Hi Crime Junkies. It's Ashley.
Six years ago, when we did our very first crime junkie tour, we told a story about a young girl who was murdered.
Well within that story, the killer had googled Dana Ireland autopsy photos.
That small piece of the larger story sent me on a years long spiral, picking apart the murder of a young woman on Christmas Eve.
Three men were convicted of her murder, but it was clear that the real Killer had never been identified.
But how that happened is a wild story.
One that we're telling you in the new season of three, hosted by Amanda Knox.
Hear the full story in season two of three.
You can listen to three now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is about a gruesome discovery in a New York City basement.
One that set off an investigation, weaving together threads that you would never expect to find in a single case.
A shadowy suspect, a tangled family tree filled with deception, and iconic rock club.
The September 11 attacks mob shakedowns tied to a gangster who would later find fame on the Sopranos.
Like you name it, it is in this case.
And at the heart of it all is a teenage girl and the decades -long mission to restore her identity.
But even though she finally has her name back, justice still remains out of reach, And police need your help to find out what really happened to her.
This is the story of a woman who, for more than two decades, was known only as the Midtown Jane Doe.
Wow. It's Monday afternoon, February 10, 2003 and construction workers are clearing debris from a basement of a rundown five -story building on West 46th Street in Midtown, Manhattan, a neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen.
Now, this place is in pretty bad shape, and the only reason the workers are even down there is because the restaurant next door arranged to rent part of the basement just for storage.
So, they're doing their thing when one of them notices something weird in the corner behind this old boiler.
It's this big rectangular concrete slab, like six feet wide, five feet long, taller than your standard cinder block.
And it looks just all kinds of wrong, like it definitely doesn't belong here.
And in a place like New York, where lifers have seen it all, that is saying something.
So a worker takes a sledgehammer to this thing and instead of the solid thud that you would expect to hear when you like hit concrete, There is this echoing sound that tells them it's hollow inside and with the blow the cement starts breaking apart until they see brown fabric poking through and when they pull on it a Human skull starts popping out Now the worker notifies the NYPD and detective Gerard Gardner who just started his shift and is next up in rotation to catch a case Now, he knows right away that this is not going to be a routine investigation.
New York City has more than its fair share of homicides, don't get me wrong, but cases involving skeletal remains are rare here.
So, he calls in the city medical examiner's forensic anthropologist, and when they dig through that concrete to the dirt below, they find a skeleton, like curled up in the fetal position all wrapped up in a rust -colored carpet.
This was literally a concrete coffin.
— Mm -hmm. And more like a tomb.
I mean, there's no bottom to it per se.
Like, whoever did this might have put the body down, or maybe even dug into the floor a little bit.
And then what they did was they poured cement right over the top, almost as if they were building some kind of foundation.
Now, at first glance, investigators don't see any obvious signs of trauma on this skeleton.
But they have no doubt that this is a homicide.
— Well, yeah, someone encased in concrete kind speaks for itself.
Yes, but theoretically, they could have died from something nonviolent, like an overdose, and then whoever was there panicked and covered it up, whatever.
But that's not even a consideration here because the victim was hog -tied with pantyhose and an electrical cord, which is also wrapped around this person's neck.
But even though they have a huge potential clue about the cause of death, like with these things, they've still got their work cut out for them.
The concrete might have helped to preserve the skeleton, but what they're dealing with is just that, bones.
There is no flesh, there is no muscle, nothing.
And even the bones aren't in great shape.
Like the outer surface starts peeling away on them, kinda like old paint chipping off of a wall.
So an ID is gonna be difficult.
However, they do find some pretty promising clues.
They discover that this person had long fingernails and the victim is wearing a tan bra.
There's also a glittery fabric with red and yellow sequin that they think might come from some kind of clothing, which all hints to them that this might be a female.
The anthropologists can also get a pretty good sense of this person's age.
The victim's wisdom teeth haven't totally come in yet, which usually happens between 17 years old and 25 years old.
And their collar bone isn't fully fused, meaning that this person's bones were still growing when they died.
and while they don't find a purse or ID the victim is wearing two pieces of jewelry that could be huge for identification.
So, there is a 1966 bull of a watch on their wrist and a yellow metal signet ring on their right pinky finger with the initials PM lowercase c G.
Now everything gets hauled into the lab and a couple of days later Detective Gardener gets an update on the findings that start painting a clearer picture.
They can now confirm that this definitely is a female victim, a young woman between 15 and 21 years old, somewhere between 4010 and 54.
She had a narrow face, petite -billed, and reddish -brown hair, some of which was still attached to the skull.
According to America's Most Wanted, her pointy chin and the shape of her skull and the eye sockets led them to believe that she was likely white.
Now, looking at her pelvic bone, the anthropologist thinks it's unlikely that she ever had children, although they can't be sure, but it is her teeth that really tell an interesting story, because she had expensive dental work done on her back teeth, but her front teeth were starting to rot before she died.
It makes me wonder if she left home or was somehow taken from family or caretakers well before she died.
Like, at some point, Somebody cared enough to get her that expensive dental work, but then somewhere along the line, something changed.
Now investigators theorize that she might have been one of the kids who maybe ran away to New York City chasing Big Dreams or something.
But whatever she was looking for, I mean, obviously she found something very different.
And that idea isn't totally out of left field.
So the detective who's working the case now, Ryan Glass, he told our reporter Nina that this part of Hell's kitchen specifically, like including this very building, which is 301 West 46th Street, was known for drugs and sex work.
It's right by the Port Authority bus terminal, which is often the first stop for young people coming into the city.
But that also makes it a magnet for predators looking for vulnerable teens.
Cops even nicknamed the area the Minnesota Strip because so many of the girls being trafficked there were runaways from the Midwest. And the basement that she was buried in has its own interesting history.
So it was home to a speakeasy in prohibition, then a rock club in the sixties.
Okay, but at least with this watch being from 66, we know that this body is at least from the sixties.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely not that old.
Okay. But they can tell that she has been there for a while.
So her skeleton is mostly intact, but some bones were missing, smaller ones from her hands, feet, stuff that could have maybe been carried off by rats.
And speaking of rats, when lab techs process the scene, and they find this whole little ecosystem that developed around her remains — maggot casings, rodent bones, a nest, and there are also animal and human hairs in the carpet that she was wrapped in.
And then there's this random collection of items that they find mixed in with everything — pieces of Sears brand feed and weed bag, scraps of rat poison wrapper, like a plastic green toy soldier, some duct tape, and a dime from 1969.
The dime is so crusty and corroded that they can barely make out the date, but they do.
Was that all buried with her or did it just, like, end up with her over time?
Right, so, okay, that's hard to say.
Some of it was definitely in the mix with her remains.
Like the Searsbag and the toy soldier and that dime were actually in the rug with her, which makes me think that maybe they were just kind of lying on whatever carpet that, like, she was ended up being rolled up in.
Or, I mean, it's also possible that she had those things on her.
Like, who knows? But the other stuff, like, the rat poison wrapper, probably that stuff came, like, it was more in the concrete.
I mean, it's really like kind of a sh -show down there.
But all of this stuff still helps create kind of a rudimentary timeline.
Like, those little green army men, they became huge in the fifties when everyone got freaked out about lead poisoning from the metal ones.
But then the dime tells us that she couldn't have been killed before 1969.
Then the rat poison wrapper, that brand didn't even exist until the late 70s.
So taking everything into consideration, they think she was killed some time in the 70s, maybe the 80s.
But they're leaning more toward the 80s given the history of crime in that stretch of the city.
Now, even after the medical examiner, whose name is actually Dr. Happy, even after Dr. Happy checks everything out, he can't find any injuries that definitively show how this person died.
But given the electrical cord around her neck, Dr. Happy is thinking that it was probably strangulation.
And while they don't know for sure if she was sexually assaulted, nothing seems to point to that actually.
Her bra was still properly in place, not like pulled down or messed with.
And they also find scraps of dark fabric near her hips and legs that might be from pants or shorts along with some buttons.
So right now, they have no name, no suspects, and no motive.
And they're like two decades behind.
All they can do for now is try to build a profile of what kind of person could have done this.
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Police believe the killer had to be someone who knew that building inside and out.
Probably a regular in the neighborhood.
They would have needed to know their way around concrete as well and that particular basement.
And there's actually a few ways to access this basement from inside the building plus a steel trap door that opens to a neighborhood parking lot.
But they don't think that this was just some random person who wandered in.
Think about how much time it would take to construct something like this tomb, as we're calling it.
This is a place that her killer felt comfortable in.
Well, and it's not just about burying her, right?
Unless this basement already had concrete storage in it, they'd have to haul that down there, making multiple trips in and out, make the concrete.
Yeah, Detective Glass estimates that they would've needed at least 50 bags of concrete to basically make this thing that she's encased in.
And what was this building in the 80s?
So, it's a little hard to tell at first but it might have just been a regular basement back then.
Like, TBD will kind of get there.
But this building in general, like investigators at the time quickly realized that it was never a kind of place where people would stay long.
Like, by the time they're canvassing in 2003, the place is practically empty.
There aren't any long -term residents.
Even the superintendent is fairly new.
And the first floor is just an adult video store and some of the upper floors are completely blocked off.
And they do end up finding one guy who worked in the area back in the eighties but he can't tell them anything useful about the space.
So with no witnesses to work with, Detective Gardner shifts focus to the physical evidence, starting with that Bolivar watch. He's hoping that the serial number might lead them to whoever bought it.
But according to New York Post reporter Al Gwardt, that is a total dead end.
And it turns out that Boulevard just randomly assigns serial numbers for insurance.
Like, they don't actually track the purchases at all.
So they move on to what they think is actually their best chance at identifying her, that ring.
So Gardner teams up with the FBI and starts searching nationwide for missing persons with PM CG in their initials.
Now, based on their timeline and what they know so far, they look for people born on or after 1958 and they get 11 names back, but after comparing things like race and age and other characteristics, they have to eliminate every single one.
So next, they dig into arrest records, checking out every woman with those initials who's been charged with a crime across the country.
And they're doing this thinking that maybe she could have been involved in sex work or maybe drugs and if that's the case, maybe she had a run -in with law enforcement.
So that search gives Gardner another 500 names to chase down.
But still, even with those 500 names, he gets nothing.
You know what doesn't make sense to me about the sex worker theory, though?
Like in so many cases we've covered where the victims were sex workers, the killers just dump them somewhere on the side of the road in an alley ditch. They didn't even try to hide what they've done or what they did.
And like, they did do that, like, Lisk, like they did try to hide.
The victims were, like, super, super hidden, close together, or at least buried outdoors.
But this guy, he went to extreme lengths to try to make sure, like, she would never be found.
Not even by accident.
Right. Like, to your point, there are serial killers.
Even that MO's a little off, but there actually was one of the first potential suspects, at least that we know of, that they look into was someone who targeted sex workers and someone who took elaborate steps to hide their bodies or at least make sure that, like, these bodies couldn't be tracked back to him.
Now this guy is among New York's most notorious serial killers, Joel Rifkin.
Rifkin terrorized women all over the city and Long Island from the late 80s into the early 90s.
And the only reason he stopped was because he got caught driving with a missing license plate of all things like that.
He could have gotten copper and when he did get caught, police found a decomposing body in his pickup.
Now, he ended up confessing to killing 17 women, though he was only ever convicted technically of nine murders.
Now, what we know about him is he strangled his victims, all of whom were sex workers or women struggling with addiction, and he was super calculated about disposing of their bodies.
And the thing about him is he used different methods each time, which made it really hard for investigators to connect these crimes.
And get this. According to biography .com, With his second victim, he actually put her dismembered head, arms, and legs into buckets and then filled those buckets with concrete and dumped them into the East River and a Brooklyn canal.
Now, only catch is that Rifkin was known for leaving bodies outside, in water, in woods, near highways.
Sometimes he put them in oil drums, but as far as we know he never stashed anyone away indoors.
And I'm not exactly sure how or if they ruled him out back then.
I know Detective Glass interviewed him years later after he inherited the case.
But in 2003, even though they're interested in him, they don't seem to really focus on him.
Gardner tells Al Gore that there's time Rifkin isn't going anywhere, like he's serving over 200 years in prison.
Yeah, but anything could happen.
Like, what if he dies?
I guess, in my opinion, why wait?
Well, at the time I think they were wanting to know more about their victim, who the press is calling Midtown Jane Doe.
I think they want to figure that part out before going to him.
We've talked about this before, right?
You try and get all your ducks in a row so you know when someone's lying, you have all the facts.
Like, they might get only one shot at those interviews and without solid information about who she is, they would be at a huge disadvantage.
I mean, truthfully, they still don't even know when she was killed.
But, according to America's Most Wanted, they do catch a break with that when they send crime scene soil samples to the lab.
Mixed in with some dirt, they find a torn up clothing label, and after texts like clean it up and look at it under a microscope, they can see seals showing that it was made by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
So, Detective Gardner reaches out to them hoping that they can date this label and when gives them the numbers and the letters and all the things on the seal, they tell him that it could not have been made before December of 1987.
So like late 80s or even the early 90s and that's making sense to investigators.
I mean at the time, like 80s and 90s, New York was in the grip of a drug epidemic that was driving violence to levels that they'd never seen before.
We're talking like 1900 -plus homicides a year, except, like it's feeling great, except that timeline might not be accurate.
It takes a while, but they eventually end up learning that the estimate was wrong.
The clothing label, the dates that they were given, were completely off.
Manufacturing records show that it could have been made as early as the 60s, so we're back there.
That adds almost, what, three more decades to the estimated timeframe of her death?
Yes, but for some reason, even though they're putting the label at the 60s, police still seem pretty set on the idea that this victim was killed in the 80s.
I don't know why, but that's their thinking at the time.
So what they do is they have an artist create a reconstruction of her face using detailed measurements from her skull.
They get her featured on America's Most Wanted, which was, like, prime back then, but no one recognizes her.
Now, they managed to determine that the human hairs in the carpet belonged to a blonde male, probably a white guy.
But they can't say who that guy is.
Was there, like, a lot of hair?
Um, Detective Glass described it as, like, a pinch. Like, about what you would clean out of a hairbrush.
But they don't know, I mean, if it's the killers or if it was just, like, mixed up with everything else.
Like, it's not gonna be, like, the nail in the coffin for someone to write, like, that's not gonna be the clincher.
So, fast forward a little bit.
Over the years, the Emmy's office checks Midtown Jane Doe against various missing people.
And at least one possibility does gain some traction.
In August 2011, a woman named Maureen is online when she comes across the sketch of Midtown Jane Doe.
And as she later tells Long Island press reporter Jacqueline Galuche, it stops her in her tracks.
Because she thinks it looks just like her missing sister, Judy O 'Donnell, who vanished in 1980, while pursuing her dreams of becoming an actress and a singer in New York City.
And it's not just her looks that strike Maureen as similar.
She knew that Judy had been living on the streets in Hell's Kitchen.
She knew that she'd been arrested for sex work, which remember is the going theory about Midtown Jane Doe.
Plus, they both had expensive dental work that just seemed to stop like their lives took a sharp turn.
— But what about the ring?
Judy O 'Donnell doesn't match the initials.
— Not hers, but those are Judy's grandmother's exact initials.
And Maureen knows that Judy and their grandma were super close.
And, like, there's nobody in her family that remembers a ring like that, but Maureen thinks that it would be, like, probable that Judy might have, like, found it somewhere and kept it to honor their grandmother.
Like, who knows. So that October, a forensic specialist compares Judy's dental records to Jane Doe's, but they can't say if it's a match, one way or another.
And after being encased in concrete, for God knows how long by this point, her bones are so degraded that getting a viable DNA profile is like trying to get blood from a stone.
So all told, they submit 33 different samples for analysis.
But it's not until 2015 that they're able to get any sort of profile from Midtown Jane Doe, and it's not until the following year that they can confirm that Jane Doe is not Judy O 'Donnell.
Which is shocking, a surprise and disappointing, but at least they have DNA that they can work with now, right?
Yes, and they are even able to put it into CODES, but the sample is so small that scientists can basically only use it for direct comparison.
But either way, you're right.
It's progress. And in 2017, there is this renewed push to finally figure out who she is once and for all after a detective rediscovered the case while reviewing old unsolved files, and he decided it was time to take a closer look.
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What they do now is they try to do isotope analysis, which basically looks at the chemical makeup of hair, teeth, bones, all of that to figure out where a person might have lived, and based on what they do, the results point pretty strongly to one region, the Midwest, the Minnesota Strip.
Yes, it's got a name for a reason, right?
But the Midwest doesn't like narrow down, right?
It's not specifically Minnesota.
— When they checked missing persons reports, were they checking from the Midwest or just like New York and the surrounding area?
— They were checking everywhere, all over across the country.
So, obviously, the isotope test didn't really move things along.
So when Detective Glass is assigned the case in 2022, he comes with totally fresh eyes, no preconceived notions about who she was or where she's from or how she got there.
And what do you know?
It gives him a different take.
His gut is telling him that Midtown Jane Doe wasn't a sex worker, and that he thinks she was killed way before 1980.
And this theory might have just stayed a theory, but then something huge happens.
A lab called Astraea Forensics, which specializes in analyzing low quality samples, they managed to get a genealogy grade DNA profile from one of her foot bones.
So the NYPD's new genealogist, this woman named Linda Doyle, she is brought on board. And when they upload the sample, they quickly get two crucial hits.
They get a first cousin on her dad's side and a first cousin once removed on her mom's side.
That kind of match right off the bat is - Unheard of almost. Yeah, really rare.
Yeah. And thank God though, right?
like they are long overdue for a break.
And this is a big one, because the paternal cousin's surname is McLone.
The upper case M, lower case C, upper case G from the ring.
So Linda starts doing what genealogists do best. She's like digging into public records, old newspapers, obituaries, court documents, anything she can dig up and get her hands on that might show her where these two branches of Jane Doe's family tree intersects.
And after all of this research, Linda can only find one person who fits the bill, 16 -year -old Patricia McLoane.
She wasn't born after 1958, she wasn't a sex worker as far as we know, and she wasn't from the Midwest. She actually lived right there in Brooklyn until she disappeared, except Patricia was never reported missing.
And here's just a random twist. So Patricia's paternal cousin, who died a couple of years before genealogy tracked the family down, he was actually a retired NYPD cop and had worked as one precinct away from where they found her body.
Now, I doubt that they even knew each other.
Doesn't seem like they were very, like, the whole family was like a super close -knit family, but it was just...
I thought it was so weird. I don't know.
So while detectives have this tentative answer to the question that's haunted them for so long, they're now facing even bigger ones.
Like, who was Patricia?
What happened in her final days?
And how does a teenage girl just vanish without anyone looking for her?
So as Detective Glass and Linda dive into the investigation, they begin to uncover a story that has been buried literally for decades.
And to even try to understand it, we have to go back to the beginning.
Patricia's dad, Bernard McGloan Sr., was a busy man to say the least. By the time he hooked up with Patricia's mom, who was also named Patricia, but let's just call her Pat, he had already been married twice.
He and his first wife had two sons before they split.
Then he remarried to this woman named Helen.
They had a son. But while he was still married to Helen, Bernard and Pat got married in Virginia.
Now he knocked about five years off his age on their application, saying that he was 45 when he was nearly 50.
And for some reason, Pat added a year saying she was 21, but she was really only 20.
Now Patricia is born on April 20th, 1953.
So this is about 10 months after her parents' so -called wedding, if you can call it that since he's already married.
And at the time, Bernard is still living with Helen.
The other woman he's married to.
Okay, so we've got one man, three wives, two of whom are at the same time, and at least four kids?
And a partridge and a pear tree.
Like, you're gonna need a flow chart to keep everyone straight, which is a great reminder for everyone listening to make sure you know that we have YouTube now.
Like, this episode will be up in a couple of weeks if you want the visual crime junkie experience.
But trust me, I'm giving you the simplified version, though if you really want the messy details, there is a great article in Rolling Stone by the reporter Sarah Weinman that breaks all of this down.
But anyways, even though Bernard's two families live in the same Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, he somehow managed to keep his double life a secret for years.
So was it a secret from both women?
Okay, so Nina interviewed Linda Doyle and based on what we learned from her along with Sarah Weinman's article, I'm pretty confident that Helen was completely in the dark.
But with Pat, I'm not exactly sure.
I mean, Bernard obviously wasn't like living with her and Patricia, so I assumed that would have been a red flag, but he was a long -haul truck driver, so being gone for these long stretches like wouldn't have been that weird either.
But at any rate, in 1957, he apparently left Helen for Pat, although, when Helen died of breast cancer a few years later, her obituary still refers to her as Bernard's beloved wife, so like make of that what you will, and then Bernard and Helen's son, Bernard Jr. Hold up.
Can we please, like, call them junior and senior from here on out?
I can imagine like, having a son and Amy after you on the white, like… And then having a wife whose daughter is named after her.
Yeah, that's why. So, sure.
Junior was in his teens when his mom died.
So, he moved in with his dad, Pat, and Patricia. But if there was any stability in their home, it didn't last long.
In 1963, when Patricia was 10, senior died of a heart attack.
Pat became Junior's legal guardian, and he lived with her and Patricia for a while.
but in a brief account that he wrote about his life title, sad but true, he said that he was totally alone after his father died.
Meanwhile, as Patricia bounced between public and Catholic schools, her attendance got more and more spotty.
She had to repeat a grade, Detective Glass and Linda can't even locate a yearbook photo of her, like she's not in any of them.
But they did find little fragments of Patricia's life on other school records, and a really troubling picture starts to emerge.
Like, at her first and only semester at a junior high she transferred to in late 1968, she only showed up for nine days of class.
And obviously her teachers were concerned.
One of them noted that Patricia seemed well behaved, but she questioned how she ever was going to learn anything if she was never there.
And Pat was also reportedly worried.
And she told school officials that she just didn't know who her daughter was skipping school with, but I don't know how much attention she was really paying to Patricia. By then, she had started dating another married man, and I think he was living with them.
Now, Patricia was totally closed off from her teachers, though she did mention being interested in something she calls beauty culture, which I'm thinking is probably like cosmetology, but they didn't think that she seemed motivated to continue her education.
But I don't know if motivation is the real issue here, because, I mean, what really stands out to investigators are the last few memos in Patricia's student file, all dated 1969, including a report from March detailing a series of medical -related absences, and then another from May 8 when she dropped out of school for good.
And officially, her final departure was a, quote -unquote, medical discharge.
But this isn't Linda's first genealogy rodeo, and she knows exactly what that phrase was code for, back then.
Patricia was pregnant, wasn't she?
Bingo. And this was all happening during what was known as the Baby Scoop era after WWII, when more and more girls and women were facing unplanned pregnancies out of wedlock.
stock, single motherhood carried a very heavy stigma, not to mention the financial burdens of raising a child alone.
And that combination of judgment and desperation was the perfect storm for exploitation.
Many expectant mothers were coerced or forced to give up their babies, and some doctors saw it as a business opportunity.
For a fee, they would discreetly connect wealthy couples looking to adopt with vulnerable young women who felt like they had no other choice.
So investigators think that the physician listed in Patricia's school records might have been involved in one of these shady operations, in part because of a bizarre incident documented in a daily news article.
So apparently a gunman burst into this specific doctor's office on the Upper West Side one day at 9 PM while the place was still like buzzing with patients and staff and he robbed patient of like 500 dollars cash.
And nightpatients and cash is a major red flag.
It's definitely raising eyebrows for Linda.
Now word was that this doctor also performed abortions which to me could explain the late hours and the cash but Linda doubts that anyone in Patricia's Catholic community would have sent her to a doctor for something like that.
So it's also possible that Patricia had no plans to give up the baby that she might have had for adoption because her school paperwork had another bombshell waiting for investigators.
It turns out that Patricia got married a day before she dropped out of school on May 7, 1969, to a man named Donald Grant.
I mean, did her mom have to sign off on that?
Oh yeah, Pat gave permission.
In fact, she was their official witness at the ceremony.
So where the f— is Donald Grant now?
Exactly, and who the f*** is he?
Yeah, I mean, they assume that he might be the father of her baby, but investigators can't say for sure, because they can't find a single person who actually knew Patricia. No friends.
No neighbors. The few relatives that they're aware of have all passed away, so they don't have any details on how or when she met this Donald guy.
All they can follow is this paper trail.
So, from the school records, they go and pull the marriage license and it is basically just one giant red flag.
For starters, Donald was 32 when he exchanged vows with 16 -year -old Patricia. So Pat was the witness at her daughter's wedding to this grown -ass man.
Yes. Cool, cool, cool.
But, the age gap isn't even the biggest holy s**t about this marriage license because guess Guess what Donald put for his address.
What's so extra interesting is that Donald's name is only listed at that address for one year in the 1969 city directory, and Patricia isn't officially linked to that building at all.
But it looks like their marriage license, that's where it got mailed to.
So investigators think that she probably lived there at some point and all of this fits perfectly with the new timeline police are forming.
They now believe that Patricia was killed during the summer of 1969.
Hold up. I know the clothing label date was wrong but what about that rat poison wrapper?
Wasn't that from like the, it was the late 70s?
Yeah, it was later.
Detective Glass has a theory.
He thinks that the newer items like the wrapper and stuff like that, that probably got shuffled into the original burial site somehow, maybe during all the construction work that was going on.
I mean, that makes way more sense than Patricia being alive like into the 70s or even the 80s, especially when you look at all of the other evidence like the dime and the watch and all of that found with her remains.
So armed with their new estimated timeline, police decide to shift their focus to a place that they initially overlooked.
a place called Steve Paul's The Scene.
It was this, like, legendary rock club that operated in that berry basement from the mid to late 60s.
And when I say legendary, we're talking performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Fleetwood Mac.
Like, this was the hotspot.
Even Andy Warhol hung out there.
And the layout of this place was unusual, like, it was this massive maze of brick walls called sellers and passageways, but like everything else in that building, the scene wasn't destined to last. By the late 1960s, Brooklyn mobsters were demanding protection money from the owner.
And get this, one of those mobsters was Tony Serrico, who is best known as Pauli Walnuts from The Sopranos.
Wait. Are you saying the character Pauli Walnuts was based on him or that the actor himself - The actual guy used to be a mobster, but like, he's not a suspect.
The cement Patricia was found in for a minute.
It sparked all these mafia rumors over the years, but police don't think there's anything to that.
Cerrico is just like one of the many bizarre footnotes in this story.
But before he became an actor, he was a legit criminal known for shaking down nightclub owners, including Steve Paul.
But Steve didn't want to deal with all the drama, so he shut the club down in maybe 1 million dollars, July or August of 1969.
So suddenly, you've got this empty basement.
No crowds. No music.
No staff. The perfect opportunity for someone to bury a body in concrete without anyone noticing.
Someone like Donald.
And again, I ask who is Donald?
Well, all they know is that on the marriage license, he listed himself as a musician, which could mean anything from, like, selling out venues to, like, playing in a subway station for tips, like who knows.
I mean, it's possible he even performed at the scene, right?
But whatever the case may be, the fact that he never reported his wife Patricia missing, I think speak volumes for investigators.
They're convinced that Donald is the key to this whole mystery, just like you.
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In their marriage license, affidavit, Donald Grant said that he was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 27, 1937, to James Edward Grant and Carrie Elizabeth Johnson, who were also supposedly born in Pittsburgh.
So with all those specific details, finding him should have been a breeze.
There is no Donald Grant with that exact background, no family matching that description in Pittsburgh.
The guy police are looking for is a ghost, the only official record they can find of this very specific Donald Grant is the marriage license itself.
And the only detail they can even verify from that is his address on West 46th Street, which, remember, he only showed up one time in 1969, and then poof, this guy vanished from the directory.
And here's what's really interesting.
According to Sarah Wainman's reporting, there was a Donald Grant who was born on February 28th, 1937, but he died when he was a baby.
Not in Pittsburgh, but in nearby Ohio.
So this dude basically stole a dead baby's identity?
That's what it looks like.
Detective Glass is confident that stealing the identity or not, like, Donald is an alias.
But Linda figures there has to be some kind of kernel of truth buried in his affidavit.
So she tries every possible combination.
Rearranging names and dates.
Searching every which way she can think of.
But no matter how hard she shuffles the pieces around, there is nothing but dead ends.
it's like Patricia never even had a shot.
No one protected her, she was surrounded by liars.
Yeah, and honestly you can add her half -brother Junior to the liar list because police learned that he went on to use aliases and he got caught up in identity theft and embezzlement.
In his sad, but true, write -up Junior blamed his crimes on his step mom, Pat and the married man that she dated after his dad died.
Now, he didn't elaborate at all except to say that they were both awful people and those were the people raising Patricia, too, when you think about it.
And I say all of that to say, it's Junior's fraud case that gives us the only documentation police can find that mentions Patricia's disappearance.
So the company that Junior stole from sent investigators to interview Pat in June of 1970.
And somehow in the middle of answering questions about Junior, Patricia comes up and Pat told them that Junior's sister was a quote, unquote, addict who abandoned her 11 month old baby.
And according to Pat Patricia just took off moved away sometime in 1969 and no one has seen or heard from her since.
But wait, I think I'm confused about this timeline.
How far along in her pregnancy was she when she dropped out of school?
Okay, so she married Donald on May 7th, and she drops out of school the next day, May 8th.
So if you do the math, assuming what Pat said about the baby being 11 months old as of June 1970 was accurate, Patricia would have been about six or seven months pregnant when she dropped out, and she likely would have given birth around July or August of 1969, which is right when the scene closed.
But beyond that, I don't know if Pat ever had seen the baby or knew where the baby was.
I mean this was literally just one random paragraph buried in a huge case file that had nothing to do with Patricia. Again, she isn't even mentioned by name and Pat didn't even get Patricia's age right.
But I think the fact that Pat acknowledged that her daughter was gone makes something else investigators discover especially disturbing.
You see, Patricia's father had left a small inheritance to her and Junior.
Pat was in charge of managing the account until they hit like a certain age.
And in May of 1971, this is almost two years after police believed that Patricia was killed, Pat petitioned the court to release $250 from her account and she claimed that Patricia needed the money to buy, like, work clothes for a new job that she'd supposedly gotten.
And we actually have a copy of the petition that she filed, and, I'm gonna have you look at it because I think there's something super interesting on it.
Look at Patricia's so -called signature.
And then I've got Pat's signature there too.
They look pretty similar and you have Patricia's real signature, which looks nothing like Patricia's signature on, I know.
this like request. Yeah.
So the paperwork fills in some blanks, but only some, And that's the problem because police are running out of leads.
Detective Glass tries reaching out to everyone he can think of.
Members of the Church of All Nations, where Patricia and the alleged Donald supposedly got married, he tried her schools, even staff and regulars from the scene.
But no one remembers Patricia and no one remembers Donald.
Which isn't that surprising.
What are police even asking these people about him?
Do you happen to know some guy named Donald who we don't know anything about who might have been here around these times?
Who's name probably isn't really Donald, by the way.
Like whether he's white or black or tall or short, what his real age is, like that is anyone's guess.
It's like asking for a ghost. Right, literally, all Glass can do is ask people if they knew a guy who used that name around that time in that area.
And every time he tries, the answer is always no. but at least Patricia is coming into focus a little bit more.
After all the legwork, investigators are 99 .5 % sure that she is definitely their Midtown Jane Doe, but as Sarah Wineman points out, they can't just say like, oh, well, genetic genealogy says it's hurt.
Like call it a day, to officially confirm it.
They need mitochondrial DNA, like the kind that is passed down through the maternal line, But who do you compare it to if everyone is gone?
And literally everyone.
I mean, on both sides.
Pat, Senior, Junior, finding a sample is going to be tough.
But Linda and Detective Glass go back to the beginning, back to someone who was on the early list of matches, the maternal first cousin once removed.
So this is Pat's first cousin.
And I'm gonna call her Fiona.
Now, unfortunately, Fiona died a few years ago.
But here's where this story takes an incredible turn.
Ironically, thanks to a tragic twist, Fiona's daughter worked at the World Trade Center and she was killed in 9 -11, and like many families, Fiona gave a DNA sample, hoping to identify her daughter's remains among the rubble.
Now, that never happened, but Fiona's DNA stayed in the database, so they finally have something to compare to Midtown Jane Doe.
And when they test it, it is a match. So amid all the uncertainty, they finally know one thing for sure.
This is Patricia McGloan.
So here's where the case stands now.
The blonde male hairs from the carpet haven't revealed anything yet.
But more testing is underway.
Meanwhile, the original building at 301 West 46th street is long gone.
It was demolished years ago to make way for a hotel and some apartments.
And as for Donald Grant, whoever he is or was, he is the main suspect.
Investigators are trying to figure out who he was and what happened to the baby that Patricia supposedly had.
Now, they've already subpoenaed records from half a dozen of the largest adoption agencies, and there's no sign of a child of hers ever being placed up for adoption.
But it could have been one of those like under the table deals that you mentioned.
Totally. I mean, every scenario is possible.
Every scenario is on the table right now, but the lack of answers is frustrating.
For all that they have learned about Patricia, there is still so much that they don't know.
They still haven't been able to find even a photo of her.
Junior didn't even acknowledge her existence in his sad but true write up, and it's like she just got totally erased from history.
Her identification brings us closer to understanding what happened, but her murder is still unsolved.
And investigators want to catch her killer, but they also want to know who she was.
So, they're looking for anyone who grew up near her childhood home – 375 52nd Street in Brooklyn – or anyone who might have gone to school with her.
We've got a full list of the schools that she attended and when on our blog post. I'm going to put them in the show notes as well.
Someone out there knew this girl and she deserves to have her story told.
So, if you know anything about her or her family, this Donald, Grant guy or even this scene, anything at all, please contact Crimestoppers at 1 -800 -577 -TIPS.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkypodcast .com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkypodcast. We're going to be back next week with a brand new episode but stick around, we have some good things to tell you.
All right, Brett, end of the month share something good with us that came through the inbox Always.
So this is from Ally.
It says, hi, crime junkie.
I wanted to share that I recently gave a unique presentation at my office about the crime junkie life rules.
I live in Denver, Colorado, and I work in government contracting for the US military.
We host monthly safety meetings, but they are usually focused on workplace topics like PPE and job site safety.
For this one, I shifted the focus to personal safety.
Using your rules as a foundation and incorporating Colorado -specific statistics on missing persons.
I attached the presentation down below.
I also highlighted the importance of the if I go missing file as a tool to help ensure critical information is accessible in case the worst happens.
The session sparked meaningful conversations and reminded my coworkers about the importance of being aware, proactive, and prepared when it comes to safety.
Thank you for the work you do to raise awareness and help keep us informed and vigilant.
I love we're like a government training now, I know she's sent like copies We put the presentation online for people to see we will definitely ask but like it's pictures of us It's pictures of that if I go missing folder.
Oh my god a little bit of everything and I thought that was so cool I look so official.
I love that. She was like yeah job site safety Okay, well we're gonna do our best so you guys can like see the presentation Yeah, for sure.
On the website. And make sure you send us your submission for the good.
And cheer us up a little bit.
Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production.
So what do you think Chuck?
Do you approve? Ohhhh!
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