The elderly woman found over a hillside in Avalon was never identified.
The woman survived about eight decades on this earth, but her death gave no dignity to those years. On June 19, 1997, the mummified body of a petite black woman with short, curly, gray-and-white hair—only 5 feet tall and weighing only 100 pounds—was found over a hillside behind the Ponderosa Restaurant at 920 Ohio River Blvd. (Route 65) in Avalon. The woman, who was found inside a blue sleeping bag, was wrapped in two black plastic trash bags—one tied over her head, one tied over her feet—then wrapped again in what authorities believe was a plastic mattress cover, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Her head was lying on a pillow with a towel covering her face. Her body was covered with a green blanket. She was dressed …
Each weekend, beginning May 12-13, Patch will review a missing person, an unidentified body or a cold case homicide victim from Allegheny or Washington counties.
The Pennsylvania Missing Persons website features the somewhat-haunting sketch of "Beth Doe" on its homepage. Nancy Monahan of Penn Hills, who started and runs the website, chose the sketch because, in nearly four decades and despite social networking and modern forensics, no one has ever been able to determine where the woman came from or who she was. Monahan was intrigued in part because the woman would have been in her own age bracket. The details of the case are rather disturbing. The young woman had been dismembered and mutilated. She and her full-term, unborn child were stuffed in three suitcases and thrown from a bridge along Interstate 80 over the Lehigh River in Carbon County, PA. Police think the killer meant for the suitcases to…
