Judy Gifford would have been 57 years old today. She was 14
years old when she died in San Francisco in 1976. A teenager named Donald
McIsaac found the badly decomposed body while digging for turtle eggs. His dog
discovered a hand protruding from the sand behind a pumping station. The body
was buried six inches below the ground. Judy had been strangled to death and
had been buried between four to six weeks before she was found. She was wearing
gold earrings and a Timex watch and a gold chain with an owl pendant was in her
pocket. She was fully clothed. Other than that, the police didn’t know who she
was, so she became Jane Doe #40 for the next 40 years.
Police later established that Judy had moved to San Francisco in
the summer of 1976 to live with her father, his wife and her two half-siblings
in Park Merced. Then she disappeared and her young brother William was told
that she had returned to New Jersey to live with her aunt, Ogee Gifford, who
had previously been caring for her.
Back in Southampton New Jersey where Judy came from originally,
the aunt never changed her phone number in case her niece ever called. Some
twelve years later, Judy’s brother William, then 18 years old, visited his aunt
in New Jersey and learned that Judy had never returned to live with her. Shin,
who lives in Maryland, called the New Jersey State Police and reported Judy’s
case.
New Jersey State Police detectives worked with detectives in San
Francisco for two years in using DNA samples from collected from Gifford’s aunt
when Judy’s half-brother, William Shin, reported her missing to the San
Francisco police Department. To confirm the ID, Judy's aunt gave the police a
photo of her niece wearing the same pendant.