Who are the 3 women whose bodies were found in Hamilton County? Authorities ask for help
Hamilton County’s coroner and law enforcement pleaded with the public Monday for help identifying three women whose bodies have been at the morgue unnamed and unclaimed. One was found in September in a 1989 Buick LeSabre abandoned in the parking lot of a Walmart in Colerain Township.
“We would like to bring some closure to these women and to their families,” said Dr. Lakshmi Kodo Sammarco, the county coroner. “There’s somebody out there who knows something.”
Sammarco and police asked for the public’s help because none of the Jane Does carried identification or mobile phones. An exhaustive investigation of other clues has not yet found names.
In one case, from 2018, not even a crime-lab clay sculpture of the dead woman’s face and her head has produced a connection.
The coroner said she found no evidence of foul play in the three instances.
Sammarco has ruled that the woman in the 2018 case died of a drug overdose. The 2018 victim was the body found wrapped in a blanket, a rose in her hand, and buried in a shallow grave at an Avondale apartment complex on Glenwood Avenue.
The two other cases came in the last two months. On Nov. 2, University of Cincinnati students found the body of a white woman in the parking strip along the 2700 block of Enslin Street. Sammarco said she determined the woman died elsewhere and the body left on the street in University Heights.
A bulletin from the coroner and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation described the woman as white, between 20 and 40, about 5-foot-7 and 210 pounds. She wore only black and white yoga pants. She had four tattoos: the name Julie, a cannabis leaf, the A-in-a-circle anarchy symbol used by the band Nine Inch Nails and a runic design.
On Sept. 10, Colerain Township police investigated a blue Buick sedan in the parking lot of the Walmart in the 8400 block of Colerain Avenue in Colerain Township. In the passenger seat sat the body of a woman between 35 and 65, 5-feet-9, 179 pounds with brown medium-length hair and green eyes. She wore a pink hoodie, a black and white shirt, gray sweat pants and rainbow Danskin Now tennis shoes, size 8 ½.
The Buick bears New Mexico license tags. Detective Brent Wetherington of the Colerain Township police said parking-lot video surveillance spotted someone parking the car Aug. 30. Somebody blocked out the windshield with a sunshade and draped plastic over a broken window on the passenger side. The woman’s body was found in the car 11 days later.
Sammarco said so far, investigators have traced the car as far as the son of the owner, who laughed and hung up when contacted. The owner has not been found.
Wetherington said the woman had a receipt for ice cream purchased the day before she was found in the Buick. The owner of the bank card told Wetherington he bought the ice cream, but he did not know the woman and had no idea how she had the receipt.
Sammarco reiterated her pleas for help in the 2018 case. In 2019, a BCI artist sculpted the clay bust from a model of the woman’s skull made with a 3-D printer. The woman was between 35 and 60, between 5-feet-3 and 5-feet-10, and wearing a gray tank top with gray pajama pants.
To provide information, call the Hamilton County coroner at 513-946-8700 or the Bureau of Criminal Investigation at 740-845-2406.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Authorities ask for help to identify 3 women found in Hamilton County
