A more than six-decade-old case surrounding the identity of a dead child known only as “Little Miss Nobody” was cracked through the use of new technology.
Initial attempts at trying to identify the girl, who was found dead in the Arizona desert 62 years ago, were unsuccessful due to unsophisticated technology at the time, but by obtaining DNA samples from living relatives and creating a 3D image of the girl’s face, officials were able to identify the child as Sharon Lee Gallegos, officials from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona said during a press conference on Tuesday.
“Anybody who has ever worked investigative violent crimes, investigative victim crimes, you know, particularly homicides, you know that when you start these cases you are filled with hope,” Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes said during the press conference.
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“You are looking for evidence, you are trying to solve it quickly, [and] you are trying to find your perpetrators quickly. But, as time goes on, that hope starts to dissipate. That belief that somehow someday you are going to get to the point where you’ve solved this crime, that starts to dissipate,” Rhodes said, adding that the “cold case volunteers” never gave up hope.
A man from Las Vegas was out looking for rocks around Highway 93 when he stumbled upon the child’s “partially buried body,” Lt. Tom Boelts said at the press conference.
Gallegos was playing with two other children in an alleyway behind her grandmother’s house in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 21, 1960, when she was abducted, Rhodes said.
Initially, Gallegos was believed to be about 7 years old, but due to the state of decomposition, she was estimated to be closer to 4, Boelts said.
“We as the family want to say thank you,” Rey Chavez, a nephew of Gallegos, said during the press conference. “Thank you for what you’ve done for us. Thank you for keeping my aunt safe and never forgetting her. It’s still sinking in.”
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Boelts said that there was still a lot of work to be done on solving the case.
“We would still like to identify the people who took her. We would still like to answer the questions, what happened in those 10 days from the time she was taken to the time she was found,” he said. “So we are still working.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office for a statement but did not receive a response back.
