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Murdered Sarasota Jane Doe Identified — And Her Husband Never Reported Her Missing
Jeana Burrus has been matched to a murder victim discovered in 2007, with her husband now named as a person of interest in the crime.
An unidentified murder victim who lay in a Sarasota morgue as a Jane Doe for 16 years has finally been given back her name, authorities have announced.
The white female buried in a shallow grave in the woods was confirmed through genetic genealogy as being 39-year-old Jeana Burrus, a married mother-of-one who last had contact with her family in 2006.
However, the discovery has blown the murder investigation wide open — because Jeana’s husband James never reported her missing and told their young son she had abandoned the family. James has now been named a person of interest in the homicide inquiry.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at the two apparently unrelated cases that turned out to be one and the same.
Jane Doe is discovered
It was a 14-year-old boy who first stumbled upon the remains of a woman in the woods of Sarasota, Florida on February 6th 2007. He had seen a bone sticking out of the ground and told his mother, who recognised it as human and called the police.
Crime scene technicians painstakingly excavated the area to find a badly decomposed body lying in a three-foot hole. The female had been the victim of blunt force trauma to the head that fractured her skull and she was fully clad in a shirt, skirt and leather belt.
However, she was missing her shoes and one of her knees was bent up in the air, which led crime scene technician Maxine Miller to believe she had been murdered before being carried there to be disposed of.
Furthermore, Maxine told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune she thought the killer had known what he was doing when he chose the dump site, as its dense vegetation was effective in hiding the remains.
“This is not your normal homicide area.This is an area that someone has obviously taken great care to obfuscate the fact that there is a body here,” she added.
