No match identifies her.
Police use social media.
The purse photographs are finally shown to be a false lead.
Decades continue passing.
Anita's relatives search online.
Some encounter the Huntington Beach Jane Doe information and suspect it might be her.
But suspicion is not enough.
Then investigative genetic genealogy changes cold-case investigation.
In 2019, Huntington Beach police and the Orange County District Attorney's Office begin genealogy work on the unknown male DNA.
The family tree narrows.
Investigators identify Johnny Chrisco.
DNA evidence connects him to the crime.
But Chrisco died in 2015.
No arrest will ever happen.
Then genealogy is applied to Jane Doe.
Family branches lead toward Maine.
Investigators contact relatives.
A name emerges from family history.
Anita Piteau.
DNA confirms it.
Jane Doe finally has her name.
In July 2020, investigators bring Anita's remains back to Maine.
She is given a memorial service with her family.
The mystery that began when three boys thought they saw a scarecrow finally receives its answer.
But not a courtroom.
The 52-Year Difference
There is something almost impossible to comprehend about the timeline.
The boys discovered Anita in 1968.
Richard Nixon had not yet been elected president.
Humans had not yet walked on the moon.
Personal computers did not exist.
The internet did not exist.
DNA profiling did not exist.
When Anita was finally identified in 2020, a DNA sample could be converted into genealogical relationships and matched through sprawling digital family trees.
The world that solved the case barely resembled the world in which the crime occurred.
Yet the evidence connecting those worlds was sitting in storage the entire time.
A cigarette.
Clothing.
Biological samples.
The Detective Who Never Met Anita
Many of the investigators who worked this case never knew Anita's name.
They could not call her Anita.
They knew her as Jane Doe.
A case number.
A photograph.
A reconstruction.
A set of clothes.
A woman in an old crime-scene photograph.
Yet some continued investigating anyway.
That persistence is one reason the case survived long enough for technology to solve it.
No family member could stand in the Huntington Beach police station every year demanding answers because the family was in Maine and did not know Jane Doe was Anita.
Law enforcement had to keep caring about a woman whose identity they did not know.
The Cruel Irony
There are two particularly cruel timing details.
First:
Anita planned to return home.
Her family expected her.
They did not knowingly lose contact with someone who wanted to disappear forever.
Second:
The suspected killer lived until 2015.
The case was solved only a few years too late to confront him.
Fifty-two years sounds like an extraordinary investigative victory.
It is.
But it is also evidence of how much time was lost.
What We Still Do Not Know
Authorities know Anita's identity.
They know the DNA identity associated with the man they concluded killed her.
But several questions remain open.
How did Anita meet Johnny Chrisco?
Why were they together?
Did she know him well?
Was he connected to her job?
To nightlife?
To someone she stayed with?
Did she enter his vehicle voluntarily?
Was the Huntington Beach field the scene of the attack or primarily the place where she was left?
Did Chrisco ever tell anyone?
Did anyone suspect him?
Could there have been another witness?
Did the cigarette belong to a moment before, during or after the crime?
Those details may never be answered.
Genetics can identify people.
It cannot resurrect conversations.
The Case's Real Signature
At first glance, the unforgettable part is the scarecrow.
Three boys approach something in a field.
They think it is an object.
Then realize it is a human being.
But the deeper signature of the case is time.
The dead woman spent 52 years without her name.
Her family spent 52 years without knowing where she was.
Police spent 52 years protecting evidence they could not yet fully use.
And the man identified by authorities as her killer died only five years before the science finally connected him to the crime.
The case was not solved because one detective suddenly noticed a hidden clue.
The clue had been sitting there since day one.
Human technology needed half a century to understand it.
A Cigarette in the Dirt
That is why the smallest object in the story may be the most powerful.
The killer apparently believed he had left almost nothing behind.
The body was in an open field.
No identification connected Anita to her family.
No obvious witness identified him.
Rain had touched the crime scene.
He disappeared.
Years passed.
Then decades.
But a cigarette remained.
Someone in 1968 picked it up.
Bagged it.
Recorded it.
Stored it.
No one knew that inside that discarded object was information capable of identifying a man who would remain unknown for another fifty years.
He left his name at the crime scene.
Science simply did not yet know how to read it.
Anita Comes Home
In the end, there was no dramatic arrest.
No old man opening his front door to find detectives waiting.
No courtroom filled with Anita's surviving family.
No jury.
No sentence.
Johnny Chrisco was already dead.
Instead, the emotional climax occurred thousands of miles from the California field.
Anita's remains went home to Maine.
Police officers traveled with her.
Her relatives finally had a place to gather.
For the first time since 1968, the family knew where Anita was.
Not where they hoped she had been.
Not where they imagined she might have gone.
Where she actually was.
And they could finally bury her under her own name.
The Last Image
Go back to Huntington Beach.
March 14, 1968.
No genealogy databases.
No DNA profiling.
No internet.
No social media.
Three boys walk through an open field.
One points toward something in the distance.
It looks like a scarecrow.
They approach.
Then stop.
Police arrive.
Detectives photograph an unidentified woman.
One officer picks up a cigarette butt and keeps it as evidence.
Nobody standing there knows her name.
Nobody knows where her family lives.
Nobody knows the cigarette will matter.
Nobody knows the man who left the DNA will live for another 47 years without being publicly connected to the case.
Nobody knows that the woman will spend more than half a century buried under no name at all.
They know only this:
Someone left a young woman in a California field.
And somewhere, someone knows who she is.
It would take 52 years to discover that the answer to the first mystery was Anita Louise Piteau.
And the answer to the second was Johnny Chrisco.
The boys thought they had found a fallen scarecrow.
What they actually found was a mystery that would outlive generations of detectives.