On December 20, 1976, the Pennsylvania police were called to a horrifying scene after a local resident reported a foul odor near a rural road.<\/p>\n
When officers arrived, they discovered three old suitcases, each wrapped in newspaper pages dated September 26, 1976, from The New Jersey Daily. Inside were the dismembered remains of a young woman\u2014and heartbreakingly, her fully developed unborn baby.<\/p>\n
The autopsy revealed the woman had been sexually assaulted, strangled, and shot after death. Some parts of her body\u2014specifically her ears and breasts\u2014were never found. Investigators were sure that identifying the victim would be the key to solving the murder.<\/p>\n
But despite weeks of effort, fingerprint comparisons, and dental record checks, no match was found.<\/p>\n
The police decided to temporarily name her \u201cBeth Doe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her body was buried in a Pennsylvania cemetery, under a simple headstone that read \u201cIn memory of Beth Doe.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Mystery That Lasted Over Four Decades<\/p>\n
Over the years, the FBI and Pennsylvania State Police re-opened the case multiple times. They released facial reconstructions, public appeals, and even theories suggesting Beth Doe might have been a runaway or a missing woman from another state. Still, no one came forward.<\/p>\n
In 2007, investigators exhumed her remains to conduct modern DNA testing, hoping new technology could finally solve what had become one of Pennsylvania\u2019s most haunting cold cases.<\/p>\n
A list of twelve possible missing women was examined \u2014 but each one was ruled out.<\/p>\n
Then, in 2018, a breakthrough came. A genetic genealogy database linked Beth Doe\u2019s DNA to a man named Luis Col\u00f3n, who lived in New York. When police interviewed him, he mentioned that he once had a niece named Evelyn Col\u00f3n. She had become pregnant at age fifteen and left home to live with her boyfriend in the mid-1970s. After that, the family never heard from her again.<\/p>\n
The Truth Behind the Name \u201cBeth Doe\u201d<\/p>\n
Following this lead, investigators tracked down the boyfriend \u2014 Luis Sierra, now a 65-year-old man living quietly in New York City. At first, Sierra denied everything.<\/p>\n
But under pressure, he eventually admitted that he had once dated Evelyn. He claimed that one day he returned home and discovered she had \u201cleft him.\u201d He said he never looked for her or their unborn child.<\/p>\n
DNA results later confirmed what Evelyn\u2019s family had feared for decades \u2014 \u201cBeth Doe\u201d was actually Evelyn Col\u00f3n, a teenage girl from New Jersey who vanished in 1976.<\/p>\n
In 2021, police finally arrested Luis Sierra and charged him with Evelyn\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n
The community that had long mourned \u201cBeth Doe\u201d finally knew her real name. However, justice was short-lived \u2014 Sierra was released on a $250,000 bond, and after trial, the evidence was deemed insufficient to convict him. He walked free.<\/p>\n
A Grave Without Justice<\/p>\n
The story of Evelyn Col\u00f3n, once known only as \u201cBeth Doe,\u201d is a tragic reminder of how many young women disappear without a trace \u2014 and how time, technology, and persistence can finally bring their stories to light, even after forty years.<\/p>\n
Evelyn\u2019s grave now bears her real name, but her killer remains free.<\/p>\n
What began as a gruesome mystery inside three suitcases has become a heartbreaking symbol of lost innocence, unanswered justice, and the power of DNA to give victims back their identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On December 20, 1976, the Pennsylvania police were called to a horrifying scene after a local resident reported…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5440,5439,5438,783,5437,28,30,29,5436,1368,4871],"class_list":["post-5999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-decades","tag-for","tag-haunted","tag-murder","tag-mystery","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-suitcase","tag-that","tag-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}