After nearly 53 years, police in St. Petersburg, Florida, have identified the victim in the “Trunk Lady” cold case as Sylvia June Atherton, 41, of Tuscon, Arizona.
Assistant Police Chief Michael Kovacsev said, “Last year and earlier this year, the detectives, in this case, went through it again. And that is one of the things I want to highlight, with the cold cases, it takes persistence. It takes going back and looking at things that may not have been available to individuals back in 1969.”
“But more importantly, when we look at things, what could we have missed? And the detectives noticed that there was a section of hair that had not been tested, and we sent it to a private lab. When the hair sample was sent to the private lab, we were finally able to get a DNA profile, and that’s only a stepping stone to that. After we were able to get that DNA profile, the lab was able to then run it through the DNA Genealogy database. And after 53 years, the trunk lady finally has a name. We were able to do quite a bit of research as well with the DNA hit,” said Kovacsev.
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“And we’re able to locate some family members, so I’d like to point out she is no longer the trunk lady; her name is Sylvia June Atherton. She was killed when she was 41 years of age. She left behind five children and she was from the Tucson, Arizona area,” said Kovacsev.
The “Trunk Lady” case of 1969 was the unidentified woman whose body was found in a steamer trunk beneath a tree in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Halloween night, 1969.
She was found wearing a green nightgown wrapped in plastic. There are still no suspects in this case.
The woman was white, between the ages of 18 and 25, and had long brown hair. She was 5’5″ tall and weighed about 120 pounds. She had a small scar on her right cheek and a vaccination mark on her left arm.
The woman’s body was found by a group of teenagers who were playing in the woods near the tree. The trunk had been hidden by some brush, and the teenagers had to move the brush to get to it. When they opened the trunk, they found the woman’s body inside.
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The police were called to the scene, and they began an investigation. They interviewed the teenagers who had found the body, and they searched the area around the tree. However, they were unable to find any clues that would lead them to the woman’s killer.
The woman’s body was taken to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy. The autopsy revealed that the woman had been strangled to death. She had also been sexually assaulted.
The police released a composite sketch of the woman, but she has never been identified. The case remains unsolved.
In 2019, the St. Petersburg Police Department announced that they were using investigative genetic genealogy to try to identify the woman. The technique involves comparing DNA from the crime scene to DNA from commercial DNA databases. The hope was that this would lead to a match with a relative of the killer, which could then lead to the identification of the suspect.
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