19-05-2025
After nearly 60 years, Marin County Jane Doe identified as Dorothy Vaillancourt
Penelope Vaillancourt was 15 when she lost contact with her Australian-born mother Dorothy after moving out of their troubled home in California in 1965.
Now 74, she is shocked to learn Dorothy's body was found on a cliff the following year but went unidentified for almost six decades.
Known as the Marin County Jane Doe, the woman's identity was a mystery until March this year, when work by forensic DNA company Othram and US law enforcement officials restored her true name.
The discovery "opens up a whole new book with no answers" for a grieving Ms Vaillancourt, who still lives in California.
Next year will mark six decades since Dorothy's badly decomposed body was found in underbrush, roughly 20 feet below the winding Paradise Drive outside San Francisco.
At the time, authorities said the mystery woman, with no identification, had lain unseen for several months before she was found.
There had been no reports of a missing woman matching her description.
But a firefighter in a nearby station did advise police that a woman fitting Dorothy's description had asked him for accommodation and the use of a car, both of which were declined.
"I'm really upset about knowing she was down a ravine … that she had been there for months," Ms Vaillancourt said.
Newspaper clippings have helped Ms Vaillancourt piece together the story of her mother's life as well as death.
Born in Tasmania in August 1917, Dorothy Jean Williams married US serviceman Francois Arthur Vaillancourt in Victoria in 1943.
An article on their wedding describes how Dorothy wore a trained gown of handmade lace paired with a full-length veil, cut on tailored lines.
Later she'd changed into a "black frock" and a fur coat that she wore with a blue velvet handbag and hat.
The description fits with Ms Vaillancourt's recollections of a stylish mother who turned heads when she walked into a room.
"She had style, she was just that kind of woman."
After marrying, the couple moved to the United States where Ms Vaillancourt and her six siblings were born.
Ms Vaillancourt's last memories of her mother are from her teenage years.
Her parents divorced when she was young and she lived with Dorothy until she was a teen.
Dorothy remarried to a man named Hermann Hess and the family moved into a home in Marin County in California.
Ms Vaillancourt said she lost contact with her mother after a violent altercation in the family home in which she alleges she and her brother were physically attacked by their stepfather.
It propelled Ms Vaillancourt to move in with her father in 1965.
While still in her teens, Ms Vaillancourt "tried to actively find out where [her mother] was, what happened [to her] … we were all trying to find out".
But she said there was "nothing, it was just … a big dead end".
"So, we naturally thought she was with the stepfather."
Ms Vaillancourt now realises her mother's absence from her life is explained by her death.
The ripple effect of Dorothy's identification is being felt among relatives in Tasmania.
Penelope's second cousin Danielle Williams "went to work" tracking down her US relatives after learning the news of Dorothy's identification.
Months earlier, with time on her hands in retirement, Penelope Vaillancourt had decided to do a mail-in DNA kit out of curiosity and joined an ancestry website.
Ms Williams "made the link" to Ms Vaillancourt on the website after extensive research starting with Dorothy's marriage.
"Once I had her married name, I then searched [Dorothy's marriage to Francois], and found his obituaries and grave notices, and I found the names of some of his children."
For Ms Williams, discovering Ms Vaillancourt fills in a piece of a puzzle that is still missing many parts.
"My dad [Graham] really didn't know anything much about his dad's side of the family," Ms Wiliams said.
"What we did know is that Dad had an aunt that had gone missing after the war.
"What we — Dad and my siblings and I — 'knew' is that Dorothy had married a soldier, went to America and then was never heard from again.
"Which as we now know isn't exactly what happened."
Ms Williams said her grandfather was absent for large periods of her father's childhood and that Graham only occasionally saw him in adulthood.
"For us, my dad especially, there's been some pleasure in finding family connections we never knew we had," Ms Williams said.
Marin County Sheriff's Office and Othram were contacted for comment.
Dozens of Jane and John Doe cases have been solved in the US using technology developed by Othram since Dorothy's identification.
It has left families either reeling or at peace with news about a family member.
For Ms Vaillancourt, it has meant she could visit the location where her mother's body was found and family could leave flowers at Dorothy's now identified gravesite in San Rafael.
But the circumstances of her death leave Ms Vaillancourt deeply disturbed and upset.
"I don't have answers to anything … I hate it so much, I really do."
