For four decades, Princess Doe was known only as a girl whose short life ended violently.
Her body was dumped in a New Jersey cemetery in 1982, where her slender 5ft 2in frame was partially decomposed by the time an undertaker found her after noticing a crucifix and chain lying nearby. She had been beaten to death and was wearing nothing but a red and white skirt and blouse.
A year later, she became the first person listed in the FBI’s fledgling missing persons database, and her identity remains one of the nation’s most enduring murder mysteries.
On Friday, investigators revealed they finally learned her name: Dawn Olanik. She was 17 when she was killed; a high school student from Long Island.
Convicted murderer Arthur Kinlow confessed to the crime from prison in 2005, the Warren County District Attorney’s Office said. But it was only this week, after DNA evidence was used to confirm Ms Olanik’s identity, that Mr Kinlow was charged with her murder.
Residents who lived near the cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey, helped pay for her funeral and lovingly tended her grave. A gravestone inscribed with a tender message — “Princess Doe. Missing from home. Dead among strangers. Remembered by all.” — can often be found surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
At the time of her murder, reports were coming in from around the country and the world, said Eric Krantz, a retired police lieutenant who was among the first officers to arrive at the cemetery after the body was found on July 15, 1982.
“You’ll have people coming from other states just to visit the grave,” Mr. Krantz said.
“Ohio people. Nebraska. Texas,” he continued. “It was a pretty amazing thing to witness.”
On Friday, Ms Olanik’s relatives carried photographs of the young woman strapped to their chests at a news conference as they thanked law enforcement officers for never giving up. They could not be reached for further comment.
“They’re just glad it’s over,” Mr. Krantz said in an interview. “Even though it turned out badly, at least they know how it turned out.”
“The whole thing is really kind of obsessive,” he added.
Dawn Olanik was a student at Connetquot High School in Bohemia, New York, when she disappeared from Long Island, where she lived with her mother and sister. She died, officials said, after resisting Mr. Kinlaw’s attempt to lure her into prostitution.
“When she refused, he drove her to New Jersey, where he eventually killed her,” prosecutors said in a statement.
The news came on the 40th anniversary of the day George Kise, a worker at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, found Ms. Olanik’s badly beaten body in a wooded area near a steep embankment leading to a stream. She was wearing a skirt and short-sleeved blouse, but no underwear, socks or stockings, officials said.
Six months later she was buried in the same cemetery, not far from where she was first discovered, in a grave dug by Mr. Kise.
In 1998, Mr. Kinlow was charged in New York with the murder of a girl who was found in the East River 14 years earlier. At the time, the New York Police Department said he was suspected of running a prostitution ring in the Bronx.
He is currently serving time in a New York prison for two unrelated first-degree murders, officials said.
Mr. Kinlow, prosecutors said, wrote a letter to authorities in 2005 indicating he wanted to confess to the murder of a young woman found in Blairstown.
But he could not be charged with the crime until Ms. Olanik was identified, a process that began in 2007 when the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas tested her skeletal remains for DNA.
Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offered funding to retest the DNA, and the final results were received in April.
Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s acting attorney general, praised the persistence of investigators.
“In New Jersey,” he said, “there is no time limit on justice.”
Mr. Krantz believes that the search for Ms. Olanik’s killer sparked an early interest in missing-child databases.
“Missing persons were not at the top of the list,” he said. “The only people who were most concerned at the time were the people who were missing this person.
“Her life, or her death in this case, played a very important role in bringing the issue forward.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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