USA TODAY National
In the vast and lonely Arizona desert about 50 miles south of Las Vegas, tourists who took a wrong turn stumbled across a woman's naked and bloodied body on Dec. 12, 1989.
Two days later and nearly 400 miles to the west, good Samaritans found two baby girls crying on the dirty floor of a park restroom in the working-class coastal California city of Oxnard.
At the time, detectives in each jurisdiction had no idea the cases were connected. Arizona investigators couldn't figure out who Jane Doe was, and California authorities had no idea who the babies were.
Each case remained a mystery for decades. Until this year.
Not only was a cold case detective in Arizona able to identify Jane Doe as a 28-year-old California woman named Marina Ramos, she later made the shocking discovery that the baby girls left on the bathroom floor were Ramos' daughters. With the help of familial DNA and dogged determination, the detective recently tracked down the girls in what she calls "a miracle."
As the girls, now in their 30s, grapple with the news of who their mother was and the fact that she was murdered, the hunt is on for her killer.
A cold case reopened
It was 2019 and Detective Lori Miller had just joined the Mohave County Sheriff's Office in northwestern Arizona to work on a newly formed cold case unit.
One of the first cases Miller took on was the body of a Jane Doe found in the desert on Dec. 12, 1989. The woman's throat had been slit, semen was found on her nude body and it was clear she had been killed at the remote spot because of the amount of blood at the scene.
"No human being deserves to be murdered, but in such an undignified way, it's inhuman," Miller told USA TODAY.
Luckily, four women from Ohio who had stumbled across the body while searching for a ghost town found Jane Doe roughly eight hours after the murder, Miller said. That allowed detectives to collect fingerprints and the male DNA.
But the case languished for decades until Miller got her hands on it. In 2022, Miller resubmitted Jane Doe's fingerprints to the FBI. The next day, Miller got a possible identification.
The fingerprints came back as belonging to a woman named Maria Ortiz of Bakersfield, California. With the help of Bakersfield police, Miller tracked down someone listed as "a friend" of Ortiz all the way to Tennessee. Miller called her.
"She said, 'I don't know a Maria Ortiz but my cousin Marina Ramos has been missing since 1989," Miller said, adding that the woman then shared even crazier news: Ramos had two young daughters and no one in the family had seen them since 1989.
"Now, I have an unsolved homicide and a missing persons investigation," Miller said.
The search for Maria Ramos' missing babies
When Miller learned that Jane Doe was Marina Ramos and that Ramos was the mother of two baby girls, tracking down the missing daughters became her priority. None of her fellow detectives thought there was much hope they'd be alive.
"People told me to give up, 'You're never going to find them,'" Miller recalled. "But this was my white whale. I never stopped working on it."
Armed with Marina Ramos' identity, Miller was able to track down a sister and a daughter. The daughter was five years older than Ramos' missing daughters and had been raised by her grandmother.
Miller was able to get the daughter's DNA tested. After multiple rounds of testing with different companies over many weeks, the DNA finally turned up a big hit: a half-sister who turned out to be one of the missing babies.
"My heart stopped," Miller said. "I thought, 'Holy cow.'"
Missing daughters were given new names, adopted
After the familial DNA came through for Miller, she called each sister and told them the news: that their mother was a woman named Marina Ramos who was murdered in the desert.
It was a bombshell for the sisters.
When they were found on the bathroom floor in 1989, police had reached out to the local news media to spread the word in hopes of identifying family members. No one ever came forward, and a local family adopted the sisters together, naming them Tina and Melissa and giving them a loving home.
When the girls were teenagers, their parents told them that they had been abandoned and adopted. They assumed their biological mother didn't want them and was the one who abandoned them.
"I told them, 'No,' she had been a victim of a homicide two days prior," Miller said. "That helped give them some comfort."
Miller also informed them of their birth names: Jasmin and Elizabeth Ramos.
That happened at the end of August, roughly three years after Miller first identified Marina Ramos and started the hunt for the girls. Now the girls are planning on a reunion with their long-lost biological family members, including their aunt Margarita, Marina's sister.
Miller recalled Margarita's reaction to learning her nieces were alive and well after 36 years of wondering.
"She's like, 'OK, this is a miracle. We found the girls. Now who killed my sister,' " Miller said. "She said: 'What animals could have done that to her?"
Murder investigation has few leads, many hurdles, one determined detective
Miller faces an uphill battle with the investigation into Marina Ramos' murder.
She said very little evidence was collected from the scene, and no murder weapon was found. There was not enough semen on Ramos to conduct a search using forensic genetic genealogy. The semen is in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), but there have been no hits on any suspects so far.
The last person to see Marina Ramos alive was the cousin Miller tracked down in Tennessee, but she died of cancer last year.
She told Miller that the last time she saw her cousin, Ramos had just gotten out of a Bakersfield jail on a shoplifting charge and showed up with a man named Fernando to pick up her daughters and move to the Los Angeles suburb of Ontario "for a better life."
There is also one lead from the scene of the bathroom where the girls were abandoned.
Witnesses reported seeing two Hispanic men and a Hispanic woman getting out of a black mini pickup truck with the girls and later seeing them leave without the girls. The woman was further described as being about 5 feet tall and wearing a red skirt and white boots. (This was after Ramos was murdered, so she couldn't have been the woman.)
"I know it's a long shot but if anybody is still around, still alive, recalls Colonia Park in Oxnard, this woman in a red skirt and white boots − that might help me continue to follow up on leads," Miller said.
Anybody with information that could help solve the case can call the Mohave County Sheriff's Office at 928-753-0753, extension 4408.
"I've gotten the girls, but now I need justice for Marina," Miller said. "I need to find out who did this horrible thing to her."
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers executions for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'My heart stopped': Missing baby girls found 36 years after mom's body dumped in desert
Reporting by Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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