Mysterious Dead Bodies That Were Never Identified

What's even creepier than a murder? One where the body of the victim is never identified. 

Unexplained and unidentified corpses are found from time to time, and despite efforts to find their killers and put their bodies to rest, investigators aren't always able to solve these gruesome crimes. Known as John and Jane Does, these mysterious murder victims captivate the imagination of many. Who were they? What happened to them? Why did they die? 

The task of figuring out who these people are is often hard and fruitless. Authorities trying to crack cases with unexplained corpses face uphill battles when trying to resolve these murders. They involve men, women and children of all ages, all races and all across the world. While nameless, they live forever in their mysteriousness. 

On December 20, 1976, three suitcases were found under a bridge in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. Inside were the remains of a pregnant woman believed to be between 16 and 22-years-old. The woman had been strangled, shot in the neck, and then completely dismembered - even her eyes, nose and breasts had been removed.  Among the remains were also the remains of her unborn baby. The only lead police had was numbers and letters that could have been a license plate number written on one of her hands. Investigators never determined who she was or what the numbers meant. She was buried under the name “Beth Doe” and her murder, sadly, remains unsolved to this day.

On Halloween 1979, someone spotted a naked body lying alongside Interstate 35 in Texas. Upon further inspection, the body was that of a woman who was wearing nothing but a pair of orange socks. She had been strangled to death and dumped over the guardrail. Other than a mother of pearl ring and the orange socks, there were no clues as to who this woman was. Police working the case referred to her only as “orange socks.”  

Investigators believed she was a prostitute and drifter because, in addition to having no one recognize her or report her missing, she suffered from gonorrhea. It also appeared as though she was using a towel in place of a sanitary napkin. 

Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas claimed he picked her up hitchhiking, killer her, and raped her corpse. But there was no evidence to support this claim, and Lucas contradicted himself quite a bit during this alleged confession - as he did with over 6,000 other bogus murder confessions. Her real name remains a mystery. Tragically, it seems, she will forever be known as “orange socks.”

It was July 9, 1991, in El Dorado, AR, when a woman’s body was found beaten and shot in her room at the Whitehall Motel. While her ID read Cheryl Ann Wick, it was quickly discovered the real Cheryl Ann Wick was alive and well in Minneapolis. This mystery woman apparently had many aliases. Her boyfriend and killer, James Roy McAlphin, didn’t even know her real identity. She led lives in Dallas, Little Rock, Houston, Shreveport, and Florida. She had been known as "Kelly Lee Carr," "Shannon Wiley," and "Mercedes." 

She allegedly worked as an exotic dancer and prostitute, and had been arrested multiple times, yet her true identity was never known. The only personal items police found on her was a Bible with names scrawled inside. The names turned out to be people she stayed with temporarily and offered no insight to the true identity of El Dorado Jane Doe.

On February 25, 1957, a horrific discovery was made. A boy that couldn’t have been more than 6 had been stripped of his clothes, thrown in a box, and left on the side of the road in Philadelphia. He was severely underweight, malnourished, and was badly bruised. His official cause of death was blunt force trauma.

Not a single person knew who he was, there were no missing persons reports matching his description, no fingerprints on file with the hospital, and no one ever came forward after word of his discovery got out. Police went so far as to enlist the help of a psychic to help solve this mystery but who this child was still remains a mystery.

On Valentine's Day 1975, skeletonized remains of a young black woman were found near a highway in Maury County, Tennessee. Her age was placed somewhere between 15 and 25, and her weighed between 127 to 137 pounds. It was hard to narrow down specific physical traits because to the decomposition. The only unique thing about her was that she had an extra upper tooth. 

No one came forward with an identity of the young woman, and authorities found nothing on the scene or in their own missing persons files to help identify her.

She had multiple fractures, enough to cause speculation of a hit-and-run. Police believe she could've been intentionally run over.  They speculated she had been dead for at least nine months. Strangely enough, the remains of a dog were also found with her - it’s possible that it was hers. 

On October 31, 1958, the grisly remains of a badly decomposed body of a young girl were discovered. Despite best efforts, authorities could not identify her. The remains had been out on a desolate road near the Grand Canyon for a significant amount of time, so much so that the only thing left was her skeleton. She had some personal items with her, such as toiletries, but nothing useful in determining her identity or what killed her. What can be determined is heartbreaking - she was no more than 14, possibly as young as 11. Her clothes were found near her body, so she was stripped naked - and possibly sexually assaulted - before her death. Her remains had been left to decompose out in the desert for close to nine months, and while her cause of death was never determined, it’s always been ruled a homicide.

The 'Tamam Shud' case is considered by many as one of Australia's most profound mysteries. The case, also referred to as the "Mystery of the Somerton Man," is about more than just an unidentified body. It’s about the cryptic coding found in the man’s possession, and that no one knows what actually killed him. On December 1, 1948, a man’s body was found in Somerton Beach in South Australia. In his pocket was a torn page from a book of poems entitled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. On it was the phrase "tamám shud" meaning "ended" or "finished" in Persian.

Police located the copy of the book the page was ripped from, and inside of the back cover were written indentations. They deciphered a telephone number, but the other number and seemingly random text is believed to be an encrypted message. Investigators were never able to figure out the code or the man's identity.

The discovery of the body coupled with the growing concerns of the Cold War and an increased public concern over international espionage caused some to speculate the man was a spy. No one ever figured out who the man was, what his code means, how he died, or what he was doing in the first place.

In 1985, a hunter out in New Hampshire’s Bear Brook State Park, made a shocking discovery. He found the bodies of a woman in her mid twenties to early thirties and a young girl, both beaten, wrapped in plastic, and stuffed into a metal drum. Police were unable to identify the two victims and the case went cold.

In May 2000, a detective decided to reopen the case and visit the crime scene. To everyone’s horror, two more bodies were found about 300 feet away from the first two victims. They, too, were concealed in a metal drum, and while their cause of death was undetermined, it did date back to the same time period as the first two victims.

They were much younger than the first child, one was between 2 and 4 years old and the other was only 1 to 3 years old. DNA testing concluded that two of the children were maternally related to the woman, the third could have been a paternal half-sister or cousin to the other children. The identities of the family remain unknown. There was nothing in the database to link the girls to a father, a missing person's report, or any other family members.

In 1943, a group of English boys made a terrible discovery while playing in Stourbridge. They discovered the skull of a woman whose body had apparently been stuffed into the hollowed trunk of a Wych Elm. They reported it to their parents, who turned the case over to police. They discovered the body, which had been there almost a year-and-a-half. 

Soon thereafter, someone wrote "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" on walls in the nearby town. Some speculated the body could belong to a prostitute named Bella who had gone missing a few years prior.

Ten years after the body's discovery, a woman named Una Mossop accused her cousin Jack Mossop of helping a Dutchman named Van Ralt put the woman in the tree. According to Una Mossop, the woman was drunk and the two men thought it’d be a funny way to scare her. He died at the hospital prior to the discovery of the body. Jack Mossop was said to be haunted by dreams of the woman’s dead eyes staring out at him from inside a tree trunk. There's no proof that Una Mossop's story was true. 

It was the summer of 1974 in Cape Cod when a young woman’s body was found brutally murdered and half buried in the sand dunes. She was believed to be between 25 and 49. In an effort presumably to hide her identity, her killer removed her hands and many of her teeth. Her skull was so badly crushed in, it was practically detached from the rest of her body. She laid decomposing for more than a week before a teenage girl walking her dog stumbled across her.

This mysterious woman has been exhumed many times throughout the years. DNA specialists, dentists, even psychics have all tried their best to identify this woman and bring her killer to justice but have had no luck. Serial killer Hadden Clark confessed to the murder at one point, however, many believe his confession is false, as he has a reputation for lying. The identity of this woman still hasn’t been discovered and there’s a chance that her vicious killer is still roaming free.