Woman found dead: Over ten years after officials reopened the cold case, the 1991 Illinois cornfield death victim has been identified as a Chicago-area woman.
Paula Ann Lundgren was identified last week thanks to an inquiry using a posthumous DNA sample. Authorities are now hoping to piece together additional information about her life and dying circumstances. The LaSalle County Coroner’s Office states that three sheriffs and four coroners have looked into the matter throughout the years.
“For more than thirty years, everyone has been working nonstop on this matter. together with their large workforce. The office stated that hundreds of leads had been eliminated and that letters and brochures had been distributed throughout the United States and Canada in an effort to identify the unidentified “Jane Doe.”
In order to collect DNA and use investigative techniques not available in the early 1990s, her body was unearthed in 2013. A professor at Illinois Valley Community College created a list of the woman’s potential living relatives in 2019 using investigative genetic genealogy.
The LaSalle County coroner’s office stated that, prior to enlisting the FBI in February, it searched the list for a match for years. There was a pause in the lawsuit in July. “We have limited resources, so the FBI agreed to provide further assistance with the case that eventually led to a living relative,” Rich Ploch, the coroner, said on Monday. “That person’s DNA was confirmed as a match to Paula.”
Authorities indicated that Lundgren, who had mostly resided in the Chicago region, would have been 29 years old when her body was discovered in a cornfield in northern Illinois’ LaSalle County in September 1991 by a farmer. She had two tattoos, one of a star-shaped flower and a multicolored flower coming from a stem, and a large amount of dental treatment, according to the county coroner. She also had breast implants.
At the time, the coroner’s office concluded that the woman’s cause of death was cocaine intoxication. After that, her remains were misidentified and interred in a cemetery in Ottawa with the gravestone, “Somebody’s Daughter, Somebody’s Friend.” Now that Lundgren’s name is known, the LaSalle County Sheriff’s Office stated that they are hoping to “develop new leads as to how she came to be in the cornfield.”