posted August 07, 2003 09:14 PM               

By Doug McMurdo

Journalists are trained to never marry their stories. Emotional attachment compromises objectivity; the search for truth becomes a crusade for justice.

In the interest of doing right by my profession, I have not yet made a commitment to Jane Doe, the unidentified woman whose remains were found in a desert area smack dab in the middle of Pahrump last October.

My resistance is growing weak.

I've been thinking about Pahrump Valley Jane - that's what doctors at the Clark County Coroner's Office dubbed her - for a week now, and pretty much nonstop. Something inside me won't let go.This woman had a mother and a father; maybe she had children out there who stay awake at night wondering whatever happened to Mom.

Who was she? And why hasn't somebody come forward to claim her as one of their own?

Questions without ready answers have always fascinated me, and I detect an obsession coming on. Earlier this week I was relieved to learn I wasn't alone, not by a long shot.

Managing Editor Henry Brean received an email from Todd Matthews of Livingston, Tenn., on Monday. Matthews is part of an all-volunteer group that helps investigators put a name to the more than 4,000 John and Jane Does listed in a National Crime Information Center database.

The email led to a phone conversation between the two of us that afternoon. Matthews and his group scan the nation's newspapers, at least the ones that have a complementary website, and as a result Friday's story on Pahrump Valley Jane landed on his desk.

I told Matthews I had rarely before been so affected by a story I covered, and he had more than a few words of warning for me.

Matthews' own obsession dates back to 1968, two years before he was born, when his future father-in-law, Wilbur Riddle, stumbled across the body of a young woman. She had been bundled in a tarp and abandoned in the Kentucky backcountry.

Efforts to identify the girl were featured in Master Detective magazine, and its readers were urged to help put a name to Tent Girl. Thousands of leads came in; all were dismissed for one reason or another.

In 1988 Matthews was 17 and dating Riddle's daughter. Mr. Riddle told his future son in law about Tent Girl. Matthews became, in his own words, fascinated with the case and obsessed with discovering Tent Girl's identity.

He became a freelance detective. For 10 years he made countless phone calls to police who investigated the case and the coroner who performed the autopsy. Eventually, he made the 400-mile roundtrip to Tent Girl's burial site. His marriage began to suffer, and his fixation was taking a toll in other areas of his life.

Unable to shake Tent Girl from his mind, Matthews began surfing Internet websites dedicated to missing persons and unidentified bodies. His search ended with victory in the late 1990s when he found a posting on the Internet from Rosemary Westbrook, who wrote that her sister, Barbara Ann Hackman-Taylor, had been missing since 1967. Matthews played a waiting game with the authorities in an effort to exhume Tent Girl from her grave. They relented, and in 1998 DNA testing proved beyond the shadow of a doubt Tent Girl was Westbrook's big sister. A 30-year mystery had been solved, all thanks to a man who wouldn't let the name of a dead woman go unknown.

These days Matthews is the media director for The Doe Network, which is comprised of people who are missing relatives or are related to a murder victim. "They want to make a difference," he said. "This is how they deal with whatever pain they go through."

The Doe Network members have identified eight other John or Jane Doe's since Tent Girl, and law enforcement is finally taking them seriously.

"I really had an obsession," Matthews said with a Tennessee twang. "If you can focus your obsession you'll be OK. If you don't I don't know what harm might come.

"You have to look at the silver lining, and I don't see Barbara's death as much a tragedy now that's she's been identified. It's still sad, but not as sad, you know?"

Matthews said it isn't uncommon for journalists to obsess over the discovery of unidentified bodies they report on, but police officers that investigate these cases are particularly vulnerable.

Detective Donna Jasperson is working the Pahrump Valley Jane case. Last week she said she has a need to discover the woman's name, where she came from, and whose mother she might be. "The police can be severely impacted," said Matthews. "So much so that it can create a negative in terms of productivity.

"But once she begins to unravel the mystery she'll start to see patterns ... it's really a process of elimination."

Who was Pahrump Valley Jane? And does she know I'm about to marry her story?

Write to Doug McMurdo at dmcmurdo@pvtimes.com