Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — A Salt Lake City woman missing since 1982 has been identified by Ohio police.
Ohio detectives contacted Salt Lake City detectives a week ago and asked about a missing person report, according to Salt Lake City Police detective Veronica Montoya. The Ohio police recently received a hit on one of their data bases of a partial fingerprint that lead them to believe their unidentified body was missing person, Sharon Rae Bowen.
A record keeper in the Salt Lake City Police Department searched the files of Sharon Rae Bowen and sent the Ohio police a fingerprint card. The fingerprints matched and Ohio police confirmed that their unidentified person was Bowen.
Bowen was reported missing by her family in December 1982. Almost seven months later, two fishermen found her unidentified body near the Hoover Dam reservoir in Blendon Township, Ohio in 1983. It appeared that she had been strangled to death.
Ohio police tried to confirm an identity for more than a year as the body remained at the morgue. In October 1998, a group of students from four Catholic parishes raised funds for a grave and a burial stone. They named her "Mary Rose Doe."
"I kept thinking she's out there somewhere and I tried and I wanted to find her," said Bowen's sister, Marsha Bateman.
Bateman said the last time she had seen her sister was when Bowen was 25 years old living with their parents. Bateman believes Bowen was still emotionally recovering from a divorce that happened about 10 years prior. Bateman said one day, Bowen just left.
"She had gone to California to stay with our older brother, and stayed with him for a couple weeks," Bateman said. "And he wanted to bring her home to Utah and she wouldn't come. And so she says, 'I just want you to take me up to the highway' and so he did and gave her $50 and that was the last time he saw her."
Bowen's family wasn't sure where she had traveled to until police officers called them to inform them that Bowen had been stabbed in the abdomen in Texas.
Bateman said their family asked Bowen if would come home and she refused. They never heard from her again.
"She was just like a lost soul trying to find herself," Bateman said.
Thursday, almost 30 years later, Bateman received a phone call from Salt Lake City police informing her that her sister's body had been identified.
"People aren't sure sometimes if they should report somebody missing and does this do any good? But now we can see it does and it gave us a trail to follow," Montoya said.
Contributing: Dave Cawley
