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Nichols, Elizabeth/CAF830304; Sacramento County CA March 4 1983
Topic Started: Aug 16 2006, 03:44 PM (387 Views)
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Case Number 83-0366
Gender Female
Race White
Estimated age Between 20 and 30 years old
Height 5’ 3½"
Weight 167 lbs
Eyes Blue
Hair Dark brown curly-medium length hair
Date Found 03-04-1983
Date of Death Unknown
Case Information Found lying in a drainage ditch on El Centro Road south of Del Paso Road.
Distinguishing Characteristics
Scars/Marks/Tattoos
She had a possible birthmark on her left leg 4" above the knee (1 ½" x ¾”), a mole above her right hip (3/8"), and vertical lines on her lower abdomen.
Clothing
Wearing black (after ski) zip up ankle boots with three shield-like crests on each boot and skier emblem on soles, a white-crew neck T-shirt (size Small 34-36), a long sleeve, dark-blue pullover top with a large white stripe encircling upper chest and arms (size Large), a Levi denim blue jacket (sleeves removed), Wrangler denim jeans (blue, Size 16 X 33 with multiple tears and patches), and an olive drab colored coat (field jacket style, Size "B-34").
Jewelry
None
Other distinguishing characteristics
Good teeth with a moderate overbite. Pierced ears.
Phone: (916) 874-9320

http://www.coroner.saccounty.net/unidDecea...rsons.htm#mail: coronerweb.saccounty.net
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http://z10.invisionfree.com/usedtobedoe/in...showtopic=18599
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tatertot
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http://www.sacbee.com/news/story/1666567.html

Sacramento forensic artist breathes life into unidentified remains
By Stan Oklobdzija
Published: Tuesday, Mar. 3, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 2B

With just a pencil, some bones and a set of reports, Barbara Anderson can raise the dead.

A forensic artist with two decades of experience breathing life back into corpses, she's sketched about half the unidentified remains taken in by the Sacramento County Coroner's Office in the last 16 years.

But unlike other artists, her work will never grace a gallery wall.

Rather, it hangs in liquor stores, bus stations and all the other places the forgotten dead may have frequented in life.

Her work, Anderson said, requires a 50-50 split between a scientist's mind and an artist's touch.

Before setting pencil to paper, she takes into consideration the era in which the people lived, the kind of clothes they last wore and any clues to the kind of life they led.

"You need a good foundation," she said. "Otherwise, your drawing won't fit."

Since 1975, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office has come across 73 John or Jane Does, said Assistant Coroner Edward Smith.

"About 50 percent of the time, we just have a skeleton," he said. "Oftentimes, we'll just get a skull."

Many of the bodies are found in secluded areas, where they've been exposed to the elements and have gone undiscovered for long periods. Complicating matters is the fact that many of the unidentified remains are people with few or no connections to society.

"Lots of folks coming to California are transient," Smith said. "They go from place to place."

One such woman was found by bicyclists in a canal south of Del Paso Road in 1983, according to coroner's reports.

When the Coroner's Office approached Anderson to sketch the woman, all it could offer were old pictures and an old crime scene report.

Anderson noticed a few things about the woman.

"The decomposition wasn't bad (in the photos)," she said. "You could see her face. … Her upper and lower teeth didn't meet nicely."

The woman's clothing was large, giving Anderson a clue to how much flesh to draw on the woman's face.

Finally, Anderson noticed the woman had long hair.

"Shooting back to the '80s, I know how women looked back then," she said. "It was around the time of 'Flashdance.' … They had wild permed hair."


Anderson's sketch has been circulating since November, but she said it often takes years for a family member or friend to come across one. Often, people associated with the deceased don't start looking for years after they've last seen a loved one.

Anderson, who paints and sculpts on her days off, said forensic art is a different beast, where interpretation takes a back seat to exactitude.

As Smith put it, "you've got to be really on the money" in order to give someone's memory the spark that puts a name to a face.

"It's an art form where the success of getting it right is against you most of the time," he said.

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http://cbs13.com/local/sacramento.cold.case.2.967076.html
Mar 24, 2009 6:04 pm US/Pacific
Detectives Ask For Help With 26-Year-Old Cold Case Reporting
Elyce Kirchner SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ¯

Posted Image
The 2008 composite sketch of the unidentified victim.

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The 1983 composite sketch of the unidentified victim.


Authorities are asking for the public's help in identifying a murder victim in a cold case that is decades old.

On March 4, 1983, a body was discovered floating in a drainage canal near Del Paso Road in Sacramento. The victim, a woman in her 20s, was found partially nude with no identification and was murdered by a blunt object, according to the Sacramento Police Department.

No suspects were identified and no witnesses were located. The crime scene 26 years ago was farmland, completely isolated -- the closest thing to the canal was a truck stop nearly three miles away.

"The truck stop, the highway, easy on-and-off access and it might have been someone that you could maybe rule as a serial killer," said John Cabera with the Sacramento Police Department.


Cabera was a detective with the department at the time of the murder, and now works in the cold case unit. He hopes an updated sketch of the victim will bring new answers.

Infamous serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Rob Rhodes once claimed they murdered the unidentified victim, but new DNA evidence points to two other people.
"Our hope is to be able to say, 'This is who did the crime and we are bringing them to justice,'" Cabera said.

The two DNA profiles will be submitted to the FBI and entered into the Highway Serial Killers Initiative, which tracks cases where the victim is found near a highway or truck stop.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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http://www.redding.com/news/2009/jun/11/re...1983-cold-case/

Redding teen identified in 1983 cold case
By Record Searchlight staff
Originally published 06:09 p.m., June 11, 2009
Updated 06:09 p.m., June 11, 2009

A teenager who was reported missing in Shasta County more than 25 years ago has been identified as a 1983 Sacramento murder victim.

Elizabeth Nichols was 19 when she walked away from a Redding mental hospital Feb. 19, 1983, and disappeared, Sacramento police said Thursday.

In May, she was identified through DNA as the person whose body was discovered floating in a drainage canal on March 4, 1983, near Del Paso Road and Interstate 5 in Sacramento, police said.

An autopsy at the time determined Nichols died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

The victim’s mother, Alice Nichols, and the Sacramento Police Department asks that anyone with possible information on the murder to contact Crime Alert at 916-443-HELP or text in a tip to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter SACTIP followed by the tip information. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward up to $1,000, police said.

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http://www.khsltv.com/content/localnews/st...-1T4vLk1yw.cspx

Body Identified in a 26-Year-Old Cold Case
Reported by: Nitin Lal
Last Update: 6/11 8:05 pm

Elizabeth Nichols went missing in 1983 when she was 19.

Nichols escaped from a Redding mental institution, she suffered from schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder.

Her bruised and battered body was found in a Sacramento canal 13 days after she disappeared.

It took investigators 26 years to identify her through DNA testing.

Nichols' mother was notified of the developments on Monday.

"There's no more hope. The hope is gone. You can't burry her cause they lost the ashes," say Alice Nichols.

There's a $1000 reward offered for anyone with information that could lead to an arrest in this cold case.

Contact the Sacramento Police Department at (916) 443-HELP.

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http://www.redding.com/news/2009/jun/12/mo...ways-held-hope/

Mother of missing Redding girl always held onto hope
By Ryan Sabalow
Originally published 04:58 p.m., June 12, 2009
Updated 04:58 p.m., June 12, 2009

On Monday, two Sacramento police detectives knocked on the door of Alice Nichols’ Redding home, bringing with them the news that they’d identified the body of her daughter, missing for 26 years.

Thanks to DNA and a missing persons’ database, the detectives were able to identify a body found March 4, 1983 in a Sacramento drainage canal as Elizabeth Nichols, a 19-year-old Redding woman who had run away from a Shasta County mental hospital a month earlier.

The girl had been murdered; an autopsy found she’d died from at least one blow to the head, police said.

Alice Nichols, 63, said the news the detectives brought was bittersweet.

Like any parent whose children are missing, Nichols always held out hope, however small, that her child would somehow turn up unharmed, even after decades.

“It’s better to know than not know,” Alice Nichols said today. “Now I know where she is and that helps a lot.”

She now hopes that the person who killed Elizabeth Nichols is found.

Sacramento police are asking for the public’s help, and they’ve posted a $1,000 reward for information about the long-cold case.

Anonymous tips can be made at Sacramento’s crime tip line at (916) 443-HELP.

Aside from finding the killer, detectives also face one lingering question in the case.

Elizabeth Nichols wasn’t officially reported missing until six years after her initial disappearance from Shasta County’s now-closed mental hospital on Breslauer Way in South Redding.

The official missing-person report finally was filed with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. Sgt. John Hubbard said he doesn’t know why it took so long to get the report.

“That’s the golden question,” Hubbard said.

But when Alice Nichols talks about why it took so long, a long-held bitterness seeps into her voice.

“I was accused of not caring for six years,” she said.

She said the Monday after the girl went missing, she contacted Redding police and told them about it.

Nothing ever came of it, but as she kept calling as the years went by, especially when bodies were found locally, the police told her they had no record of the report, she said.

At one point, officers came to her home and talked with her, but they, too, told her that no report existed, she said.

Perhaps police figured Nichols didn’t want to be found. After all, it wasn’t the first time she’d run away, Alice Nichols said.

Then, there was also the stigma of her mental state.

“She was 19 and she was mentally ill,” Alice Nichols said. “And I wasn’t somebody in the clique. It just didn’t matter, I guess.”

Alice Nichols said her daughter was a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities, who earned her high school diploma from a school in the Napa State Hospital, a state-run mental institution.

When on her medication or not going through a “glitch,” as her mother calls her daughter’s sometimes violent psychotic episodes, Elizabeth Nichols was a strikingly bright girl, Alice Nichols said.

She could play the piano, she could speak Spanish and was fluent in sing language.

“When she was herself, she was a sweet, helpful child,” she said.

It wasn’t until 1989, after her now-dead husband James suffered a stroke, that Alice Nichols tried the sheriff’s office, to see if someone at another law enforcement agency would take the case seriously.

Redding Police Chief Peter Hansen said he couldn’t speak to what officers did 26 years earlier, as he’d only been hired a few months after Nichols went missing.

But he noted that laws have since been passed that require officers to immediately take down a missing-person’s report, even if its not in their jurisdiction, and forward the case to the appropriate agency.

It’s also illegal under federal laws for agencies to make a family wait a certain amount of time after their loved ones went missing before a report can be filed.

“It was because of circumstances like this because that the law has changed,” Hansen said.

But it was changes in technology that led to Elizabeth Nichols’ name being matched with her long-dead body.

Hubbard said that advances in DNA technology and a California Department of Justice missing-persons database were able to match swabbed samples detectives took from Alice Nichols’ mouth to the DNA of her daughter.

Hubbard said Sacramento’s police weren’t the first to contact him.

In 2007 detectives from Los Angeles County initially called saying they were hoping to get DNA samples from Nichols’ family to see if it could be matched with a body that looked like Nichols’ description in the missing persons’ database.

There was no DNA match in that case.

A year went by, and a cold-case detective from Sacramento called Hubbard about the body in the canal.

Months passed before Department of Justice forensic teams were able to match Alice Nichol’s DNA with her daughter.

“It solves a cold-case missing person for us,” Hubbard said. “It identifies a homicide victim for Sacramento P.D. But the big question is who did it?”

It’s a question very much on the mind of Elizabeth Nichols’ mother. In the meantime, she’s hoping to recover her daughter’s ashes from a Sacramento mortuary so that she can be interred next to her father’s remains in Redding.

She also wants the world to know her daughter as more than just a long-gone victim of a long-forgotten crime.

“She was pretty,” Alice Nichols said. “She was smart. She was a good girl.”
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