The 1991 Jane Doe That Took 35 Years to IDENTIFY

The 1991 Jane Doe That Took 35 Years to IDENTIFY

On the morning of June 5th, 1991, a security guard at a Super 8 Motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, used a screwdriver to pop the lock on room 233. The guest hadn’t checked out. He found a woman dead in the bathroom and a Polaroid photograph on the table of her sitting next to a man. There was no ID in the room.

 Her fingerprints matched nothing. Nobody reported her missing. She was buried under a case number instead of a name. For 35 years, the only image of her alive was that Polaroid, and nobody could say who the girl in the picture was. Two nights earlier, on June 3rd, a man had walked into the Super 8 front desk on University Boulevard between 9:30 and 11:00 at night and rented room 233 for two people.

 He signed the register as Eduardo Colon and gave a license plate number. So, everything on the slip was real except the plate. It didn’t match any registered vehicle. He paid in cash. The room was booked for one night. Check out was 11:00 a.m. the next morning, June 4th. Nobody checked out on June 4th. The room stayed occupied.

 On June 5th, when the room was still locked and the guests hadn’t appeared, the motel sent a security guard to check. When he got in, the room looked mostly normal. There was nothing obviously wrong at first glance. Beer bottles sat on the table alongside a blue suede purse and a suitcase of women’s clothing.

 $500 in cash lay in loose bills on the surface. The Polaroid was there, too. He walked into the bathroom and found the woman. She was hanging from the shower head by a strap from the suitcase. She had heroin in her system. Though the medical examiner noted it wasn’t at a level high enough to cause an overdose, there were healing scrapes on her face and leg that looked like they’d happened days earlier, before she came to Albuquerque.

There was no sign of a struggle anywhere in the room. Nothing was broken. Nothing was knocked over. The Bernalillo County Medical Examiner ruled her death a suicide. Eduardo Colin was gone. He wasn’t in the room when the guard opened it, and there was no record of when he left or how he got out. The door had been locked from inside with the chain on, which meant someone had to have been the last person out and engaged the chain behind them.

Or the chain had been on before Colin left, and there was another way out of the room. Shed investigators checked the windows and found one that could be opened from inside. That question, how Colin left a room that was chained from the inside, has never been fully answered. His name on the register was real, but finding him would take investigators years.

The bigger problem for detectives wasn’t the circumstances of her death. It was that nobody could figure out who she was. She had no identification anywhere in the room, no driver’s license, no wallet, no ID card of any kind. The name Eduardo Colin on the register didn’t help because she wasn’t Eduardo Colin.

The $500 in cash had no markings, no envelope, nothing to trace back to a bank or a person. The Polaroid showed her face clearly, but nobody who saw it could put a name to it. She was a complete unknown in a city where nobody was looking for her. Shed the Albuquerque Police Department ran her fingerprints through every system they could get access to.

The FBI’s national fingerprint database, state criminal records, missing persons files, even Canadian law enforcement databases in case she was from across the border. Nothing came back. Not in 1991 and not in any of the years that followed as the databases expanded. They ran her prints again every few years as the systems grew.

In 1991, the FBI’s system held about 65 million records. By 2020, it was over 140 million. Her prints never matched any of them because she’d never been in any of those systems while she was alive. She’d never been arrested, never been fingerprinted for a job or a background check. She’d never served in the military or applied for a government clearance.

 At 18, so she hadn’t touched a single system that collects prints. The databases kept getting bigger and her prints kept coming back empty. Most people end up in a fingerprint database by their 20s. A job at a bank, a daycare, a hospital, a school, anything with a background check runs prints. A single arrest or enlistment form would have put her there.

She’d gone 18 years without ever sitting down and rolling her fingers across an ink pad. That one fact is the reason nobody could identify her for 35 years. If she’d been fingerprinted even once while she was alive, detectives would have had her name within hours of finding her body. Composite drawings of her face went to police departments across the Southwest.

A PD worked with the Doe Network and a volunteer group that tries to match unidentified remains to missing persons cases through online databases and public outreach. Different detectives took over the case as the years went by. One detective in the late 1990s reopened it and ran her prints through newly expanded systems.

 Another one in 2008 submitted updated descriptions to NamUs, the national database for unidentified people. In 2009, a DNA sample from the evidence was submitted to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. No match came back. CODIS only works if a relative or the person themselves has been through the criminal justice system.

 Nobody in her family had been. She stayed anonymous. Detectives estimated her age at 25 to 35 based on how she looked. They were off by almost a decade. She was 18. Yeah, and a civilian investigator named Gerald Roach eventually took over the case and wouldn’t let it go. Roach wasn’t a sworn officer.

 He was a civilian employee of the department who worked cold cases. “I wanted to give her her name back.” he said later. He ran her information through every updated system he could find, checked it against new missing persons reports as they came in from around the country, compared photographs, and cleared possible matches one by one. He ran fingerprint comparisons, DNA comparisons, photo comparisons.

 He worked the case for years. Nothing stuck. Nobody anywhere in the country was looking for this girl. No family member, no friend, no school, no employer had ever contacted any law enforcement agency to say she was missing. She existed in government records. She had a birth certificate and a social security number.

But nobody had ever asked any system to look for her. The Polaroid from the motel room showed the woman sitting next to a man. They looked relaxed together, like people who knew each other. It was the only picture of her alive. Investigators circulated it for years, showed it to people across the Southwest, posted it online, and ran it through every channel they had.

Nobody could identify either person in the photograph. In March 2021, 30 years after she died, the man in the photograph came forward anonymously. He told investigators he dated the woman for a few weeks in Los Angeles. They’d taken the Polaroid together during that time. He said her name was Becca, and she was possibly from Reseda or Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley, neighborhoods in the north end of Los Angeles.

 They’d split up, but stayed friends. He said his brother-in-law, a car mechanic in Albuquerque named Eduardo Callen, had developed feelings for her after hearing about her. The ex-boyfriend was fine with it. He said he’d driven her to Los Angeles International Airport himself, so she could fly to New Mexico to meet Eduardo in person for the first time.

She’d never been to Albuquerque before. She didn’t know anyone else in the city besides Eduardo. That was the last time anyone who knew her saw her. She flew to Albuquerque, checked into the Super 8 with Eduardo Callen on the night of June 3rd, and 2 days later the security guard found her in room 233. She’d traveled more than 800 miles to meet a man she’d never seen face-to-face, and she was dead within 48 hours of landing.

Police had tracked Callen down years earlier through the motel register and records in the Albuquerque area, but by the time they found him, he’d already died of natural causes. He’d been a car mechanic who lived in Albuquerque. His family was shown the Polaroid, but couldn’t add much to what investigators already knew.

They recognized Callen, but had nothing to offer about the woman in the picture. Whatever happened in that motel room between June 3rd and June 5th, Callen was the only person who could have explained it, and he took it with him. The 2021 tip gave investigators a first name and a general area in Southern California.

It was the first real lead in 30 years, and it’s where the nickname Becca Doe came from. Detectives and online communities had been calling her Albuquerque Jane Doe or Super 8 Jane Doe for decades. Um now she had a first name, but a first name and a neighborhood in LA wasn’t enough to identify someone who’d been dead for 3 decades.

Detectives needed DNA, and not the kind that goes into CODIS, which had already come back empty. They needed the kind that searches through consumer ancestry databases, where regular people send in their spit to learn about their family history. In December 2025, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator reached out to Ramapo College in New Jersey.

Ramapo had opened a genetic genealogy center in 2022, the first academic program in the country dedicated to solving cold cases using DNA and family tree research. Students and professionals worked side-by-side on real investigations submitted by police departments from across the country. By 2026, they’d solved 28 cases across the country and had dozens more in progress.

They took on Becca Doe for free. The way genetic genealogy works is completely different from CODIS. CODIS only finds people who’ve been through the criminal justice system, people who’ve been arrested or convicted. If the person you’re looking for was never in the system, CODIS can’t help you.

 And that was exactly the problem with Becca’s case. Genetic genealogy gets around that. It finds people through their relatives instead. If even a distant cousin, a third cousin, a fourth cousin, someone you’ve never met and probably don’t know exists, sent their DNA to a consumer service like 23 and Me or Ancestry DNA, the system can pick up the connection through shared genetic markers.

From there, researchers build the family tree outward, tracing parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents through birth records, marriage certificates, and census data until they narrow it down to one person or one family. It’s slow, careful work that can take weeks or months. The goal is finding one person at the end of a family tree that might have hundreds of branches going back generations.

In identification cases like Becca’s, the process works in reverse. Instead of tracing a suspect, they’re tracing a victim, building a tree that leads to a name and a family who lost someone. The lab pulled DNA from the evidence that had been stored since 1991. Getting usable DNA from a 35-year-old sample isn’t guaranteed.

Heat, humidity, and bacteria can destroy genetic material over that kind of time. But the evidence in this case had been stored properly by the office of the medical investigator the whole time. And that was the only reason this worked. The lab built a genetic profile and uploaded it to a law enforcement version of the genealogy platform GEDmatch.

Matches came back almost right away. Distant cousins showed up in the database. These were people who’d sent in their own DNA to learn about their family history and had no idea they were connected to a woman who’d been dead in a New Mexico motel room for 35 years. The system flagged them because they shared enough DNA to be related.

The Ramapo team traced the family tree through birth records, marriage certificates, and census data in multiple states. They worked backward through the cousins, parents, and grandparents until they found common ancestors, then traced forward through every branch of those ancestors’ descendants until they found someone who matched the age, geography, and available records of their unknown person.

It’s the same kind of genealogy work people do for family history projects. Except the target is someone whose name you don’t know. Within weeks, they narrowed the search to a family in Ventura County, California, about 60 mi northwest of Los Angeles. The tree pointed to two living relatives, a stepfather and a half-brother, both still in the Ventura area.

These were the last people who’d seen her alive. A sergeant from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office drove to the half-brother’s house in February 2026. The man hadn’t seen his sister in 35 years. She’d left and never come back. And nobody in the family had called the police about it in any state. Now a detective was at his door telling him she’d been dead the whole time in a motel room in Albuquerque filed under a case number for 35 years.

He’d been alive the entire 35 years she was unknown. He lived in California. She’d lived in California. They were in the same state the whole time she was growing up. He’d gone on with his life while she was filed away in a medical examiner’s office in a state she’d barely set foot in. He gave a cheek swab at his kitchen table.

The DNA was shipped to the lab for confirmation. Half-siblings share roughly 25% of their genetic code and the test came back a match with 100% confidence. The woman in room 233 was his half-sister. The stepfather was contacted separately. Yet he told investigators the last time he saw her was in early 1991 when she left the Los Angeles area.

She’d said she was heading east. He didn’t know where she was going, didn’t know who she was going to see, and he never heard from her again. He didn’t file a missing person’s report. In a family spread across states with step-parents and half-siblings in different places, people sometimes drifted apart and lost touch.

It happened. He learned she was dead more than 34 years after it happened. By then he’d spent decades not knowing where she was or or she was alive. Her name was Rebecca Malakooti. Born March 4th, 1973 in Tacoma, Washington. She’d bounced around as a kid. By her late teens, she was in the LA area, often living with relatives in Ventura County, working odd jobs when she could get them.

She was 18 years old, living the kind of life that doesn’t leave a lot of records behind. On March 5th, 2026, the Albuquerque Police Department and the Ramapo Genetic Genealogy Center announced together that Becca Doe had been identified as Rebecca Malakoot. The announcement came one day after what would have been her 53rd birthday.

They scheduled it that way on purpose. It was the first time her real name had ever been spoken publicly in connection with the case. Gerald Roach, John the civilian investigator who’d spent years on the case, was the one who got the email with the results. He interrupted a meeting his supervisors were in to show them.

He couldn’t wait. “It just so happened to be the day before her birthday,” he said. He’d been working this case long enough that the timing meant something to him personally. He called her family in California to tell them their daughter and sister had been found. Interim Police Chief Cecily Barker called the case a testament to the department’s commitment to never giving up, no matter how much time had passed.

The Chief Medical Examiner for the state, Heather Jarrell, said the identification showed what could happen when agencies work together with new forensic technology. The Office of the Medical Investigator in New Mexico still has 77 cold cases they’re working on. ANAP D has hundreds more on their books. They hope the Malakoot case shows what’s possible when someone pushes for one more try with evidence that’s been sitting in storage.

 The Medical Examiner’s ruling from 1991 still stands. The circumstances that brought an 18-year-old from Los Angeles to a motel room in Albuquerque with heroin in her system and $500 in cash are still not fully understood. Eduardo Colin died before investigators could sit him down and ask what happened in room 233. The questions about those two days in the motel room, June 3rd to June 5th, 1991, will probably never be fully answered.

Rebecca Malacoti was born in Tacoma, grew up scattered across Washington and California, and flew to Albuquerque at 18. She She died in a motel room two days after she got there. Nobody in her family reported her missing in any state. She left Los Angeles, landed in Albuquerque, and disappeared into a case file in New Mexico.

Roach, the investigator who’d carried the case, said her family was happy and glad nobody completely stopped. Every family needs some closure, he said, whether it means a prosecution or at least an identification. She was 18 years old when she died in room 233 of the Super 8 Motel on University Boulevard in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

For 35 years, nobody knew it was her. If you enjoyed this case, go check out the other solved cases in the playlist.