about the cases,” said Officer Ramon Cervantes, a 25-year police veteran who has worked 13 years as a homicide detective. He joined the cold case squad last year.
“If there are photographs that we’re able to put on there or if it involves a sketch of a possible suspect, we do that as well,” he said. “Those that visit that page and may have information on it, they can call us directly or Crime Stoppers.”
A case is considered “cold” when all investigative leads that can be pursued are exhausted and the crime remains unsolved for three years.
Rows of small, flat markers with metal plates mark the spaces where thousands of unknown and indigent bodies are buried in the oldest of Harris County’s two burial grounds run by its community services department.
Thousands of graves
About 15,000 people are buried in the vast, plush greenway of grass. The Oates Road cemetery, established in 1923, stopped accepting new burials in 2014, when the county’s new cemetery opened in Crosby.
In Section L at the old burial ground, one grave is denoted by only five letters: UNK W F. She was an “unknown white female” whose identity was updated later to include an ethnicity, Hispanic.
She’s the person found around 7:15 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1989.
Someone’s daughter. Someone’s granddaughter. Possibly someone’s spouse or mother. Potentially someone whose loved ones are alive and hope to learn what happened to her.
A bank employee headed into work at 5433 Westheimer found her lifeless body at the mid-rise building’s entrance, according to police records.
The woman, about 5-foot-4, was wearing decidedly 1980s attire: A white T-shirt, black Leebrand jeans, black socks and black Coasters-brand shoes.
Detectives at the time believed she had been killed elsewhere and was dumped outside the building.
“It’s puzzling,” Cervantes said. “It might have been around the corner or at the other end of the parking lot.”
Police canvassed the immediate area that December day, and ran all the investigative traps available in 1989 and the early 1990s, he said.
“She was identified as a Hispanic or possibly being a Hispanic. The detective at the time also sent off her prints to [federal immigration authorities] and ran the prints through their system. At the time, nothing came back,” Cervantes said. “Was she relatively new to the country where there was no profile on her at all? That’s possible.”
‘Somebody … knows’
Because the woman was found in the morning, HPD investigators at the time brought the overnight security guard in for questioning about events on his night watch. Cervantes said warming up the case could include trying to interview that person again.
Houston police officials have declined to release photos of the scene or discuss specifics of the close-range gunshot to the woman’s head. Some details need to be preserved as evidence.
“I believe that the person or persons who are involved in this know the manner in which she was shot and exactly where she was shot,” Cervantes said. “Only someone who did it knows where they put the gun up to what area of her head.”
Recollections and memories that may still be intact are called upon to help solve this case nearly 28 years later.
“The challenge when we have an old case such as this one that occurred in 1989 is going back,” Cervantes said. “If there is some new information that is brought forth in any form or fashion, be it Crime Stoppers, a family member or even the possible suspect themselves, the challenge is going back to find the individual. And, unfortunately, sometimes the individuals — witnesses, family members — have died or have moved away.”
Like many other cases where pieces of the puzzle have yet to coalesce, Derrick goes with her gut.
“Somebody potentially knows,” she said.