A woman killed more than 30 years ago is no longer a Jane Doe.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office announced Monday that it used DNA testing to determine that a woman whose body was found in a grassy area at the corner of Cross Island and Southern State Parkways in August 1991 was Judy Rodriguez, 30 years old.
Rodriguez was last seen about eight months before her body was found, at her daughter’s first birthday party, and her family reported her missing, according to the district attorney’s office. But law enforcement did not realize at that time that the decomposing body discovered in the grass was his. And the authorities did not have the scientific tools necessary to identify his remains.
On Aug. 25, 1991, someone called 911 to report a dead body under a wooden plank at the intersection of Cross Island and Southern State drives in southeast Queens, according to the district attorney’s office. Prosecutors say the woman’s ankles were tied together with rope.
An 18-year-old man, a 19-year-old man and two 20-year-old men were arrested and pleaded guilty to the murder – one to manslaughter, two to inadvertent endangerment and another to hindering prosecution. But the identity of this woman remained a mystery for decades. That changed earlier this year, when the NYPD and the Queens DA’s cold case unit sent the woman’s skeletal remains to a DNA lab to create a genealogical profile. A detective then used this profile to search for possible relatives of the woman.
After contacting potential family members and obtaining DNA samples, investigators confirmed the remains belonged to Rodriguez. Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said she couldn’t imagine what it was like for Rodriguez’s daughter to wonder for so many years whether her mother was still alive.
“Death is a horrible thing for a child and their parent to experience,” she said. “But not knowing what happened to them is probably just as bad.”
Using DNA to Solve Old Cases
After taking office in 2020, Katz launched a cold case unit to investigate Queens’ oldest unsolved homicides. The woman found between two highways in the summer of 1991 was one of them.
Katz said Rodriguez’s homicide was one of 50 homicides his cold case unit was investigating with unidentified victims.
“A prosecutor’s office is not just for prosecution,” Katz said. “That’s definitely why too. But it’s also about finding answers for people, and this was one way for us to do that.
Katz said the growing prevalence of genealogy testing helped solve this case. She said some DNA databases that people use for personal genealogical research allow users to check boxes allowing their DNA to be used for law enforcement purposes. A member of Rodriguez’s family had entered his DNA into one of those databases, she said, and the relative came up as a match.
“Then we received a swab from another family member. And we were certain that it was 100 percent — that it was Judy Rodriguez,” Katz said.
The prosecutor’s office recently received a $500,000 grant from U.S. Rep. Grace Meng to conduct DNA testing and genealogy investigations. Katz said the cold case unit is using genealogy to investigate 14 cases containing unidentified remains, and the technology can also be used to help identify perpetrators in cold cases. Meng said in a statement that she hoped the money would bring “answers and closure to families.”
“This latest case from 1991 highlights why this money is so important, and it is an example of the type of cases it will be used to solve,” she said.
This story has been updated with more information on the case.