Remembering Warren County's 'Princess Doe' 39 Years Later

WARREN COUNTY, NJ — It will be closing in on four decades on July 15, 2022, as the anniversary of the day an unidentified young woman’s dead body with a badly bludgeoned and decomposing face mysteriously appeared in Blairstown’s Cedar Ridge Cemetery.

Investigators haven’t lost hope though that someone, someday will say that the person known to the world as “Princess Doe,” is somebody they once knew.

"Next year will be 40 years since her body was discovered," said Jeanette Iurato, one of the founders of the Blairstown Museum, who helps to maintain Doe's gravesite. "I continue to hope and pray that one day her headstone will bear her real name."

As time marched on in 1982 and her body remained unclaimed in the morgue for six months into early 1983, the people of Blairstown pulled together their financial resources for a proper burial for the girl who they believed was possibly between the ages of 15 to 20. Today, she lays in eternal rest in the Cedar Ridge Cemetery, steps away from where her half-clothed body was found down a wooded embankment on that muggy, summer day.

The only name on her epitaph that presently identifies her is the one that investigators gave her after she was first found. While the “Doe” moniker is often given to the unknown souls found at crime scenes, whose case files sit in dusty cabinets and boxes in law enforcement archives, her investigators preceded her name with “Princess.”

In 2021, she also still remains an unknown, her name forever imprinted in cyberspace on the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office “cold cases” webpage, including another unknown female victim found in nearby Knowlton close to a decade later and about the same age, who was nicknamed “Tiger Lady,” because of a prominent tiger tattoo on her calf.

"We still get leads and tips [about Princess Doe] and we work in conjunction with the Warren County Prosecutor's Office," said Blairstown Police Chief Scott Johnsen.

Johnsen told Patch on Wednesday that tips, which are passed to the Prosecutor's Office as the lead agency now in the case, range from people missing their family members to some that are more random and as he put "off the wall."

In 2020, the police department received a tip from Iurato and other Blairstown Museum volunteers who found odd items in a box left behind at the grave, which were passed as well to the prosecutor's office for an investigation, Johnsen said.

"It's a high profile case and strange things can happen with it," Johnsen added. "We do follow every lead because you never know."

"Everybody wants to help," Johnsen said.

The Warren County Prosecutor's Office did not return a call from Patch on Tuesday, requesting comments about the case.

The Early Investigation

The heart of Eric Kranz, who was a police lieutenant with the Blairstown Police Department and the first lead investigator on the case, has continued to ache about this case well into his retirement. As a father himself, his first investigation goal was to connect Princess Doe to someone who may have been missing her, with the next, to solve her murder.

In his retirement, Kranz has since joined other experts to discuss Princess Doe at programs the Blairstown Museum has hosted. In pre-pandemic times and even during the pandemic for one socially-distant remembrance event in 2020, museum volunteers have spent time maintaining her grave and holding annual memorial gatherings to remember her on the day she was found, July 15.

Though this year, the Blairstown Museum is not having a memorial gathering or celebration of life for Princess Doe, Iurato said museum volunteers will gather on Thursday to clean the grave site and plant flowers in her honor.

Kranz and retired lieutenant Stephen Speirs of the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office have been a part of the museum’s programs, along with book author Christie Leigh Napurano, who penned “The Untold Story of Princess Doe.” Napurano grew up in Blairstown and took an interest in the case.

“Princess Doe, missing from home, dead among strangers, remembered by all,” was how her stone was etched, her birthdate followed with a question mark and the date her body found, after the dash.

Early on after Doe was found, Kranz took a step even unusual 39 years later, and placed the girl’s tattered clothes - a reddish v-neck top and bohemian-printed skirt with peacocks - onto a mannequin. At the time the petite woman of slightly over five feet in height and 110 pounds was found, a gold cross necklace with a flower at its center was tangled in her brown hair, which Kranz also latched onto the mannequin’s neck.

He invited members of the press to the Blairstown Police Department to take some pictures, in hopes that someone would step forward and claim this princess.

One mother, Irene Benward, was missing her daughter and went to the police station, troubled by the clothes and the cross, a necklace similar to one her daughter had owned. Benward’s daughter, however, resurfaced several weeks later in Florida, according to a news segment.

“I got tired of writing the name ‘Jane Doe,’ there are a million Jane Does,” Kranz told a documentary team in a segment while the case was still a “warm” one. “I just wanted to give her some personality, some identity.”

“That’s why I named her Princess Doe,” he said. “She was probably somebody’s princess along the way.”

Kranz continued to invite the press for conferences, having artists sketch composites, which over time and with technology, have been updated since Doe turned up on that July day.

After the drawing was broadcast on news channels, Bill Gahres contacted Kranz about his missing daughter Sally, after his niece had seen Doe’s rendering. Unfortunately, after sending on his daughter’s fingerprints and blood type to the police department, she too wasn’t a match.

The Blairstown Police Department waited until the following year after she was found, before laying Princess Doe to rest. Neither Kranz nor the department’s then-chief, Norman Bedell, wanted to bury Doe, without hopes in finding her family first.

Bedell, visibly moved on the vintage news segment from the pain after losing his own son, said, “We [his family] gave him a decent burial and I’d like to give this girl one too.”

It was on Jan. 22, 1983 that a hearse slowly drove through the snow-covered Cedar Ridge Cemetery, carrying a grey-toned casket covered with a generous floral arrangement. Kranz was one of Doe’s pallbearers.

“Dear God our heavenly Father, we gather here before you this afternoon to commit to your care a girl whose birth, life and death remain a mystery to all of us, though they are well known to you,” the pastor who conducted her services said, while 30 residents stood in the cemetery to grieve the young woman known only to them - but they felt belonging to them - because of her tragic ending in their hometown.

“She has no family that came forward,” one woman told the news crew filming Doe’s burial in 1983. “There’s not a clue about where she’s from or who raised her.”

“Someone loved her, so we love her now,” the woman concluded.

Tips, Leads And Current Investigation

Though there have been developments in Princess Doe's case along the way and investigators aren't giving up hope, Johnsen said on Wednesday "there's unfortunately no new information."

Princess Doe was the first case for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and now rests on the group’s website, until someone claims her.

"We continue to urge the public to contact the Warren County Prosecutor's Office and request that additional resources be applied to this cold case," Iurato said.

Iurato has also pursued leads on her own, having made Open Public Records Act requests to the state on the case. She's followed up with investigators, reporters and others in missing persons cases, where girls reported missing were wearing cross necklaces.

In 2020, she also found in an online auction the identical skirt that Doe was found in. Though in the past programs with the Blairstown Museum Speirs said the skirt had been traced to a store in Long Island, the one Iurato purchased, which the seller had sold a number of them in the 1980s, was for sale at a flea market in the Poconos, not far from Blairstown.

It's from there that Iurato hopes perhaps Doe purchased it or it's where someone bought it for her.

At one of the museum's past memorial events, actress and director Kansas Bowling, who Iurato said has taken an interest in Doe's case and attended, told Iurato that she and director Quentin Tarantino offered to financially help with DNA testing. Obtaining usable DNA from Doe, as well as with the processes as they are now, has remained a difficulty.

"Hopefully someday, we find someone, somewhere looking for her; and we find the answers," Johnsen said.

Have a tip about Princess Doe? Contact 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST) or the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office at 908-475-6275 or by email here.

Questions or comments about this story? Have a news tip? Contact me at jennifer.miller@patch.com.