The Girl Next Door

Will Forensic Reconstruction Help ID Nameless Murder Victim?

(CBS) 
As the weeks turned to months, no one came forward to claim this young girl, but the people of Castro Valley began to feel a connection.

“The whole community in this area has adopted her. She’s known as Castro Valley’s Jane Doe,” says Dudek.

And perhaps no one was touched more than Dave Woolworth, a local landscaper. “Sometimes you’ll catch me out here talking to her,” says Woolworth.

Best known around town for his signature tie-dyed T-shirts, Woolworth was an unlikely hero. But the case of this unclaimed child turned him into one.

“It was eating at me. When I read the story, I started crying. And I looked at my wife and I told her, this girl will never be identified. No one will come and claim her,” he says.

Once the forensic investigation was completed Jane was destined for cremation. But that was unacceptable to Woolworth, himself a father who had once been estranged from his own daughter.

Woolworth decided to take the lead in raising donations and four months after her body was abandoned in a parking lot, Castro Valley’s adopted daughter was given a funeral befitting a dignitary.

As several more months went by, this child was still nameless and her killer, faceless. But the community that adopted her in death refused to give up hope.

"For the past two years, everything pertaining to her I’ve saved. This way, when the mother comes forward or is found, it belongs to her,” says Woolworth.

Even after dozens of dead ends, Scott Dudek remained determined.

Then investigators got a clue: an anonymous letter in the mail.

The letter writer claimed to have seen someone get “something from the trunk” of a car and dump it into the very same bushes where the body was found.

"We asked this person to come forward and we would keep him anonymous," says Dudek. "However unfortunately he chose not to come forward at that point.”

This potential witness admitted in the letter that he was reluctant to come forward because he himself had been in that parking lot “waiting for a married girlfriend.”

Dudek says the person is a huge witness. "He’s got to make the decision and do the right thing.”

Dudek’s frustration was mounting. “I’m a father; everybody that works on this case is a father. It just pulls at you every single day as far as why can’t we just solve this?”

So he made perhaps the most difficult decision of his career: to exhume the young girl’s body and search for clues that forensic investigators might have missed the first time around.

“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this. I can’t believe we’re at this stage in the investigation where we have to go to such extreme measures,” says Dudek, speaking about the exhumation.