Chicago murder victim identified 50 years after she was found in box in Indiana cornfield

A murder victim found in a box found in an Indiana cornfield has been identified – 50 years on from the shock discovery, investigators announced this week. 

The woman – who had been shot in the back of her head – was named as 69-year-old Jane Hart – who was born in 1906, the DNA Doe Project revealed Wednesday.

Hart, a housekeeper, was the daughter of a Croatian woman, who emigrated to the US the previous year before giving birth in Ohio.

She then moved to Ohio to Chicago – before vanishing from public databases in the 1970s. 

Hart’s body was found in a box by cornfield farmer Norman Skoog and his 16-year-old son Curtis on Oct. 8 1976 – and at the time authorities believed the box had only been in the field for around 12 hours. 

She was wearing a double knit pant suit, a green jacket, and slacks — and there was a smashed vial of perfume near her remains, the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported. 

Investigators suspected the woman inside had been killed a week before the box was found.

She was found with a large scar due to a radical mastectomy. The scar was about eight centimeters in length, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

But Harold Konzelman, who was the Benton County coroner at the time, told the Journal and Courier on Oct. 9 1976 “We have so few clues to go on” and authorities never tracked down a suspect.

Speculation also flourished on the circumstances leading up to her death.

“As for theories?” Matt Rosenbarger, the current Benton County coroner who helped exhume her body in 2019, said.

“There’s the wide variety that everyone has. Possibly a mob hit?

“Was it one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time things? Who knows, for sure? We just know we had no missing cases around here at the time. And someone went way out in the middle of Benton County to leave her.” 

Curtis Skoog even speculated that someone may have traveled on a helicopter and dropped the box.  Locals never saw a car in the area or someone acting suspiciously.

In 1977 then-sheriff Don Steely suggested, “She may have been somebody who walked right into the middle of something.”

More than 40 years later Benton County coroners teamed up with the DNA Doe Project – and a profile was created, where they found she was of Croatian heritage.

“We could tell that our Jane Doe had Croatian ancestry, which posed a challenge,” Harmony Vollmer said. 

But researchers found documents relating to Hart’s living arrangements and family records. They also worked with her relatives.

“It was thanks to the assistance of Jane’s surviving family that we have been able to confirm her identity,” researchers said.

Curtis Skoog welcomed the fact that the woman had been identified. 

“It’s been a long road, 50 years ago… it’s pretty much tattooed in my mind,” he told CBS.