Jane Doe and Her Killer Both Identified Within a Year

Stacey Lyn Chahorski can at last be brought home and her case put to rest.

Verity Partington
3 min readSep 7, 2022

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Stacey Lyn Chahorski, murdered in 1988 (Image: GBI)

Hot on the heels of announcing the identity of a Jane Doe in a cold murder case, investigators in Michigan have now revealed they also know who it was that took her life.

Stacey Lyn Chahorski was just 19 when she telephoned her mother in September 1988 to say she was returning home from North Carolina and planned to hitch her way back to Michigan. She was never heard from again and was officially reported missing in January 1989.

Meanwhile, two Department of Transportation employees in Georgia had made a grisly discovery on December 16th 1988. They called the Dade County Sheriff’s Office and the GBI to report a woman’s body lying on the northbound lane of I-59, around five miles from the state line with Alabama.

She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, with police deducing she was probably a hitchhiker and possibly a runaway. Unfortunately, there was no identification with the body and so the victim’s name remained a mystery.

There was never any link made between the two cases and over the years both slowly went cold. Although DNA profiles were established from the Georgia crime scene for both the victim and an unknown subject, there had been no matches in any nationwide databases any time case reviews were carried out.

However, with the advent of genetic genealogy came a fresh chance to review the evidence — and in March 2022, it was announced that the analysis of the body had been successful.

Jane Doe was finally revealed to be Stacey Lyn Chahorski, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced at a news conference.

With her identity established, investigators knew they also had a chance at using the DNA technology to reveal who her murderer was.

“Today marks the day where we hunt for the killer now. I think we have a good probability of solving this case and bringing the killer to justice,” GBI Special Agent in Charge Joe Montgomery said at the time.

However, no one could have predicted just how quickly resolution was achieved. This week, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the…

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Verity Partington

A writer and author of crime thrillers living in the UK. Partial to books, stationery, papercrafts and walking. You can find her books on Amazon here: https://a