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1970 cold case victim identified

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By Staff Writer Updated 7:35 AM Thursday, July 16, 2009

GREENVILLE — Darke County’s only unidentified homicide victim has been identified nearly 39 years after her death, the sheriff’s office said Wednesday, July 15.

Jeanne Marie Melville, 18, of Green Bay, Wis., had been traveling by bus to visit the family of her aunt, Phyllis Nichols, in Darke County. Melville never showed up at the bus station in Richmond, Ind.

Melville’s nude body was found Oct. 11, 1970, in a cornfield along Frazers Road in southern Darke County.

Sheriff’s investigators reopened the cold case in 2006 after receiving a $10,000 state grant for cold-case investigations.

In October 2008, they publicized the case after exhuming Melville’s body to retrieve DNA. Nichols saw the photo of the facial reconstruction in a local newspaper and believed it resembled her missing niece. She contacted the sheriff’s office.

The Green Bay Police cooperated in the investigation, and Melville’s DNA was analyzed and compared with her only living sibling and two aunts.

The sheriff’s office is now trying to solve Melville’s death.

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