Genetic testing identifies former Jane Doe in 40-year-old Fort Worth cold case

Carrie Reeves was about three years old when her mother disappeared. 

“Not knowing her and not knowing what happened, it was hard,” Reeves said. She grew up feeling resentful. Her mother, she assumed, had abandoned her.

Over 40 years later, Reeves learned that wasn’t what happened at all. 

In February, genetic technology gave investigators a new lead for a 1984 Fort Worth cold case: a woman found strangled at a landfill. It pointed toward a possible family connection, eventually allowing investigators to identify the woman. She was Joyce Ann Hinson, Reeves’ mother.

This news has provided Reeves a sense of closure. She now knows what happened to her mom, and where she went.

None of this would have been possible without advancements in forensic genetic technology. Here’s how investigators finally found Hinson.

Hinson’s sister, Linda Barker, was 10 when Hinson was born, in 1960. Barker says she was “tickled to death” to have a sister. “I carried her around so much when she was little, I thought I was going to be deformed with my hip stuck out because there was a baby on it.”

Barker recalled taking her sister to the library when she was little, saying “the librarian there just loved her to death. She was a very sweet child, and when she grew up she still had a sunny light about her.”

Hinson was around 19 when she moved from Tennessee to Florida to help Barker raise her daughter. She lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, and helped them at the laundromat they managed. Shortly after moving, Hinson gave birth to her only child, Carrie Reeves.

Hinson loved kids, Barker recalled, and was very good with them. Hinson’s niece, Janice Clemmons, who said she was around 7 or 8 at the time of her disappearance, remembered how Hinson would burst into the house yelling, “Hey, you guys!” a reference to one of their favorite shows, The Electric Company.

After breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, Hinson spent more time away from the family. 

“She always wanted to go where the party was,” Barker said. “She always wanted to be on the go. She didn’t like sitting and waiting.”

Hinson was known to hitchhike across states, and Reeves said her mom’s disappearance was not the first time she had left. 

Reeves described how before her mother disappeared, Hinson had gone somewhere with her father and wound up at a bar.

“Her friends were supposed to bring her home, and then nobody brought her home,” said Reeves, recalling what her grandparents told her had happened. The last time anyone in her family heard from Hinson was in late 1983, when Hinson called to tell her mother she was in Austin.

When they hadn’t heard from her in several days, Barker said she called the police to report her missing. 

Hinson was 23 when her family last saw her. 

“She was a person that had a lot of spirit. A lot of determination,” Barker said. “She just got on the wrong path. And that’s easy to happen.” 

After her mother’s disappearance, Reeves was raised by her grandparents, Guy and Zelma Josephine Hinson, in Tennessee. 

“As my grandmother got older, she would ask, ‘I just want to know where my little girl is. I just want to know what happened to my little girl,’” Reeves said. Hinson’s family never stopped looking for her. Clemmons posted on Facebook and Barker reached out to a TV show focused on finding missing persons. 

Hinson’s parents, Guy and Zelma Josephine Hinson, died without knowing what happened to her.

When the phone call came, Reeves was shocked. Her mother had finally been identified after over four decades. The news, she said, makes what happened a little easier to deal with. “The biggest thing for me is I now know why she didn’t come home.”

Investigators pursued many different leads over the years. Each one ran cold. 

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office reopened the 1984 case after receiving roughly half a million dollars in a federal grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. This funding was intended to help investigators pursue unsolved crimes and send samples from homicides to Othram, a forensic biotechnology company that has helped solve thousands of cold cases. 

“When I read this case file, I was immediately drawn in and wanted to find her name and find her family,” said Amy Renfro, the deputy chief outreach investigator with the human identification department at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office. 

Using powerful DNA testing and forensic genetic technology known as genetic genealogy, investigators developed a genetic profile of the woman found at the landfill from biological evidence collected at the crime scene.

This profile generated a new lead pointing toward a potential family member, and a DNA sample from that person revealed he was Hinson’s brother.

Investigators partnered with the FBI to confirm the woman’s identity. A comparison between partial postmortem fingerprints and fingerprints from a 1981 arrest confirmed the woman was Hinson. 

Her death has been ruled a homicide and remains under investigation. The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office encourages anyone with information to contact them.

Genetic genealogy uses public DNA databases to build family trees, helping to identify potential suspects and victims. This revolutionary technique was first used to identify the Golden State Killer in 2018, and it is estimated to have helped solve 755 criminal cases as of December 2024.

Using crime scene DNA, genealogists build profiles based on short tandem repeats (STRs), highly variable repeating sequences of DNA, and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), variations in the DNA sequence involving a single nucleotide, the smallest building block of DNA.

SNPs are particularly powerful for identifying distant relations, up to fifth cousins and beyond, because these tiny variations can be inherited across generations.

Michael Coble, executive director of the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas’ Health Science Center, called genetic genealogy a “game changer” in investigations. His lab operates the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and has worked to identify victims of disasters such as the July 2025 Central Texas floods. 

Traditional DNA testing works best for close relatives, said Coble, who was not involved in Hinson’s identification. “When you start looking at SNPs,” he said, “you’re starting to look at not only close relatives. You can look at first cousins, second cousins, and you can really get more distantly related individuals.”

SNP profile data is analyzed and compared with data from a public DNA database. This results in a list of potential genetic relatives whose closeness to the forensic sample depends on how much SNP data they share.

Genealogists then work with law enforcement to narrow down the list of potential genetic relatives, building a family tree using SNP data and publicly available data such as civil and church records. Once constructed, the family tree is scrutinized for possible suspects that match information from the crime, like age, sex and geographic location.

Law enforcement then confirms the person’s identity by taking a biological sample from the match identified by genetic testing. 

Investigators described how the breakthrough in Hinson’s case serves as motivation to now find out who killed her.

For Reeves, her mother’s identification provides closure. But for her and Clemmons, the information raises more questions about who killed her. 

“I would love to know that information,” Reeves said. “No matter what I have felt all these other years, it’s still my mom.”

Renfro described how families whose loved ones have gone missing are essentially in a “holding spot.” Identification can help families understand what happened, she said, and finally begin to grieve.

“Helping to give answers to families is the ultimate goal,” Coble said. “I think if you ask any forensic scientist, that’s the reason we do what we do.”

Niamh Ordner is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.