Who was 'Harris County Jane Doe'? Nonprofit, lab in The Woodlands trying to answer 33 years later

HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- A Las Vegas nonprofit, in collaboration with a DNA lab in The Woodlands, has created a program to help solve "Jane and John Doe" cases, including one in Harris County.

She is known only as Harris County Jane Doe 1990. Her badly-decomposed body was found in Brays Bayou near Beechnut by children playing in October 1990.

While Houston police said her killer admitted to the crime, the victim has never been identified.

Terrance Tyrone Johnson was charged in 2008 after that admission from behind bars, police said, but he did not know her name either.

A composite sketch and drawings of her clothing, notably a gray T-shirt with "Marine's Sport" on the front, were released to the public, but brought no leads.

Now, the nonprofit, Vegas Justice League, is hopeful major funding will lead to a development.

"I couldn't imagine going on 30 years and not knowing what happened to a loved one," Justin Woo, Vegas Justice League co-founder, said.

"They're going through these cases at a phenomenal speed now," Lydia Ansel, also a co-founder, added.

Woo said the nonprofit was recently given nearly $500,000 to help solve Jane and John Doe cases in Nevada, California, and Texas through a program called "Road to Justice." They are working with Othram, a lab in The Woodlands that uses one of the most powerful DNA sequences on the market to develop comprehensive genealogical profiles to generate new leads in old cases.

So far, a half-dozen people, like Brenda Sue Guessler, who was found murdered along I-40 in the Panhandle in 1999, have been identified through the Road to Justice program.

The hope is that Harris County Jane Doe 1990 will be next.

"It's not over yet. There are more possibilities and opportunities for answers," Ansel said.

Othram's website highlights cases, like Guessler's, that have been solved, but it also features many more unsolved cases.

They use it to crowdfund since law enforcement and medical examiners' offices often lack funding and the technology costs about $7,500 per cold case.

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