Advances in DNA technology and a family who never gave up hope helped to find Dorothy Vaillancourt’s body after many decades – but the reason for her death is still unexplained
Penelope Vaillancourt was just 15 years old when her mother Dorothy vanished without a trace. The devastated daughter spent decades searching for her parent but until recently, she had no idea where she’d gone. When bereft Penelope was riding the bus in her home city of San Francisco over the years, she’d sometimes look out of the window and see a woman who resembled her mum. “I’d jump off the bus, run after them and look them in the face,” she told SFGATE.
Dorothy’s family searched for her for years, reaching out to FBI and San Francisco cold case investigators sporadically with no joy – the former nurse’s whereabouts remained a mystery. Dorothy Williams, as she was originally known, had been born on the Australian island of Tasmania and was living in Sydney, Australia, in World War II when she met Penelope’s father Francois Vaillancourt.
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Penelope and the American Marine, who became a painter, married and settled in San Francisco, where they had seven children. Sadly, their family life subsequently fell apart, leading to divorce. Dorothy developed a problem with alcoholism and moved into a halfway house and, due to their mother being unable to support them, the children went on to live in different orphanages in the city.
Dorothy, who remarried a German man, was last seen wandering into a fire station asking for money for a taxi or to stay the night. The fireman refused and said he last saw her walking down the street. Up until 2022, the family had no idea their mother had been found and laid to rest just two months after she disappeared. Dressed in a red cotton dress and a tan raincoat, Dorothy’s body had been discovered on a steep hillside in the San Francisco area in December 1966.
Despite intensive inquiries, authorities were unable to link the body to the mum-of-seven last seen by the fireman, so Dorothy was buried in an unmarked grace and only known as the Marin County Jane Doe. Her body had been found by a teenage boy shooting an air rifle and was badly decomposed, with the cause of death unknown.
With huge advancements in DNA technology since the 1960s, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office teamed up with the California Department of Justice in 2022 to submit evidence to Othram Labs in Texas. Scientists built a profile of their unknown woman, leading to Dorothy’s relatives finding her at long last.
Many questions remain about how Dorothy met her fate. “I don’t know how she ended up there,” said Penelope, who had helped to partially solve the mystery of her mum’s disappearance by uploading her profile on a DNA website. “Was she killed? Did somebody hit her with a car? Did she slip and fall?”
“I went to the spot where they found her, to see if I’d pick up anything,” Penelope added. “But I felt nothing.” she said.
