In September 1989, the owners of the Good ‘n Loud Music store in Madison, Wisconsin, made a grisly discovery: a human skull seen through a pipe connecting the boiler to the chimney. Further investigation revealed a complete skeleton with a faded paisley dress and pointed heels.
For years, the unidentified remains were locked in a cabinet at the Dane County medical examiner’s office, which estimated the remains had been sitting in the fireplace for two months to two years.
An autopsy determined the skeleton belonged to a thin man, 5 feet 7 inches tall and between 18 and 35 years old. For decades, he became known as the Dane County Doe, or Chimney Doe, and was featured on television programs about cold cases and unsolved mysteries with a sculpted reconstruction of his face.
Now his name has returned to him: Ronnie Joe Kirk.
He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1942, was adopted and had family ties to Wisconsin, Madison police officials said at a news conference Monday. They described a breakthrough using DNA and genetic genealogy techniques that have revolutionized cold case work in recent years.
The identification reignited a Madison Police Department investigation that had lain dormant for decades.
“There’s new momentum,” the lead detective on the case, Lindsey Ludden, said in an interview. “We finally have a name.”
Detective Ludden said officers did not yet know the circumstances of Mr Kirk’s death but said the investigation would continue.
She requested this case from her supervisors in 2018 after observing other long-dormant cases being reactivated through DNA techniques, such as those used on fossils and other ancient materials, as well as databases of family trees.
In the spring of 2018, Joseph James DeAngelo, known as Golden State Killerwas arrested for more than 50 rapes and 12 murders using DNA evidence taken from crime scenes and matching a profile in an online genealogy database.
“This type of investigation has exploded, and now hundreds and hundreds of cases have been solved using this type of technique,” said Kelly Harkins Kincaid, a paleogenomics specialist and managing director of Astrea Forensics, which specializes in extraction of DNA from degraded samples. .
Detective Ludden sent strands of hair collected from the chimney to Astrea. Because the hair was covered in gunk, Dr. Kincaid said, it took the lab nine months to extract enough DNA for genomic sequencing.
The laboratory shared a genetic profile with the DNA Doe projecta group of volunteer genealogists whose research has solved more than 100 unsolved cases since 2017.
Dr. Gwen Knapp, the project’s principal investigator, searched for the profile on GEDMatch, an online database that law enforcement can access and which combines and compares DNA tests from a variety of popular DNA testing companies, such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
Dr. Knapp’s team analyzed many distant matches before finding DNA from both sets of grandparents, which helped them build a family tree. They compared the genetic data with public records to establish that Mr. Kirk, a man with children who had been married and divorced twice and who had family ties to Madison, was the likely source of the sequenced DNA. The work was complicated by the fact that Mr Kirk had been adopted – even though the team’s research suggested his adoptive parents were family members.
Detective Ludden’s interviews with the family, who requested confidentiality when details of the case were revealed, confirmed the match.
And now, 35 years after Mr Kirk’s skeletal remains were discovered, a search into how he ended up dead in a chimney can begin.
Detective Ludden requested that the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office conduct a new autopsy of the remains, to attempt to determine when Mr. Kirk died. She also requested help from the nonprofit Trans Doe Task Force, which focuses on assisting law enforcement in tracking down cold cases involving LGBTQ victims and alleged victims of gender-based violence .
The task force focuses on deaths that “did not receive the respect or attention that they deserved or needed,” Anthony Redgrave, co-founder of the group, said in an interview.
The initial autopsy revealed Mr Kirk’s pelvis was fractured. The injury, coupled with women’s clothing, gave rise to police theories that it was a transvestite, perhaps a prostitute who had caught a customer angry enough to murder her and dump her body in a fireplace.
“Based on everything we have at this point, he has always identified as male, but I know that sometimes people hide aspects of their lives from friends and family,” Detective said Ludden.
Years passed between Mr. Kirk’s last contact with his loved ones and the discovery of his remains.
“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence of gender-based violence,” Dr. Redgrave said, “but also a lot of question marks.”
