Valentine Sally: one of Arizona's oldest unsolved "Jane Doe" cases. A young woman was found dead on the side of a northern Arizona highway decades ago, and to this day, nobody knows who she is.
But is law enforcement any closer to solving this case? And who last saw this girl alive?
"It was a graveyard shift. And it was in the winter," said Patty Wilkins, sitting in her quaint home in rural Seligman, Arizona. "It was two, two-thirty in the morning. She was a pretty girl. She really was. And she smiled a lot. It would be nice if somebody could find a name. It would even put me to rest."
For many, Valentine's Day means love. For Wilkins, it means loss.
"Yes. She's the only one I think about," she said. It's been that way for almost four decades.
"I wasn't there long enough, but I should have been there longer. I should've done more. What could I have done? What should I have done?" Wilkins said, with sadness in her eyes.
The story begins in early February 1982. Wilkin's family owned the Monte Carlo truck stop west of Flagstaff off I-40 in rural Ash Fork, Arizona. She worked at the restaurant on the property. During her graveyard shift, a man and a blonde girl walked in to eat. They seemed relaxed — nothing out of the ordinary. The man ordered coffee. The girl ordered water.
"The camaraderie between the two of them were like she knew him, and she was comfortable with him," Wilkins remembered. She believes the man was in his 50s.
"The only thing I really got about him was he wore a cowboy hat with a peacock feather in it," Wilkins said.
And the girl, she remembers to be 17 or 18, wearing a red and white striped sweater and jeans. She had a toothache, so Wilkins got her some aspirin. But what was unusual was for young girls to be at a truck stop with men in the middle of the night.
"She seemed very comfortable. Very comfortable with this gentleman. Because I asked her, 'Are you okay? Do you want to stay here or leave with him?' and she said 'No, I'll go with him.' like it was her father, grandfather, uncle, some relative," she said.
"The next thing I heard about was that they found a girl, on February the 14th, a mile from my restaurant," she said.
A girl's decaying body was found under a tree, in the bitter cold.
She was only dressed in a pair of jeans with broken belt loops. It looked like she had been dragged. Her sweater and bra were found on the ground nearby.
"First they showed me the pictures of the clothes. And yes, I recognized those clothes. She was wearing those clothes," Wilkins said.
"I said I know that girl. And he said can you describe who she was with? And I said yes, I can," Wilkins recalled.
Wilkins believes she saw Valentine Sally alive at the truck stop on or around February 2. Her body was found just a mile up the road on February 14. Detectives believe she was dead for about two weeks before she was found.
"When they interviewed me, he said, 'Was there anything outstanding?' And I told him about the toothache, and he said, 'What did you do?' I said we crushed up a baby aspirin, that's all I had, and we put it on that tooth. He said, 'What side was it on?' I said left side. He said, 'That's our girl. The aspirin was still there," Wilkins remembered.
The assumption was and is that girl was killed shortly after Wilkins saw her at the truck stop. People started calling the mystery girl "Valentine Sally," a name that stuck with her for days, months, and years to follow.
"When you first heard of Valentine Sally, what did you think?" asked reporter Briana Whitney.
"It was curious from the onset," said Stan Kephart. Kephart is a retired police chief and law enforcement expert. He sat down with us to take an outside look at this case from start to finish.
"How important is it to solve a Jane Doe case?" asked Whitney.
More:
True Crime Arizona: Who is Valentine Sally?
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