On Thursday, a DNA match revealed the identity of a teen’s body that was found by hikers in 1994.
Kori Joanne Lamaster, aka Kori Joann Bowman who was 17-years-old when she went missing from Pacifica, Calif. in 1993 has been identified as the body that was found in Pogonip Park by hikers on Jan. 29, 1994.
When she was found, there was no missing persons report and the Santa Cruz police did not know who the teen was. They did know that she had a heart tattooed on her left hand and she had been bludgeoned to death with probably a steel pipe that crushed her skull. Also, police believed she had been trying to runaway from someone before she died.
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The case remained an open homicide case for almost twenty years. Over the years Kori was nicknamed Pogonip Jane and the police tried to identify her. In 2010, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported on the case in hopes to find out who she was.
A petite white girl in her late teens, Pogonip Jane had cut her brown hair to a 3-inch chop and painted her fingernails pink. She had a tiny heart tattooed between her left thumb and index finger.
Jane probably had braces as a kid and had a few cavities, which a dentist filled with porcelain, a forensic anthropologist determined.
In the last six months of her life, she traveled the Central Coast between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, according to isotopic hair analysis done at the University of Texas.
It wasn’t until DNA submitted in 2008 led to the match of a family member of Kori’s in October 2013 by the California Department of Justice laboratory, that she was identified.
Added to the delay of Kori’s identity may also have been the lack of a missing person report filed by the family. For unknown reasons they did not inform the police she had been missing until 2007.
Wayne White, a Tennessee resident and his son Greg, who has passed, have been persons of interest in this case, Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark told CBS news. They were seen traveling with Kori around the time of her death.
The police want to find who murdered Kori and are asking the public to come forward if they remember seeing Kori around Santa Cruz in 1993.
