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A young girl who was found dead in an Arizona desert in 1960 and dubbed “Little Miss Nobody” finally has a name.
Officials utilized cutting-edge DNA evidence and facial reconstruction to solve the 62-year-old mystery and identify the slain child as Sharon Lee Gallegos, sheriffs said at a Tuesday press conference livestreamed by ABC15 Arizona.
Gallegos, 4, was abducted on July 21, 1960 while playing with other kids behind her grandmother’s house in Alamogordo, NM, according to police.
When her decomposed body was found 10 days later more than 500 miles away in Congress, Ariz, police initially believed she could be the victim. Unfortunately, officials estimated the dead girl was 7, and a clothing and footprint comparison did not match, so federal and local officials eventually explored other leads, investigators said.
“Footprint comparisons are not obviously how we do things now, but that was probably the best technology they had available to them at the time,” Yavapai County Lt Tom Boelts said.
Investigators started looking at the case again in 2014, relying on old newspaper reports for much of their research, police said.
In 2015, they exhumed the girl’s body from under her “Little Miss Nobody” tombstone, but DNA testing was not then advanced enough to generate a new lead.
A publicized 3D facial reconstruction image a year later put a face to the unidentified girl, and led to a tip that it might be young Sharon. A privately funded DNA test from the Texas laboratory Othram was then able to match the girl’s genetic material with that of a living relative.
“In 1960, people had no idea that DNA would even be a technology — they wouldn’t even know what to call it, it didn’t exist,” said Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes.
“But somehow, someway they did enough investigation to preserve, to document, to memorialize all the things that needed to occur, so that someday we could get to this point.”
Positively identifying the girl was a team effort, consisting of volunteers, police and advocates. It was the coldest case that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had ever helped solve, officials said.
“We still have work to do in this case,” Boelts said. “We would still like to identify the people who took her. We would still like to answer the questions what happened in those 10 days from the time she was taken to the time she was found. So we are still working.”
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