Remember the cigarette butt collected from the field in 1968?
More than four decades later, it became useful.
In 2010, investigators obtained a partial male DNA profile from that cigarette.
It was consistent with the male profile obtained from the victim's sexual-assault evidence.
That was enormously significant.
The cigarette was no longer simply trash lying near a body.
Genetically, it appeared connected to the same man whose DNA was associated with the assault.
The unidentified man had apparently smoked near the place Anita was found.
He had left behind a tiny object.
Investigators preserved it in 1968.
Forty-two years later, science connected it back to the crime.
Still no name.
But the chain was getting stronger.
The Victim's DNA Goes Into the System
Investigators also worked on identifying Jane Doe herself.
Blood from her blouse produced a partial DNA profile.
That profile was entered into the FBI's missing-person DNA system in 2011.
Her fingerprints were also entered into state and national databases.
Again, nothing.
No family reference sample was already waiting to connect with her.
No fingerprint record identified her.
The system knew Jane Doe genetically.
The system still did not know she was Anita Piteau.
Facebook and the Cowboy-Hat Boy
Around the same period, Huntington Beach police tried something investigators in 1968 could never have imagined.
Facebook.
In January 2011, police publicly posted the composite image of Jane Doe.
They also posted photographs of the purse, wallet and old pictures found near the field.
Responses arrived almost immediately.
Dozens of calls.
Emails.
Comments.
And then something astonishing happened.
People recognized the individuals in the photographs.
Police contacted them.
The people pictured were alive.
And they were not Anita's family.
The purse had never belonged to Jane Doe.
A lead investigators had carried for more than four decades collapsed in a matter of hours because the internet connected photographs with people faster than traditional police work ever could.
It was disappointing.
But eliminating false evidence is progress too.
The purse could finally be removed from the mystery.
Investigators could stop trying to force a connection that did not exist.
"Rosie"
Then another apparent breakthrough emerged.
A woman saw publicity about the case and believed she recognized Jane Doe.
She said the victim resembled a woman she had known as "Rosie."
Rosie had reportedly worked as a waitress at a Long Beach establishment called the Circus Room.
She had suddenly stopped appearing for work.
The witness believed Rosie may have been from New York.
Investigators became excited.
It fit several details.
Jane Doe's loafers were associated with a New York-based manufacturer.
Perhaps the victim had come from New York.
Perhaps "Rosie" was finally the name they needed.
Authorities publicized the theory.
New York police became involved.
Media reports described Jane Doe as possibly coming from Brooklyn or the Bronx.
Investigators searched for a woman who may have left a husband and young child behind.
For a while, after more than forty years, police thought they might finally be close.
They were not.
Rosie was another false trail.
The woman in the field was Anita Louise Piteau.
From Maine.
Not New York.
A witness had recognized similarities and sincerely believed the dead woman was someone else.
That mistake illustrates one of the great weaknesses of visual identification.
Faces resemble faces.
Memories change.
Decades distort certainty.
DNA eventually had to do what memory could not.
Meanwhile, Anita's Family Was Searching Too
As police searched for Jane Doe, Anita's family continued carrying their own mystery.
Her mother died without learning what happened.
Other relatives died without knowing.
Eventually the internet changed the family's search in the same way it changed the police investigation.
Missing-person databases became accessible.
Unidentified-person cases became searchable.
Crime information that once sat in filing cabinets could now be viewed from another state.
Family members began looking through Jane Doe cases.
Anita's niece Laurie Quirion became deeply involved.
Later, Laurie's daughter Dakota helped search online.
At some point, they encountered the Huntington Beach Jane Doe reconstruction.
Dark hair.
Approximate age.
Similar physical features.
Date found:
March 14, 1968.
That date was especially important.
Anita's last known letter had been mailed only weeks earlier.
The family thought there was a real possibility that Jane Doe was Anita.
But believing two cases are connected and proving it are different things.
The family struggled to reach the correct authorities.
The mystery continued.
That is one of the cruelest details in the entire story.
Anita's family came close to the truth before law enforcement officially identified her.
The answer was sitting online.
They simply did not yet have the scientific bridge needed to prove it.
The Golden State Killer Changes Everything
By the late 2010s, another forensic revolution was transforming cold cases.
Investigative genetic genealogy.
Traditional forensic DNA comparison works by asking:
Does this crime-scene DNA match a known person in a law-enforcement database?
Genetic genealogy asks a different question.
Who are this unknown person's relatives?
Instead of requiring an exact offender match, investigators can sometimes identify distant genetic relatives who have uploaded DNA information to genealogy services that permit law-enforcement use.
From there, genealogists construct family trees.
Grandparents.
Cousins.
Second cousins.
Branches.
Marriages.
Births.
Deaths.
Locations.
A huge family puzzle gradually narrows.
The arrest of Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo in 2018 made the method famous.
Suddenly cold-case detectives across the country began wondering what genetic genealogy could do with evidence they had preserved for decades.
Huntington Beach had exactly such a case.
They had two unknown identities.
Jane Doe.
And the man whose DNA had been recovered from the evidence.
In 2019, investigators working with the Orange County District Attorney's Office began using investigative genetic genealogy.
And something remarkable happened.
They found the suspected killer before they officially identified the victim.
The Man Behind the DNA
The genealogy work produced a family tree connected to the unknown male DNA.
Investigators narrowed the possibilities.
Eventually they identified a man named Johnny Chrisco.
Johnny Chrisco had never been one of the original suspects.
His name was not sitting in the 1968 case file with a red circle around it.
No eyewitness had identified him.
No detective in 1968 had apparently connected him to Jane Doe.
Genetics brought him into the case more than fifty years later.
Later detailed reporting about the genealogy process described investigators narrowing the DNA to a group of brothers.
One surviving brother reportedly provided a sample that ruled him out personally but confirmed the family line.
Another brother, Johnny Chrisco, had died.
Investigators discovered that biological material from a medical procedure associated with Chrisco had survived.
That allowed direct comparison.
The DNA matched the crime-scene profile.
The man believed to have left biological evidence with Anita and the cigarette at the field finally had a name.
Johnny Monroe Chrisco.
But he could not be arrested.
He had died of cancer in 2015.
He was buried in Washington state.
For investigators, that created a strange form of resolution.
They finally knew who they believed killed Jane Doe.
But they still did not know who Jane Doe was.
The killer had a name before his victim did.
Who Was Johnny Chrisco?
Investigators began reconstructing Chrisco's history.
Official records released by the Orange County District Attorney's Office said Chrisco had served three years in the U.S. Army before being discharged after a psychological evaluation.
The evaluation described traits including quickness to anger, resentment, impulsivity and a tendency to feel unjustly treated.
Those records are part of Chrisco's documented history.
They do not independently explain why Anita was killed.
And investigators have publicly acknowledged one critical limitation that remains today:
They still do not know exactly how Anita Piteau and Johnny Chrisco met.
That missing connection is important.