CNN —
A 14-year-old girl disappeared from a Pennsylvania park in 1969. More than half a century later, her remains have been identified, state police said Tuesday.
“After 53 years, Joan Marie Diamond’s family very much deserves closure. We will do everything in our power to make sure they have it,” said Capt. Patrick Dougherty, commanding officer of the Pennsylvania State Police detachment, in a media release.
State police are now asking the public to come forward with any information that may lead to her killer.
“We have never stopped looking for answers and this investigation remains very active,” Dougherty said.
Joan Marie disappeared from a park on Andover Street in northeast Wilkes-Barre on June 25, 1969, according to police.
In 2012, human remains were discovered on the grounds of a former coal mine in the nearby town of Newport by people digging “for relics,” the release said.
They were determined to be of “a female, estimated to be in her mid-teens to early 20s, who died under suspicious or ‘foul’ circumstances,” the release said. “Laboratory results indicate a high probability that she died in the late 1960s.”
But investigators were unable to match those Jane Doe samples to a national database for comparison, police said, until March 2022.
A local foundation funded genetic genealogy research that provided possible relatives of “Jane Doe,” which included members of the Diamond family. The family provided DNA samples and the results of those tests confirmed that the human remains were Joan Marie’s.
State police said they worked with and received “extraordinary assistance” from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National System for Missing and Unidentified Persons, multiple forensic anthropologists, Beta Analytic, Inc., and Othram, Inc.
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