Secrets from the Grave
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
EPISODE 22
The Woman No One Has Ever Claimed
We don't know what she was thinking when she wrote it. We don't know if her hand was steady or shaking. We only know that whoever killed her was careful — careful enough to strip away everything that could ever identify her. Her name. Her papers. Anything that might have told the world who she was.
But he missed the scrap of paper in her pocket.
For forty-three years, that note has been the only thing she left behind. A few lines, we believe in her own hand, that no one could read and no one could explain. And for forty-three years, she has had no name at all. Police only ever called her Ellery Jane Doe.
A red carpet, then a roadside
She was beautiful. She was well-dressed — expensive European clothes, the kind that turn heads. Hours before she died, she was seen at a glamorous red carpet party in Manhattan: drinks, dinner, photographers, the bright noise of a New York night.
And then she was discarded on a remote stretch of highway in upstate New York, in the December cold.
That is the whole horror of this case, held in a single contrast. One evening she was somewhere people wanted to be photographed. The next, she was a body by the side of a road, hundreds of miles from anyone who knew her. The clothes that made her shine at that party were the same clothes she was found in.
There was something else, too. A deep tan — the kind you can't get in a New York winter. Wherever she had been living, it was somewhere warm. Florida, perhaps. Or further still. Her genetic roots trace back to the Netherlands, to Germany, possibly Belgium — but she didn't get that tan in Europe either. So here was a woman who had crossed oceans, dressed in clothes you couldn't buy in America, lying in the snow by a highway where she didn't belong.
And no one came for her.
No mother. No sister. No daughter.
This is the part that stays with you.
In forty-three years, not one person has ever come forward to claim her. No mother reporting a daughter who stopped calling. No sister wondering why the letters stopped. No child asking what happened to their mum.
Think about what that means. A woman this striking, at a party this public, photographed in a room full of people — and somehow she vanished so completely that no one in the world stood up and said, I knew her. I loved her. She was mine.
We don't believe that's because no one cared. We believe it's because the people who loved her were looking in the wrong country. If she came from Europe, or Australia, or had been living far from that frozen highway, then her family may have spent decades making desperate inquiries — to the wrong police, in the wrong place, on the wrong continent. Somewhere out there, someone may still wonder what happened to a woman who simply stopped coming home.
That's part of why we made this episode. Because the people who can finally name her may not be in upstate New York at all. They may be listening right now.
The breakthroughs
For a long time, this case sat exactly where it had always sat. A nameless woman. An unreadable note. A killer no one could place at the scene.
But since we first told her story, things have moved fast — and a lot of that is down to people who heard the podcast and came forward. This is the part that makes this episode different. The breakthroughs aren't ours alone. They're yours, too.
The receipt. A young Australian model came to us with a story that raised the hairs on the back of our necks. In the winter of 1983, in New York, a charming man approached her — a photographer, he said, who worked with a major modelling agency. He showed her photos. He knew the right names. He invited her out of the city in a few days' time to build her portfolio. She was tempted. She even rang her agent back home, who told her to do it.
She didn't go. She was, as far as we can tell, the luckiest woman in New York that week — because he didn't take her. We believe he took someone else instead.
But here's what matters. That same trip, short of money, she bought herself a coat — and she kept the receipt. For decades. And that receipt carries a date. A date that places this man in New York at the exact moment investigators had always believed he couldn't possibly have been there. The day before, he was in Florida. The case for his involvement had a hole in it. That receipt closes the hole.
Days later, Ellery Jane Doe's body was found.
The last meal. The pathologist could tell what she had eaten in her final hours: potatoes and onion. A small, almost throwaway detail — until you look at the menu served at that red carpet party in Manhattan. Beef Wellington. Potatoes and onion. It's not proof. But it's another coincidence in a case that is filling up with them, and it places her in that glittering room on the last night of her life.
The note. And then there's the scrap of paper in her pocket — the one her killer missed.
For four decades it has been one of the great unsolved riddles of American crime. A few lines no one could decipher. We now believe we've cracked it. We believe it ties back to this man's movements, his travel, his desperate scramble for money at a very particular moment in his life — right down to why the numbers on it lead to a bank in Vancouver, of all places, on the only day of the year they could possibly have worked.
And we believe the handwriting is hers. That she wrote it herself. Which is exactly why it was in her jacket — and exactly why, in stripping her of everything else, her killer never thought to take it.
Giving her back her name
There's one more thing we're chasing, and it might be the thing that finally gives her back her name.
That party was crawling with photographers. They were there for the famous faces — the big models, the big New York names of the day. But cameras don't only catch the people they're aimed at. They catch the background. The people standing just out of frame. The woman in the expensive coat, moments before she walked out into the night.
Several archives have opened their doors to us. Somewhere in those rolls of film, there may be a photograph of Ellery Jane Doe, alive, taken hours before she died — without anyone ever knowing what they'd captured. Working with the cold case team, we want to use facial recognition technology that simply didn't exist in 1983 to search those images and, at last, put a real face to the woman who has only ever been a police sketch.
A face. A name. A family told, finally, what became of the woman they lost.
And she is not the only one
Here's the part that turns this from one woman's story into something much larger.
She isn't alone.
We've uncovered evidence linking the same man to six more murdered women — and a secret life that, for twenty years, gave him the means to find young women and disappear before anyone realised they were gone. A second obsession. A way of hiding in plain sight that ran the length of America's east coast, from Florida to New York, along a highway he knew better than anyone.
For too long, when this man died, the cases died with him. Investigations were quietly shelved. Families were left with no answers and no closure, waiting forty years for someone to keep fighting.
We intend to keep fighting. And so do the detectives and journalists working alongside us at both ends of America.
Because Ellery Jane Doe had a hand that wrote a note. She had a face at a party. She had people, somewhere, who loved her.
She deserves her name back. And she's only the first.
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Help Us to Keep Investigating
Contact us here if you know something about Christopher Wilder. If you had an encounter with him, are you are a friend or a family member of someone who never made it home, we want to hear your story:
Email: info@catchingevil.com
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Catching Evil is committed to making a meaningful impact in the lives of those affected by violent crime, particularly in light of the chilling legacy of serial killer Christopher Wilder, who left behind a still-growing number of victims. In our pledge to honour these individuals and support their families, we donate to not-for-profit groups in both America and Australia.
Survivors of Homicide Inc, based in Connecticut, provides assistance to anyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime.
All services are offered to members free of charge, including one-on-one counselling, support groups, court support throughout the judicial process and personal advocacy in working with law enforcement and other community agencies.
It was founded in 1983, just before Christopher Wilder went on his rampage, by a group of families trying to cope with the murder of a loved one that shattered their lives.
When you donate to Yesterday Today Tomorrow Women, you are investing in the empowerment of women across generations. This Florida based nonprofit was founded by Kris Conyers, who was abducted off the street at gunpoint by Christopher Wilder when she was 11 years old.
YTT Women is dedicated to advancing women’s mental health and social wellbeing and contributions directly support community-based initiatives that raise awareness, provide resources, and foster safe, supportive spaces for women to grow and heal.
Mary’s House Services was founded in 2015 by a dedicated group of concerned citizens from Sydney’s northern suburbs, close to where Christopher Wilder was born and lived wth his family. Members of the local clergy, health authorities, philanthropists and community and business leaders came together to help provide safety for women and their children, victim-survivors of violence and abuse.
The Mary’s House refuge was established to address the significant gap in government funded services and to save lives in the region by providing critical support and a safe space to cope with their trauma and begin to rebuild their lives.
How to donate: https://mhs-summer-appeal-2025.raiselysite.com/#donate
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