VA VA - Kelly Bergh Dove, 20, Harrisonburg, 18 June 1982

Richard

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Kelly Bergh Dove, 20, Missing since June 18, 1982 from Harrisonburg, VA

Kelly Bergh Dove
Missing since June 18, 1982 from Harrisonburg, Virginia
Classification: Endangered Missing

Vital Statistics

Age at Time of Disappearance: 20 years old
Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Brown hair.
Dentals: Available

Circumstances of Disappearance

Kelly Bergh Dove worked at the Imperial gas station on South Main Street in Harrisonburg. The married mother of a 4-year-old daughter, Dove had finished high school a year early and was registered to attend Blue Ridge Community College in September.

Dove's three sisters all worked at the Imperial station, then the lone building on an isolated stretch of road about a mile south of the James Madison University campus.

On Thursday night, June 17, Dove agreed to trade with one of her sisters and work the overnight shift.

After midnight on June 18, Dove called Harrisonburg police to report that a man driving a silver Ford had been harassing her.

In a second call, she reported the man had come in and had been "dressed improperly." She'd received a threatening phone call, and when she called police a third time, just before 02:30, she sounded panicked. "Please hurry," she said. "He's back."

Police arrived at the station just two minutes after Dove's third call, but they found only her purse and a magazine she'd been reading undisturbed on the counter. Dove was gone. Dove was legally declared dead in 1989 after seven years had passed with no sign of life.

Her body has never been found, and no one has ever been charged in her disappearance.

Investigators considered several people as potential suspects but could never solve the disappearance.

Investigators

If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:

Harrisonburg Police Department
540-434-4436

Source Information:

The Hook
Rock Town Weekly
The Doe Network: Case File 2413DFVA

LINK:

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/2413dfva.html
 
http://www.readthehook.com/86065/cover-glenn-barker-serial-killer-or-convenient-scapegoat

Her story begins in the 5th segment, about half way down.

Police called sometime after 3am and told her she needed to come to the station. Bergh says she didn't learn Kelly was missing until she arrived, and she was bothered by the way police seemed to be handling the scene. They never closed the store, she says, never took fingerprints. She also doubts that they had arrived as soon after Kelly's call as they claimed.
 
Bumping this up for Kelly. Next month it will be 30 years since she disappeared. There is very little info on the web about her. No physical description anywhere to try to match her with a Jane Doe. I will be near the area where this happened in a few weeks and would like to get more info. Would it be best to start w/the local police or at the local newspaper?
 
Here is an excerpt from a long article in "The Hook" about an alleged serial killer named Glenn Barker. Mentioned as one of his possible victims is Kelly Bergh Dove. As mentioned in the article, there were several abduction/murders which occurred in a very close time frame.

-------------------------------
Glenn Barker: Serial killer or convenient scapegoat?

By COURTENEY STUART
Published online Jul 19th, 2007

... JUNE 18, 1982 HARRISONBURG

For Kelly Bergh Dove, her job at the Imperial gas station on South Main Street in Harrisonburg was a temporary stop on a way to a better life.

At 20, Dove was the married mother of a four-year-old daughter. She had finished high school a year early and was registered to attend Blue Ridge Community College in September. Dove's three sisters all worked at the Imperial station, then the lone building on an isolated stretch of road about a mile south of the James Madison University campus.

On Thursday night, June 17, Dove agreed to trade with one of her sisters and work the overnight shift.

After midnight on June 18, Dove called Harrisonburg police to report that a man driving a silver Ford had been harassing her. She explained she was working alone and implored, "Could you keep an eye on me?"

In a second call, she reported the man had come in and had been "dressed improperly." She'd received a threatening phone call, and when she called police a third time, just before 2:30am, she sounded panicked. "Please hurry," she said. "He's back."

According to published accounts, police arrived at the station just two minutes after Dove's third call, but they found only her purse and a magazine she'd been reading undisturbed on the counter. Dove was gone.

Like Katie Worsky's parents, Fred and Rachel Bergh have lived for the past 25 years with the agony of not knowing what happened to their child.

Reached in Niceville, Florida, where the couple now live after raising Dove's daughter, her mother, Rachel Bergh, says details of that night are etched in her mind.

Police called sometime after 3am and told her she needed to come to the station. Bergh says she didn't learn Kelly was missing until she arrived, and she was bothered by the way police seemed to be handling the scene. They never closed the store, she says, never took fingerprints. She also doubts that they had arrived as soon after Kelly's call as they claimed.

Harrisonburg police did not return the Hook's repeated calls.

Could Glenn Barker have been responsible for Kelly Dove's disappearance more than 70 miles from Charlottesville? In the months that followed, news reports claimed that Barker– who sometimes drove a Ford– had been seen painting his car in the days after Kelly disappeared. Barker maintains that police ruled him out as a suspect in Dove's disappearance because he'd been at a family reunion where several relatives verified his presence.

And the Berghs say they believe someone else was responsible, a man Kelly had known in school.

"He had a silver Ford," says Kelly's sister, Elaine Bergh, declining to name the suspect. "He'd been in trouble before with indecent exposure and phone calls," she says, "but there was nothing concrete they could prove.

"Still, the Berghs say they wonder about Barker. One of Kelly Dove's friends traveled to Charlottesville every day of Barker's 1983 trial. "She wanted to make sure it wasn't him," says Elaine Bergh, who named her own daughter Kelly after her missing sister and remains close to Kelly's daughter, Tami, now 29 and a mother herself.

Rachel Bergh remembers Kelly, the middle of her five children, as a "very strong person, a loving mother, and very independent." The pain of the loss and the continuing mystery remains close to the surface.

"Today is my birthday," Kelly's mother says during a recent interview, beginning to weep. "We get by. You just always wonder how much pain she went though or what happened to her."

JUNE 19, 1982, Charlottesville

The night after Kelly Dove disappeared in Harrisonburg and just three weeks before Katie Worsky disappeared from McElroy Drive in Charlottesville, another young woman was finishing her evening shift at a Charlottesville restaurant. A petite strawberry blond, Paula Jean Chandler was 18 years old and a new graduate of Albemarle High School working for the summer at El Cabrito's Mexican restaurant across Hydraulic Road from her alma mater.

After work that night, Chandler asked a co-worker if she could go with him to his apartment to watch television. Two days later, a fisherman hooked her body near the dam at the Rivanna Reservoir.Although headlines about the case would soon be eclipsed by Katie Worsky's disappearance, Chandler's murder ignited a firestorm. Chandler had water in her lungs, suggesting drowning, but she also suffered more ominous injuries: two head wounds from blunt trauma. The front page of the June 21, 1982 Daily Progress featured a large photograph of a sheriff's deputy pulling on the arm of Chandler's corpse, still partially submerged....

LINK:

http://www.readthehook.com/86065/cover-glenn-barker-serial-killer-or-convenient-scapegoat
 
Thanks for posting the article from The Hook, Richard. I have read that article, as it is one of very few on the web about Kelly.

Do you have any suggestions for beginning my search? I'll have a limited time in that area and want to make the best of it. The local newspaper does not have web access to their archives unless you're a subscriber, which I am not. My quandry is deciding which place would be most beneficial - the newspaper or the local police.

I didn't know Kelly, but have been haunted by her disappearance for almost 30 years. I just want to try to give her family some closure. Seems like no one else is bothered. How sad.
 
Bumping this up for Kelly. Next month it will be 30 years since she disappeared. There is very little info on the web about her. No physical description anywhere to try to match her with a Jane Doe. I will be near the area where this happened in a few weeks and would like to get more info. Would it be best to start w/the local police or at the local newspaper?

Good luck with the police. I called a month or two ago to try to find out what her height and weight were, as they are not given on her profile. They were not helpful at all. The detective that I spoke with seemed ticked that I would call and bother him about the case. :banghead: He never gave me the information, nor has her profile been updated. If you could find out that information, that would be awesome.
 
I think that's the case with any inquiry about this case. I think I remember hearing that a policeman was "reassigned" after Kelly's abduction. I don't know that for sure - just street talk. I'll keep you posted...I'm really hoping we can help this family.
 
Most newspapers today require that folks become subscribers and pay to view past articles. And sometimes not all articles remain available.

The best way that I have found to research old cases is to go to the Microfilm files. There are certain libraries which have extensive microfilm collections and good reader/printer machines.

Larger newspapers have old printed indexes which will help you target specific articles. In more recent years, you can do computer scans on-line to locate dates and page numbers, and then look them up on microfilm.
 
Bumping for Kelly - today is the 30th anniversary of her disappearance.

At the time of her disappearance, Kelly was 5'1" tall and weighed 105 pounds. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She had a partial upper plate to replace her two front teeth that had been knocked out accidently years prior. She was probably wearing jeans. She always wore her gold and diamond wedding band on her left hand and her high school class ring from Turner Ashby High School, class of 1978, with the initials KJB engraved.

Thirty years with no answers of any kind.
 
Bumping for Kelly - today is the 30th anniversary of her disappearance.

At the time of her disappearance, Kelly was 5'1" tall and weighed 105 pounds. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She had a partial upper plate to replace her two front teeth that had been knocked out accidently years prior. She was probably wearing jeans. She always wore her gold and diamond wedding band on her left hand and her high school class ring from Turner Ashby High School, class of 1978, with the initials KJB engraved.

Thirty years with no answers of any kind.


Thank you so much for the information!! You might contact the Doe Network and see if you can get that information added to her profile.
 
I found an unidentified with two front teeth, that says cemented posts. This is about 2 hours from where she disappeared.
From this page https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7477
Adult - Pre 50
Minimum age 17 years
Maximum age 45 years
Race White
Ethnicity
Sex Female
Weight (pounds) , Cannot Estimate
Height (inches) 64, Estimated
Also the pics are similar, I think........
Maybe......
 
I found an unidentified with two front teeth, that says cemented posts. This is about 2 hours from where she disappeared.
From this page https://identifyus.org/en/cases/7477
Adult - Pre 50
Minimum age 17 years
Maximum age 45 years
Race White
Ethnicity
Sex Female
Weight (pounds) , Cannot Estimate
Height (inches) 64, Estimated
Also the pics are similar, I think........
Maybe......


I thought about that one too. This UID has her own thread.

ETA: I added Kelly's information to the UID's thread.
 
Wow! I can see a resemblance between the Jane Doe and Kelly. Is it just me?? Frederick is a fairly quick and easy trip from Harrisonburg. I think this might be a possibility. I'm going to send her physical description to the Doe Network to be added to her page. I'm wondering about her front teeth - family says partial plate, but this Jane Doe has cemented front teeth. Maybe the family has just not remembered correctly after all these years. Hoping against hope we can help this family. Thanks so much to ginestra and mamashawn!
 
Old Gray Mare, how did you get this information? Any chance you know where she got her dental work done?
 
This info was provided by a family member. Don't know where she had her dental work done, but maybe I can find out.
 
The UID found in Frederick MD----big difference in the sketches! Also her thread says she probably did not have any children. Kelly was 16 when she had her daughter - would having a child at a young age make any difference in her skeletal remains?
 

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