Eventually the woman had to be buried.
She was placed in an unmarked grave in Newport Beach.
No family stood there knowing she belonged to them.
No gravestone carried the name she had been given at birth.
No one could write the correct dates.
For the official record, she was still Jane Doe.
But she did have a name.
It was Anita Louise Piteau.
And more than 3,000 miles away, in Maine, people who loved her were beginning to wonder why her letters had stopped.
Anita
Anita Louise Piteau was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1942.
She grew up as one of seven children in the Piteau family.
Her life before California was not particularly easy.
Family accounts describe Anita as independent, restless and adventurous.
She disliked feeling confined.
As a teenager, she spent time at the Maine Industrial School for Girls, an institution intended to reform girls considered troubled or difficult.
But whatever other people expected Anita to become, she continued wanting something larger than the world around her.
Eventually, California became that larger world.
This was the late 1960s.
California carried enormous cultural power.
Hollywood.
Music.
Nightclubs.
Beaches.
Sunshine.
A rapidly changing youth culture.
For a young woman from Maine who wanted adventure, Southern California could seem almost impossibly distant and exciting.
Anita traveled west with friends.
By early 1968, she was living in Southern California.
She wrote home.
And those letters would later become some of the last evidence her family had of her life.
The Last Letter
Anita's family did not believe she had abandoned them.
That distinction became crucial.
She was independent.
She traveled.
She changed jobs.
She could be spontaneous.
But she kept contact.
In a letter postmarked February 19, 1968, Anita told her mother that she had found work as a waitress in California.
She planned to come home around May.
Family accounts say she was enjoying California.
She had been seeing the sights.
Meeting people.
Going out.
Trying different jobs.
In one letter she wrote about staying with a woman in Whittier and about her plans to travel and eventually return east.
She had future plans.
That fact matters.
People who vanish are sometimes casually described as runaways because it simplifies the disappearance.
Anita had already run toward adventure.
But she was still writing home.
She was still talking about returning.
Then suddenly, the letters stopped.
Her family waited.
February ended.
March passed.
April.
Then May arrived.
The month Anita said she might return.
No Anita.
No new letter.
No phone call.
No photographs she had promised to send.
Nothing.
Her family grew more concerned.
They tried to locate her.
According to later family accounts, relatives contacted police in California.
But Anita was an adult.
She had traveled voluntarily.
She was known to be independent.
And in the social environment of the late 1960s, young adults sometimes disappeared deliberately into new lives.
Without evidence of foul play, there was little authorities could do.
For the Piteau family, Anita simply vanished.
What they did not know was that by the time they were waiting for Anita to return in May, she had already been dead for weeks.
The unidentified woman found by three boys in Huntington Beach on March 14 was Anita.
But California police did not know that.
Maine did not know that.
And because neither side knew the other existed, two separate mysteries began running in parallel.
In California:
Who is Jane Doe?
In Maine:
Where is Anita?
They were the same question.
Nobody realized it.
Two Investigations That Never Met
This is one of the most frustrating parts of old missing-person cases.
Information once moved slowly.
Local police departments maintained their own records.
Missing people could be reported in one state while unidentified bodies were held in another.
Descriptions were subjective.
A height estimate might be off.
Age might be off.
Hair could appear different.
Dental information might be incomplete.
Names might never enter a shared national system.
There was no internet.
No instantly searchable database accessible to a worried family.
No online gallery of unidentified persons.
A family in Maine could search for Anita while detectives in California searched for Jane Doe, and the two searches might pass each other for decades without touching.
That is exactly what happened.
The Purse
As detectives worked the scene and surrounding area in 1968, another clue appeared.
Some boys found a white purse roughly a quarter mile from the body.
Inside was a wallet.
And inside that wallet were black-and-white photographs.
One image showed a young boy wearing a cowboy hat.
To investigators, the possibility was obvious.
Perhaps the purse belonged to Jane Doe.
Perhaps the people in those photographs were her relatives.
Maybe the child in the cowboy hat was a son.
If police could identify the people in the pictures, maybe they could identify the dead woman.
The purse became attached to the case.
For decades, those photographs represented hope.
They also represented one of the biggest false leads in the investigation.
More than forty years later, social media would finally reveal the truth.
The purse had nothing to do with Anita.
But investigators did not know that yet.
A Case Passes From Detective to Detective
Years passed.
New homicide cases arrived.
Officers retired.
New detectives joined the department.
Yet Jane Doe's file survived.
That is important.
Cold cases die in two ways.
Sometimes evidence deteriorates.
Sometimes institutional memory disappears.
Boxes are lost.
Clothing is discarded.
Biological evidence is destroyed because nobody knows future technology will need it.
But Huntington Beach police preserved key items.
The clothing.
The sexual-assault evidence.
The cigarette.
The documentation.
Generations of investigators continued looking.
Former detectives remembered the woman long after leaving the department.
She had no family at the police station demanding answers because nobody knew who her family was.
So the investigators themselves became her advocates.
1968 Becomes 1978
Then 1988.
Then 1998.
By then, the world had changed dramatically.
And so had forensic science.
DNA profiling had transformed criminal investigations.
Evidence collected decades earlier could suddenly answer questions investigators in 1968 had never been capable of asking.
In 2001, analysts examined the victim's sexual-assault kit and clothing.
They developed a male DNA profile.
That was a major breakthrough.
For the first time, investigators possessed a genetic signature associated with the person believed responsible for the attack.
But a DNA profile is only useful if there is something to compare it with.
Police searched available databases.
No match.
The science had given the killer a genetic identity.
It still had not given him a name.
And Jane Doe still had no name either.