Human remains found in Tennessee nearly two decades ago have been identified through DNA and genealogy as a former Connecticut woman.
The remains, found by police in a remote wooded area in Tennessee in 2007, have been identified as belonging to 40-year-old Mary Alice Maloney, according to the DNA Doe Project — a nonprofit organization that provides law enforcement with genetic genealogy services.
Maloney, a Hartford native, was living in the Nashville area prior to her disappearance. Her remains went unidentified for 18 years after they were found in La Vergne, Tennessee, on Nov. 14, 2007, the DNA Doe Project said in a statement.
According to the DNA Doe Project, investigators found some jewelry with the remains but no clothing. The body was initially only identified as belonging to a Black or multiracial woman who was between 25 and 49 years old. Authorities estimated that she died in the spring or summer of 2007.
After exhausting all leads, the La Vergne Police Department contacted the DNA Doe Project.
“The lab work needed to generate a DNA profile for La Vergne Jane Doe was complicated by the degradation of her DNA, but eventually a profile was created and uploaded to GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA.com,” according to the DNA Doe Project.
When the DNA results came through, “it was clear that all of the unidentified woman’s matches were very distantly related to her,” the DNA Doe Project wrote.
“Our work is often complicated by the lack of people who have uploaded their DNA profiles to the public databases we can use for our cases,” the project’s team leader, Jenny Lecus, said in a statement.
In April 2021, a new DNA match appeared in the GEDmatch database which shared “nearly 2% of her DNA” with the remains found in La Vergne, the nonprofit said. The match was found to be a distant cousin who was a “substantially closer match to the unidentified woman than anyone else in the databases.”
The team working for DNA Doe Project “immediately began building out her family tree” and were led to Maloney, the nonprofit said.
“This information was passed on to the La Vergne Police Department and they later confirmed that the woman formerly known as La Vergne Jane Doe was in fact Mary Alice Maloney,” according to the nonprofit.