Dateline: Cold Case Spotlight - Who was Bone Lake Jane Doe and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 32 years old homicide case, explained

A Dateline: Cold Case Spotlight recently shed light on an intriguing unsolved case involving the Bone Lake Jane Doe. As revealed on the Dateline episode, Bone Lake Jane Doe is the name used to refer to an unidentified woman whose severed head was found floating in Bone Lake in Scandia, Minnesota, on June 12, 1993.

The next day, her foot was found about forty miles away at St. Paul, Minnesota. Dateline further presented the cold case as one that has remained unsolved for more than three decades, and despite DNA evidence and attempts to uncover the identity of Bone Lake Jane Doe through forensic DNA genealogy, the status of the case is still pending.

Here's everything that you need to know.

Dateline: Bone Lake Jane Doe caused a stir in Scandia, Minnesota

As explained by Dateline, Bone Lake is a sleepy rural fishing spot in Scandia, Minnesota. On the morning of June 12, 1993, the town woke up to the news that a woman's severed head was found bobbing on the lake. There was no body to be found, and from initial enquiries it seemed like the cut that severed the head was a clean one. The investigators deemed that the victim had been dead for two or three days, and the term Bone Lake Jane Doe came into parlance as her identity could not be determined.

Detective Clayton Evens of the Washington County Sheriff's Office is the current investigating officer in the case, and he remarked:

"It’s really on me, and you can feel that responsibility, we don’t know who she is now. We didn’t know who she was then."

The medical examiner soon followed up with the information that the deceased was somewhere between twenty and forty years old. She had three piercings on each ear, and her dark hair had been cut short to resemble spikes. A police sketch of her was circulated in the neighborhood, but no one could recognize her. Evans also noted:

"It’s a pretty rural town up there. So there’s probably not a lot of short, spiky-haired women running around in Scandia, especially in 1993. So, you know, you could try to make the assumption that maybe (she) was more from the metro area, but that’s completely speculative."

Soon after, on the next day, a foot was discovered in another body of water in St. Paul, Minnesota. Considered to be linked at the time of discovery, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had confirmed in 2007 that both the body parts belonged to the same person.

Dateline: An unknown call claimed responsibility for the murder

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News regarding the Bone Lake Jane Doe soon made a splash in the media, and the Washington County Sheriff's Office received an anonymous call from a man who confessed to the murder, adding that he had buried the rest of the body under the Mendota Bridge. A search of the concerned area revealed nothing of value, and back in the day, the authorities didn't routinely record their calls, thus leading to another dead end in the case.

Dateline is available on NBC.

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