Authorities claimed that 41 years after her bones were initially unearthed, the victim whose skull was discovered by kids in a Southern California city in 1983 has been identified.
Maritza Glean Grimmett, a native of Panama who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, was identified as the victim by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department on Friday. According to a press release by the authorities, Grimmett was 20 years old when she vanished. Grimmett’s remains were used in the investigation, and a DNA analysis helped the detectives locate relatives.
About seventy per cent of Grimmett’s remains were dug up from the earth after kids in a now-part of Lake Forest, a city approximately forty-three miles (69 kilometres) southeast of Los Angeles, found her skull while playing. Authorities failed to identify the victim in the decades that followed.
According to the sheriff’s office, a DNA sample from Grimmett’s remains was sent to the Texas-based forensics company Othram Laboratories in 2022. The DNA extraction and testing were paid for by a U.S. Department of Justice missing people program. In 2023, authorities contacted one of Grimmett’s distant relatives after finding “a direct family line” for her.
According to the sheriff’s department, the relative suggested posting the results of the forensics investigation to a Facebook page devoted to women who vanished in the 1970s and 1980s. A woman contacted investigators a month after the results were made public, claiming to be the victim’s mother who had vanished.
After that, relatives gave DNA samples to the authorities, who used them to identify the victim. The inquiry is still on.
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