East Haven police have identified an 18-year-old young woman who was found dead in a drainage ditch in August 1975 through the help of DNA. Police said Monday they have identified her as Patricia Meleady Newsom.
She was found bound, gagged and wrapped in a tarp in a drainage ditch on Frontage Road on Aug.16, 1975.
Police have not identified the person who killed Newsom and they are asking anyone with information about Patricia to come forward as they continue to try to figure out what happened to her.
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Newsom’s family had moved with family rom Idaho, Falls Idaho to the East Coast in the late 1960s, according to police.
In 1972, Newsom went to a boarding school in Sullivan County, New York, but ran away with a friend and headed to Maine, according to police. They think she might have been hitchhiking and it's not clear if she ever got to Maine.
She was never seen again until her body was discovered.
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Police said they are trying to determine which school Newsom went to and which friend she ran away with. They are hoping anyone who went to school with her to come forward.
When Newsom’s body was discovered, police did not know who she was.
She was known only as “Jane Doe.” She was buried in State Street Cemetery in Hamden after her body was at the office of the chief medical examiner for a year. The cemetery is no longer in operation and was defunct in 2010.
In 2020, officials said they tried to identify the body using DNA samples and genealogy, but all three attempts failed. Because of this, police decided that it was time to try to locate the burial site and exhume her.
Last year, police went to exhume the woman's body, but later found out they dug up the wrong person.
When they went to exhume her body, they found five times the number of caskets they were expecting to find. They were stacked on top of each other and close by.
Police said Newsom’s body was later exhumed in July 2022 for DNA collection. Officers announced Thursday that Newsom's body was exhumed a second time.
The DNA was expected to allow investigators to extract, sequence and apply DNA results to genealogy databases across the globe with hopes of identifying the woman.
A couple months ago, police received the call they were waiting for. They were finally able to give “Jane Doe” her rightful name back.
Newsom’s family traveled from Tennessee to Connecticut to attend a news conference. Her sister, Maryann Newsom Collette, thanked East Haven police and everyone who took the time to share her sister’s photo on Facebook.
Collette had uploaded her DNA to GEDmatch, which allowed investigators to make headway in the case and an eventual positive identification, police said.
When she was asked how she wanted her sister to be remembered, she said laugh in a rainstorm, walk barefoot and smell the flowers and you'll be remembering her.
She called for people who are searching for missing loved ones to share their DNA and keep the search alive. She also urged anyone who knew her sister or has information on who killed her to come forward.
The East Haven Memorial Funeral home is handling cremation services at no cost to Newsom's family. They are expected to make the trip back to Connecticut from Tennessee this weekend to bring her back home.
"While this case remains under investigation, these latest developments are a full circle moment for us. We are honored to be able to finally bring Patricia one step closer to her final resting place with other members of her family," police said in a statement.
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