The murderer may have been none other than serial killer Harvey Glatman, whose "Lonely Hearts" slayings made front-page news in California, but who also lived some supposedly quiet years in Denver.
The most convincing evidence, says Boulder Sheriff's Detective Steve Ainsworth, is that Glatman was arrested at 17, in 1945, for abducting a woman and driving her up Sunshine Canyon west of Boulder.
He did not kill her, but that fits the pattern of serial killers, Ainsworth said. They become bolder and bolder, moving from, say, kidnapping to murder, from the thrill of control to the thrill of the kill.
Ainsworth got help from Boulder historian Sylvia Pettem, who obtained the files of a California detective who did the original work on the Glatman murders. The detective was Pierce Brooks, famous for leading the investigation into the "Onion Field" murders of police officers which became the subject of a popular movie. Brooks later was chief of police in Lakewood and later still in Springfield, Ore., where he died.
Glatman ultimately was captured in 1958 in California when he bungled an attempt at rape and murder.
He'd kidnapped a woman, put her in the back seat of a car and driven her to the desert. He tried to take off her clothes, but she fought back. Somehow, she got his gun and was out of the car, half-dressed, pointing the gun at him when a California Highway Patrol officer on a motorcycle drove by and made the arrest.
Ainsworth pieced together a likely scenario of what happened that April night in 1954.
"They probably were parked at Boulder Falls. He told her to take her clothes off. She somehow got away, and he went after her in the car," Ainsworth said. If he hit her with his car, sending her over the 29-foot embankment, that would explain why hikers found her the next day, naked, with bruises on the left side of her body, Ainsworth added.
After Glatman was arrested in 1958 in California, he was asked about the Boulder Jane Doe murder. He denied any connection, said Ainsworth. But at the same time he admitted hiring models in Denver years before and photographing them. Asked if any of those women were dead, Glatman replied, "No, unless they were run over by a car."
If Ainsworth is right, and Glatman was the killer, that still only solves half the 52-year-old mystery.
Who was the woman? In the weeks, months and decades after the death, no one came forward to claim to know the attractive young woman.
Ainsworth submitted a molar and a section of Jane Doe's femur to the FBI's Missing Persons Data Base in Quantico, Va.
Two weeks ago, he heard that the FBI had extracted the DNA. Now, it's just waiting its turn to be run through the database. The search finds close DNA matches. If a relative of the woman is in the database, the connection can be made.
Meanwhile, the TV show America's Most Wanted has prepared a segment on Jane Doe.