DNA helps identify a Phoenix woman found in an abandoned burning car, decades later
On Feb. 4, 1997, a charred body of a woman was found in a burning abandoned car in Phoenix near 24th and Monroe streets.
For years, the only clue investigators had was an empty purse with 'Monique' written on it, found yards from the body.
Who was this mystery woman?
Forensic scientists initially determined that the unidentified woman was Black and between 20 to 50 years old, standing 5 foot 3 inches tall and weighing around 100 pounds. She had very short hair which was possibly white on the top and was missing all of her upper teeth and many of her lower teeth, according to a flier put out by the Phoenix Police Department. The woman was dressed in blue pants and a gray shirt.
Witnesses at the site where the car burned said she was possibly a homeless woman who had been seen in the local area before.
The case sat for decades.
In June 2020, Phoenix police brought the case to the DNA Doe Project, whose investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify John and Jane Does, missing people otherwise unidentified.
A team of volunteers worked continuously on the case but ran into multiple roadblocks.
'This case faced certain challenges that we often encounter in African American research,' Harmony Vollmer, team leader, said. 'African Americans are underrepresented in the DNA databases we have access to, while part of the devastating impact of slavery was to rip families apart and leave few traceable connections between their descendants."
The team persevered until they were able to identify her remains in January 2025. They learned her name was in fact Monique, as the purse had indicated.
The DNA Doe Project identified her as Monique S. Boggs, who was 48 years old at the time of her death.
Boggs was born in 1948 as Shirley Jefferson and was raised in the Detroit area. Her family, who knew her only by that name, was not aware that she had ended up in Arizona, according to the DNA Doe Project.
The team came across a woman named Monique Boggs who was born in Mississippi but had moved to Michigan as a young child. Further DNA analysis confirmed she was the woman Phoenix police had been searching for.
'She was a distant cousin of multiple DNA matches to the Jane Doe, and she appeared to have fallen off the radar in the 1990s,' said case manager Eric Hendershott. 'But the most striking detail was that she had changed her name in the 1980s to Monique – the same name written on the purse found with our Jane Doe.'
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Woman's charred remains were found in 1997. She was identified in 2025
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