Detective attempts try to ID Jane Doe
Trucker admitted strangling 'Jane Doe'
By Mark Gomez, MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Launched: 06/28/2007 03:32:44 AM PDT
Detective Ronald Breuss keeps the sketch above his desk, an artist's rendering of a woman whose identity has remained a mystery for 14 years. Most likely a truck stop prostitute, her lifeless body was found in 1993 near Pacheco Pass on Highway 152, dumped there by convicted serial murderer Keith Hunter Jesperson.
Breuss, a cold case homicide investigator for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, likes to think the woman had a family, that someone once loved her and wonders what happened to her. So this summer Breuss will pack his car with copies of the sketch and hit the road. He will spend his own time and money in one last effort to put a name to the face.
If he strikes out, Breuss will close the case and put her file in an archive where "realistically no one will ever look at her again."
That's why her name matters so much to Breuss.
"She was a human being. She had a history ... and nobody could care less about that woman," said Breuss, a 26-year veteran in the sheriff's office.
He plans to drive I-5 posting her sketch with a plea for information along the way. "I care. She's entitled to somebody standing up for her. And in a lot of cases, the cold case officer is the last guy to stand up for somebody."
Even if that person was perhaps a down-on-her-luck prostitute, estranged from her family and addicted to drugs or alcohol. She wasn't from around here, just dumped in a remote part of the county. Breuss has theorized all of those scenarios.
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