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Missing Mom Susan Lund Is Ina Jane Doe, Decapitation Victim Found in Illinois in 1992


On Christmas Eve 1992, a young mother named Susan Lund left her home in Clarksville, Tennessee, for a quick trip to the grocery store and never returned.

What happened to Lund has been a mystery for nearly three decades — a mystery now solved thanks to an increasingly important investigative technique known as genealogical DNA research.

Authorities announced this week they have identified Lund as a murder victim whose head was found in an Illinois state park a month after she disappeared and who remained Jane Doe for 29 years next.

Despite those grisly details, the Lunds are relieved that at least some of the puzzle pieces have haunted them for years.

“I only speak for her three children,” said Lund’s older sister, Pamela Reyes Southern Illinoisan.

“They just really want people to know that they are grateful to know that they were not abandoned by their mother. She did not abandon her child, not contentedly. For her only 6-year-old son, it was really important for him to understand that mom didn’t leave him.”

Reyes says she spoke to Lund the day she disappeared.

“I was probably the last person to talk to her in the family. We’ve been planning to talk, and I’m trying to make plans to come down to visit her. It was like we were celebrating Christmas and then all of this,” she said. “It is never the same. We are always missing a part of our family. “

When Lund didn’t return from the grocery store that Christmas Eve, her husband quickly announced that she was missing. Clarksville police took months to investigate, but the trail has cooled.

“Her family is constantly looking for her,” Jefferson County, Illinois, Sheriff Jeff Bullard said at a news conference Friday.

The story might not have ended there if it weren’t for an anthropology professor at the University of New Hampshire who grew up in Illinois and knew about the case of an unknown murder victim years ago.

Amy Knight asked the sheriff’s office for help in reanalyzing what was left: the head found by two young girls in the woods of Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park in Ina on January 27, 1993.

The victim was named Ina Jane Doe, and a sketch that circulated in the 1990s did not lead anyone to identify her.

Knight’s team began an anthropological study that helped develop a more accurate sketch, which they then began to compare with missing cases and unsolved murders.

Meanwhile, the Redgrave Research Forensic Service begins poring over Ina Jane Doe’s DNA for clues. They uploaded her genetic profile to a huge database called GEDMatch and searched for others with the same ancestry.

It wasn’t long before they had some success and started building a family tree with the goal of working towards seeing where Ina Jane Doe could fit into it. The incident resulted in a family and a woman without any public records after 1992 but not reported dead.

That’s Susan Lund.

DNA was taken from a close relative to confirm that she was in fact Ina Jane Doe.

The news shocked the family.

“I cried almost all day,” Reyes said Southern Illinoisan. “We didn’t stop looking, when we could, to find her. She is very kind, non-judgmental and condescending. Just a really sweet person the whole time and people…really love her. Then I got angry. I’m angry because she’s been there for 29 years. But now we are relieved.”

However, for relatives and the police, there are still many open questions: Where did Lund go after running away from home? How did she end up dying? And who killed and decapitated her?

Bullard said the naming of Ina Jane Doe was just the beginning of the investigation. “That doesn’t stop our mission…to find out the truth about what happened to Susan,” he said.

His office is in contact with Clarksville police in the hope of being able to provide Lund’s loved ones with the answers they need.

“We will roll up our sleeves and start researching again,” he said.



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