NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — For decades, she was another Jane Doe. Her body was buried beneath a house in West Nashville.

Sheila Cummings vanished in 1984, and for years, her family searched without answers. Police never suspected that she'd already been found.

Now, nearly 40 years later, a phone call from her daughter and a breakthrough in forensic genetic genealogy helped Nashville investigators finally identify her.

But while one family now has closure, another mystery remains.

In November 1987, a tenant renting a home on Charlotte Avenue discovered human remains under the dirt floor of the crawl space. When police arrived, they uncovered the skeletal remains of two women.

"I’m very confident now that we have two victims,” a police detective said at the time. “We have two skeletal remains, and there’s no other bodies or body parts or evidence we need to seek out."

Shortly after the discovery, authorities turned their attention to a man named James Shaffer, who was already serving a prison sentence in Kentucky for kidnapping and raping a 14-year-old boy. He confessed to the murders, telling investigators that he killed the women two years earlier, in 1985, during a fit of rage. In media interviews at the time, Shaffer claimed the women were sex workers, and that he only knew them as “Sheila” and “Lil Bit.”

Despite the confession, the women’s identities remained unknown. The case stalled.

“The two women were never identified back in 1987 because they were skeletal remains,” said Detective Matt Filter with Metro Nashville Police. “The technology just wasn’t available to use any biometric information to try and identify them.”

But in January, Metro’s Cold Case Unit reopened the file, this time using forensic genetic genealogy — a tool that has revolutionized how investigators solve decades-old crimes. They planned to exhume the remains and submit DNA for analysis.

Two days before the exhumation, police received a call.

“I got a phone call from a woman who said she had been looking for her mother since the 1980s, since about 1984,” Filter said.

Police collected a DNA sample from the woman and submitted it for comparison against the unidentified remains.

The match was confirmed: one of the Jane Does was Sheila Cummings of Elgin, Illinois. She was just 23 years old when she was killed.

“It’s a great feeling to know after 40 years, you’re able to finally identify somebody and return them to their family,” Filter said.

Police said the identification would not have been possible without the daughter’s call — or advances in DNA science.

“With forensic genetic genealogy, we can now take a DNA sample, upload it to a database, and see how it matches with other people,” Filter said. “Even distant relatives.”

But while one victim now has a name, the second remains unknown. She’s still referred to only by the nickname Shaffer gave her: “Little Bit.”

Investigators said they won’t give up. The same technology that helped bring Sheila Cummings home, they hope, will one day give another family the answers they’ve been waiting for.

News Source : https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/after-nearly-4-decades-a-phone-call-and-dna-technology-identified-shelia-cummings-another-jane-doe-still-remains-unidentified/