Startex, SC – Fourteen years after her remains were discovered in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, a Jane Doe known as Ms. Startex has been identified as Jolene Lynn White. White was born in New York in 1976 but had been living in the nearby town of Cowpens when she disappeared in 2005, six years before her body was found.
On October 26, 2011, a group of teenagers searching for scrap metal found skeletal human remains in a wooded area along a highway in Startex, South Carolina. Authorities determined that the remains belonged to a 40-55 year-old Caucasian woman and investigators found evidence that she had been murdered before her body was hidden under debris.
In 2020, the Spartanburg County Coroner’s Office brought the case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert volunteer investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does. A DNA profile was generated from the woman’s remains and uploaded to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, but the team immediately ran into challenges. Ms. Startex only had distant DNA matches but it was obvious that she had roots in Puerto Rico, where endogamy can complicate genetic genealogy research…