As a dabbler in crime documentaries and podcasts, a thought that keeps me up at night isn’t just that these crimes happen, it’s that they are only a fraction of the crimes we hear about. But after 35 harrowing years, one case is on its way to being solved, and police recently uncovered something that resolved another mystery from that time.
In 1989, tourists who took a wrong turn in the Arizona desert discovered a woman’s naked body, according to USA Today. By the looks of it, authorities were able to determine she was murdered on site with a slit throat, and they were able to extract male DNA from the semen left on her body. But Arizona investigators couldn’t figure out who she was.
Just two days later, someone else found two baby girls crying on the floor of a park restroom in Oxnard, California, and local authorities were never able to determine where they came from.
All that changed this year, thanks to Detective Lori Miller, a cold-case detective. She was able to identify the woman from the desert as Marina Ramos, a 28-year-old Californian. Miller ran fingerprints and got a match to a Maria Ortiz of Bakersfield, California, and she was able to track down a contact identified as a “friend” in Tennessee.
“She said, ‘I don’t know a Maria Ortiz but my cousin Marina Ramos has been missing since 1989,” Miller said, according to USA Today, and it was then she learned about Ramos’ two daughters. She made it a mission to find them.
“People told me to give up, ‘You’re never going to find them,'” Miller said. “But this was my white whale. I never stopped working on it.”
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data studied by the Murder Accountability Project, nearly 346,000 cases of homicide and non-negligent manslaughter went unsolved from 1965 to 2023, so these types of cold cases aren’t exactly uncommon.
Miller tracked down Ramos’ sister and a daughter, raised by her grandmother, who was five years older than the missing girls. After testing her DNA, she found a half-sister who turned out to be one of the missing girls.
“My heart stopped,” Miller told the outlet. “I thought, ‘Holy cow.'”
It was a “bombshell” moment for the sisters too, who appeared relieved to learn they weren’t just randomly abandoned according to Miller. They recently decided to reconnect with Ramos’ sister and their own older half-sibling.
Now Miller is on a quest to find out who killed Ramos. “I’ve gotten the girls, but now I need justice for Marina,” she said. “I need to find out who did this horrible thing to her.”
Anybody with information about the case should call the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office at 928-753-0753, Ext. 4408.
