Tonight, on Dateline...
She had wood piled on top of her.
She was still burning when the deputies got there.
She couldn't really be identified.
We had no grounds to go on who this could be or where she came from.
I think what if this is your family?
What if this could be your friend?
This has become an obsession.
I said I think I know how we can do it.
All of these people share some amount of DNA with our unknown person.
We thought this is the family.
This is it. Surreal.
It felt like somebody just punched me.
They know the truth.
I want everybody to know who she was as a person.
She had a good heart.
For more than 12 years, a murder victim didn't have a name until strangers gave it back to her.
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
Here's Keith Morrison with The Woman With No Name.
Here is where they put her.
Her permanent home.
Nobody really knew anything about her.
This little cemetery in East Texas, one simple marker on her grave, and the name that wasn't a name, Jane Doe.
It makes it personal, because you think what if this is your family?
What if this could be your friend?
She. Who was she? This impossible enigma.
The question that kept them glued to their computers.
Participating in something like this, too, can be almost consuming.
It can really drain us.
The obsession. I was hooked.
I was absolutely hooked.
This is where it began.
October 29, 2006, Hillgore, Texas.
Two men out target shooting on oil lease property not far from town.
They smelled it first.
Then they saw it. Something burning.
Looked like a mannequin.
The men approached.
What was that? And then they recoiled.
That was a young woman.
Dead and burning. We have homicides just like the rest of the world.
It was going as far as trying to burn the body.
It really struck fear in people around here.
Lieutenant Eddie Hope was still a sergeant back then.
Greg County Sheriff's Department.
She had wood piled beneath her and wood piled on top of her.
There was, I believe, a gas can lid there.
Wow. So it looked like somebody was trying to cover their tracks.
She was meant to be part of one big bonfire and just to spear forever.
Right. The officers who responded noted every detail they could, that she was young, late teens, early 20s, and she was little, maybe five, four, or 100 pounds.
She was wearing jeans, a pale shirt, the color of lavender, $44 in her pocket.
And this was unusual, baby teeth.
She still had a few.
She never lost them.
They said that's highly unusual.
Well, that gave you something to work with anyway.
A little bit. Other than that, the young woman was impossible to identify.
She had been murdered of that there was no doubt.
Her last moments had been very bad.
But in most homicide investigations, detectives burrow deep into the life of the victim, talk to every friend, interview the family, find out about scorned lovers or past mistakes.
That's often how murders get solved.
But in this case, none of it was possible.
Didn't have a clue.
What could you do? Nothing.
If we got tips, ran them down.
Because, I mean, we had no grounds to go on who this could be or where she came from.
They ran her DNA profile.
It didn't match any known person, known to them anyway.
But the autopsy revealed semen in her body.
And it did match someone.
A known local sex offender.
So they pulled him in.
And he admitted he had sex that day with a woman whose name he didn't know.
But he said he didn't kill her.
And he said he had an alibi, too.
We would get people off the internet that would say, hey, I think this might be so -and -so.
And we would follow up on that and eventually rule it out.
What we were thinking at the time was, maybe she's not from around here because nobody's missing her here.
And so Greg County paid for a burial plot and for a little marker on the ground above her body.
Small headstone that just reached Jane Doe.
There's no other information we knew on her.
And winter came. But they didn't give up.
A Texas Ranger who sometimes worked with them said maybe he could help.
And he was able to fly in an artist to try to reconstruct what our victim looked like in real life.
And here it was. But it produced no leads.
The county even made a clay model using an x -ray of the victim's skull, including those baby teeth.
Sent it around to local media.
Still nothing. They didn't forget her as they went about their work.
But the young woman remained nameless.
No matter how many trails they followed.
And they just went on for years.
I mean, it's basically all we had.
And then something unusual happened.
The little details, like her baby teeth, caught the eyes of amateur internet investigators on sites like Reddit and WebSlooths.
And before too long, they began referring to the mystery woman with a kind of shorthand.
It was the distinctive color of her shirt that did it.
One of those armchair detectives took to calling her Lavender.
Lavender Doe. This was a case that was followed online very closely by many people.
People like this guy.
And what happened after that?
Well, remember what we said about obsession.
Tomorrow and tomorrow.
And a decade went by.
Eleven years after the murder of the young woman they called Lavender Doe, and more than two hundred miles from the spot where her body was found, in the town of Killeen, Texas, a man was feverishly at work.
I kind of spent a lot of my spare time looking into missing persons cases, really just kind of trying to flesh out the stories of some of these lesser known cases.
His name is Kevin Lord.
He wasn't an investigator or a law enforcement officer, just someone plagued by unanswered questions with a passionate interest in true crime.
I was looking for Jane Doe's in the area in Texas that might be a match to one of these missing girls.
And that's how he came across hundreds of pages of online forums about a mystery woman nicknamed Lavender Doe.
Could she be one of the missing women he was trying to locate?
And so Kevin called the Gregg County Sheriff's Department and found himself on the phone with the lead detective on Lavender Doe's case, Lieutenant Eddie Hope.
I was impressed that people cared, because we live in a world where everything is fast -paced and a lot of people are worried about themselves and not others.
Some other investigator might have blown off a guy like Kevin, just another civilian with an internet connection and a theory.
But Kevin seemed to know what he was doing, and his internet skills?
Way beyond what Lieutenant Hope could do.
And before long, though they didn't actually meet in person, they began acting almost like partners.
We just flew together.
You know, whatever he needed that he couldn't get, that I could get law enforcement wise, he would send it to me.
To kind of mesh together these bits of information.
And two things happened.
One, Kevin realized Lavender Doe was not one of the missing women he'd been looking for.
And two, he got hooked on the case of the girl in the Lavender shirt.
But he kept hitting dead ends.
He needed some specialized help.
Very specialized. I reached out to DNA Doe Project to see if I might be able to come on as a volunteer.
The DNA Doe Project.
A nonprofit founded by a former rocket scientist named Colleen Fitzpatrick and a novelist and genealogy enthusiast, Margaret Press.
I barely knew what John and Jane Does meant, but I had been retired for about a year.
I'd come out back to the West Coast to be near my daughter and grandchildren and to relax.
It was winter 2017 when Margaret, not the retiring type, was struck with an idea.
She'd already been deeply immersed in genealogy, helping adoptees find their birth parents.
So... If I can figure out Jane Doe's parents, we'll know who Jane Doe was.
Margaret's plan? Obtain remains from Jane and John Does, retest their DNA and upload the results to a public database where, maybe, that DNA would lead them to some relative of their victim.
Margaret and Colleen soon set up a nonprofit to take donations for DNA testing.
After just six months, they solved their first case.
A few weeks later, another case made headlines around the world, showing the power of genealogy.
Police arresting a man they believe is a so -called Golden State Killer and the suspect, a former police officer, discovered using DNA.
And suddenly, Colleen and Margaret had company.
Genealogists came out of the woodwork, and I could see us as a very unique organization where law enforcement agencies could come to us with their bones and no money, and we could bring in volunteer genealogists who were begging to help us.
What you can bring to this process is a crowdsourced investigation, like, you know, a bunch of bees forming a hive, and, disparately, they're not gonna do much, but all together, they can really accomplish something truly significant.
Right. Exactly. Kevin Lord was one of those bees.
He joined DNA Doe as a volunteer, and then others followed, like Lori Gaff, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot who stumbled on a Facebook posting about DNA Doe.
I was completely enthralled, and me being me, had to know absolutely everything there was about it.
She was soon addicted, much like Missy Koski.
One hour turns into ten, pretty quick, I would think, right?
Ten might be a slow day.
This has become an obsession.
A self -described search angel who had used genetic genealogy to find her biological father.
So she began helping other adoptees find their birth parents, and one day...
While I was helping an adoptee, that adoptee got a phone call from the DNA Doe Project, and she was told that she was distantly related to a Jane Doe.
I just got intrigued, and I said, can I talk to them?
Before long, Missy was hooked too, and the three, Kevin, Lori, and Missy, formed a team, a kind of mini hive, looking for the truth about a mystery woman called...
Lavender Doe. . It was a kind of obsession now, the determination to give her back her name, to identify the anonymous young woman murdered and set on fire and then buried here in Longview, Texas.
Got those law enforcement that tried every trick in the investigative book.
Except for a new book, if you could call it that.
The DNA Doe Project.
A bunch of amateurs, really.
But committed? Oh, yes.
It's not that law enforcement has not tried.
Most of the cases that come to us were kind of the last resort.
Back in Gray County, after more than a decade chasing leads on Lavender Doe, the Senate hope understood that investigations have changed.
Genealogy, it's the way of the future.
And to us homicide detectives, it's way above our heads, to be honest with you.
So you welcomed their help?
I did. In the summer of 2018, the DNA Doe Project hoped to generate attention for Lavender Doe, so they made a new sketch and posted it online.
They added a PayPal button to raise money for that retest of Lavender Doe's DNA.
And pretty soon, the online community answered the call.
And within four days, the public had come through and completely funded the testing that we had to do.
But before they could even get the test sent out, something very unexpected happened.
I get a call from Lieutenant Hope of the sheriff's office saying that he has big news.
Lieutenant Hope was investigating the recent murder of 28 -year -old Felicia Pearson in Longview.
The prime suspect was a man named Joseph Wayne Burnett.
It turned out he was the sex offender who's semen had been found 12 years earlier.
In the body of Lavender Doe, Lieutenant Hope said they didn't have enough evidence in that case to arrest Burnett back then.
They did not confess.
You need a confession in that case.
Yes. But when he spoke to detectives this time, he said something surprising.
He started talking about a girl that he killed and burned several years ago.
A burned girl? Right away, the detectives called, had he hoped.
You're on your way home at that point.
I was already home.
Must have been good to hear.
Didn't take me long to get back.
And that's why I wanted to get this off my chest.
I just let him talk.
He talked about this 12 -year -old murder as if it happened yesterday.
He left no detail out.
When I reached down there and I grabbed a rope, I put it around her neck, and I timed it up.
She never saw it coming.
A rope around her neck.
It only took seconds.
But Burnett's admission only got them so far.
We had the confession, and we still don't know who this person is, and they just eat you up.
Burnett said he didn't know who she was either.
And despite his confession, he pleaded not guilty.
It seemed justice for a victim still labeled Lavender Doe in court documents would take some time.
Time the volunteers couldn't waste.
That made it a lot more real and put more weight behind what we were doing.
The team of volunteers finally sent Lavender Doe's DNA out for testing.
When the results came back in October 2018, they went to work looking for potential relatives.
And just nine days later, they found one.
A woman in east Texas, right near the spot where Lavender Doe was found.
This had to be immensely exciting.
Oh, we thought this is her.
This is the mom. This is the family.
This is it. And so, of course, Lieutenant Hope, with a brand new optimism, drove out to see her.
And he came up empty.
The woman had no missing relatives, and no idea who Lavender Doe might be.
Must have been disappointing.
It was. Like you thought maybe you were on to something and you weren't.
You've got to get your hopes up, and then you let down, but that had been happening for 12 years.
I was so, no, no, no, she's lying.
She's lying. This is it, because when you're researching family from another part of the country, and all of a sudden you find this relative in the right spot, in the right place, at the right time, it has to be.
Then it dawned on them.
The woman wasn't lying, and there was still a chance she could help.
She told us that she did not know who Lavender Doe was, but she had taken a test herself with Ancestry DNA, and she would be happy to share her results with us.
Well, what happened when she did that?
When we compared her DNA to Lavender Doe's DNA, we could see that it looked like Lavender Doe's parent was probably a first cousin of hers.
And then, it was Kevin who found it.
The Texas woman had a distant cousin who lived out of state.
A woman she didn't know had never met, whose name was Robin.
It appeared she had a daughter, but when they tried to find that daughter, she had addresses up until right around 2006, and then kind of just fell off the map and couldn't find her anywhere.
2006? What a coincidence.
It was the year Lavender Doe was murdered.
Over the years, Lieutenant Eddie Hope thought a lot about those last moments of Lavender Doe's life.
Kind of haunts at you if you're coming out here, and you can't put a closure to it.
You can't end the story yet.
To help write that ending, he had put his faith in the dedicated volunteers who had spent countless hours trying to give her back her name.
By the fall of 2018, they seemed close.
DNA and genealogy had led them to a woman named Robin.
They learned Robin had died, but her family tree offered them valuable clues, including a woman who seemed to have vanished after 2006.
Could they have finally found Lavender Doe?
From the family tree, they located that woman's cousin, and Lieutenant Hope called in.
He said, I haven't seen her in years.
He said, last we'd heard, she ran away from home, just like she just disappeared.
Disappeared, just like Lavender Doe.
And he told Lieutenant Hope that his missing cousin had a half -sister named Amanda, so Lieutenant Hope called her, too.
Well, I talked to her several times, and she agreed to send Kevin their DNA kit.
Which meant sending Amanda's DNA sample to the lab, and, once again, waiting.
How long did that take?
It took about a month and a half, I believe.
That must have been pins and needles.
Oh, yeah. It was a winter's day, late January, when they got the news, it was a match.
Kevin called Lieutenant Hope.
I was pretty excited, and the whole department was excited.
I wasn't prepared for the emotion that I had right then.
I couldn't control myself, I remember sitting on the couch and just crying because I was so happy.
So, who was she? Who was the young woman who, for so long, had been a sketch, known only as Lavender Doe?
Here she was, Dana Lynn Dodd.
It was Dana's half -sister, Amanda, who'd agreed to provide her DNA sample to Lieutenant Hope.
As soon as I hung up the phone with him, I Googled it, I Googled Lavender Doe, and as soon as it came up, I knew.
And I called him back and I told him, that's Dana, it's Dana.
What was it like to see that?
Surreal. It felt like somebody just punched me in the stomach.
I was angry that she was by herself, you know, her.
Her worst fear came true.
She was forgotten. Which was the heartbreaking truth Amanda revealed about Dana Dodd.
Hers was a life of instability, uncertainty, and from the very beginning, rejection.
Her mom moved out when she was little.
One mother figure after another came and went from her life.
She was passed around between my dad and his, you know, current wife or current girlfriend at the time, and that's how we lost track between her and us for about 10 years.
By the time Dana was in her early teens, Amanda was 23 years old and married and raising a son of her own.
And when she heard Dana was living not far away, somewhere in Florida, she asked her to move in.
After all she'd been through, it was almost like a fairy tale, a real home.
Was she happy about it at first?
Very, very happy. She said she liked the normal life, feeling normal, not having to worry, you know, being loved is what she said.
It was good for a while.
So what happened to Dana Dodd?
How did she become that mystery victim so far away?
For 12 years they knew her only as Lavender Doe, the mystery murder victim with the purple shirt.
Now they knew her real name, Dana Lynn Dodd.
What a story a name revealed of an abandoned baby, a rejected toddler whose whole life had been a cautionary tale.
Her long lost half sister Amanda stepped in to help and did help.
But then at age 16, Dana got a serious boyfriend.
That's when the problem started.
It's a story as old as time.
Oh yeah. So then, Amanda sent Dana to live with her brother, John.
I tried to make it where she was always wanted.
But that boy again.
Did you give her ultimatum?
I did, I did. I told her, do you want to stay with this guy or do you want a better life?
And she's like, you know what, I love him.
Well that didn't work out either.
Dana, determined to finally take control of her own life, decided to get a job.
It was with a magazine company, she said, that would allow her to travel selling subscriptions and other products.
John told Dana that sounded like a bad idea.
In a contest between you and those folks in the magazine, you didn't stand a chance.
No, no. She was just looking for acceptance.
Dana was 18 and full of optimism.
She would call me every month, saying, hey, I'm in Indiana, hey, I'm in Cincinnati for like six months, five or six months, she would call me every month.
It was summertime, 2006, when she called him the last time.
I told her to come home and she said, no, I want to do this on my own.
So that was the last time I heard from her.
And then Dana all but disappeared.
What a helpless feeling that must have been.
It was, it was hard.
Where do you start when you know they're traveling all over the country?
Dana met her fate in this Walmart parking lot, trying to sell magazines to Joseph Wayne Burnett.
That's where he told police he picked her up, took her to this bridge and killed her.
Why? He said it was because she stole money from him.
Impossible to know if that was true.
Because Joseph had burned her remains.
She wasn't trash. She wasn't in pizza trash like he took upon himself to discard of.
And I want everybody, you know, to know who Dana was and who she was as a person.
Even with her difficult life and her upbringing.
And she still had a good heart.
So after 12 years, the investigators, professional and amateur, finally knew her name, knew what happened to her.
But it felt unfinished somehow.
And so they all made a kind of pilgrimage to see the place with their own eyes.
And that was the very first time the trio would actually meet in person.
Here, Lieutenant Hope took them to the Walmart and to the cemetery where she'd been all this time.
I think the thing that surprised me the most is that there were already flowers there.
The community over the years paid attention and didn't forget her.
They left her their own flowers, lavender, of course.
DNA Doe Project volunteers are still working hard to solve cases.
And some are like Dana Lynn Dodd.
The little girl abandoned early and often.
And though Amanda and John tried to help, she was in the end abused and discarded, but not forgotten.
And to those armchair detectives and their partner, Lieutenant Eddie Hope, she was as important as you or me.
It doesn't matter what walk of life you come from.
Everybody's a person.
In December of 2020, Joseph Wayne Burnett pleaded guilty to the murders of Felicia Pearson and Dana Lynn Dodd.
For the relatives of Burnett's victims, this has been the last chapter of a very painful book.
And indeed it was. Though by then, Amanda and John had found a little solace here in Longview, the community that didn't forget.
We felt like that was her adopted family.
Which is why they decided not to take her remains back home to Florida with them.
She will stay here in Longview with her name carved in stone.
It's a funny thing, isn't it?
But it's that it would be important to have a stone up above the place you're lying down with your name on it.
And yet it is. It is.
Exactly. You never think about it, but it is something.
It's important to have that because you're never forgotten.
You know, that your name is there.
It's written in stone.
Lavender Doe no longer.
Eternally Dana Lynn Dodd.
Some of the people still go by her grave site and still put flowers and things like that there.
And that's what we wanted because she's part of Longview.
And she'll never be sent away again.
She's home. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.
Good night.
