ANOTHER COLD CASE MIRACLE

It is amazing when everyone gives up hope of finding their missing loved one, a miracle happends! Here is one that is for the books, this unfortunate woman was missing for 55 years. Cold cases have a way of finding life when all hope is gone, our 37 years is certainly overshadowed by this 55 year miracle.



PHOENIX — A murdered young woman buried as Jane Doe in Colorado 55 years ago. An Arizona family puzzled and saddened as Dorothy Gay Howard's disappearance stretched into decades.

It took a historian, a detective and a determined family member to make the connection after more than a half century that these two people were one and the same.

Howard's younger sister, Marlene Howard Ashman, the last surviving member of the immediate family, was relieved last month when authorities announced the identification.

"It was just complete and utter shock," said Ashman, who lives in Mena, Ark., but spoke to The Associated Press from Newport, N.C., where she was visiting her daughter.

"All these 55 years, I guess I learned as a child to put it in an abstract form so I could deal with it; it's easier to accept," Ashman said.

But the younger sister is grappling with the fact that Howard was murdered and is aching to know who killed her.

"Now that I know, it isn't so much that she died, but the horrible death," she said.

Boulder County Sheriff's Detective Steve Ainsworth, the lead investigator in the case, said Howard died of blunt-force trauma. She couldn't be identified because her body was found a week after she was killed, and animals had gotten to her face and fingers.