Remains of unidentified woman from 1968 Will County cold case exhumed, sent for DNA sequencing

WILL COUNTY, Ill. (WLS) -- A more than 50-year-old sketch by a forensic artist shows what she might have looked like.

Her identity is still a mystery. But for decades, her case has been burned in the minds of law enforcement.

ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch

"No one in this office has ever forgotten about her," said Will County Coroner Laurie Summers.

Summers said the woman's body was found in heavy brush on September 30, 1968, off I-55 near Blodgett Road, which at the time, was mostly farmland.

She had been strangled and suffered a blow to the head.

"She had nothing on her. Nothing. Nothing. So, except her butterfly tattoo," Summers said. "We actually call her Madame Butterfly."

Her skeletal remains were exhumed from Oakwood Cemetery in Wilmington last Friday and sent to a Texas-based company called Othram, which applies state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques to forensic evidence in the hopes of a genealogy match.

Earlier this year, leads developed by Othram helped identify Webster Fisher as the man found shot to death and stuffed in a wooden crate in Lockport in 1980.

He is one of at least five Will County John and Jane Does the company has helped identify since 2022.

There is hope that this cold case will also be closed.

"I want her name. I want her name, and I want to try to find her family if there's any," Summers said.