Cold Case Break: CT Woman Identified 18 Years After Body Found in Tennessee

Eighteen years after a woman's body was found in Tennessee, she has been identified as a Connecticut native. The findings come from the nonprofit organization DNA Doe Project.

Mary Alice Maloney, who was 40 at the time of her death, had been living in Nashville prior to her disappearance.

A police officer discovered a woman's body in a remote wooded area in La Vergne, Tennessee, on Nov. 14, 2007.

Investigators found no clothing at the scene but did find some jewelry. The woman was believed to be African American or multiracial and was between 25 and 49 years old at the time of her death.

Investigators estimated that the woman died in spring or summer of 2007.

After exhausting all leads, the La Vergne Police Department contacted the DNA Doe Project. The organization's volunteer investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does.

"The lab work needed to generate a DNA profile for La Vergne Jane Doe was complicated by the degradation of her DNA, but eventually a profile was created and uploaded to GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA.com," according to the DNA Doe Project.

However, when her DNA results came through, "it was clear that all of the unidentified woman’s matches were very distantly related to her," according to the DNA Doe Project. The team on the case "could tell from her matches" that she had roots in Puerto Rico and African American heritage, but determining how these matches were connected was the challenge.

“Our work is often complicated by the lack of people who have uploaded their DNA profiles to the public databases we can use for our cases,” said team leader Jenny Lecus. “That’s why one of the recommendations we make to families of the missing is to make sure your DNA profile is in GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNA Justice.org”

Then a new DNA match appeared in the database in April 2021, providing a break in the case. The match was only a distant cousin, but she was a much closer match to the unidentified woman than anyone else in the databases, according to the DNA Doe Project.

The team began building out her family tree, eventually providing their findings to the La Vergne Police Department. Police then confirmed that the woman was in fact Mary Alice Maloney.

The full report from the DNA Doe Project is available here.