Four decades after her body was found in Cobb woods, she finally has a name
Forty-one years ago, a young Cobb County woman’s partially clothed skeleton was found in a densely wooded area just feet from the Chattahoochee River.
She was lying in a bed of pine straw and had been there so long that nature was starting to reclaim her. Thorny briars were covering her body and likely would have concealed her if not for the land’s owner finding her while inspecting his property on May 10, 1984.
With the body were several substantial clues that today likely would lead to a quick identification, but back then, they led nowhere.
It wasn’t until this week that, with the help of forensic genetic genealogy and a long-sought family connection, Cobb police learned who she was: Veronica Jane Miller, a 20-year-old originally from Ohio.
Not much else is known about what happened to Miller, or why or how long she had been in Georgia. But investigators are treating her case as a homicide, though they haven’t said what led them to that conclusion.
What police do know is Miller attended South High School in Columbus, Ohio, for at least her junior year in 1980, according to Othram, the private forensic laboratory that helped identify her.
At some point between then and when she died, she’d undergone reconstructive surgery to repair a fractured jaw and a crushed orbital bone on her right side, officials said. She also had metal pins in her left ankle from “an old fracture,” according to the GBI’s unidentified remains database.
Cobb detectives declined to be interviewed about the case, so it’s not known if the implants had any serial numbers that investigators could have tried matching to a manufacturer.
It’s estimated Miller died at least two to three months before she was found, likely in February or March. Her body was about 10 feet from Nichols Drive near Riverview Road, just outside Mableton, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time.
That location is now home to The Eddy at Riverview, a ritzy complex that overlooks the river.
Various pieces of clothing were left with Miller, including a man’s coat and a mechanic’s shop shirt that had been draped over her, according to information from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
The rust-colored men’s corduroy coat was from Rich’s and was a size 40L, while the shirt bore another clue: The name “George” was embroidered onto a company name tag. The business? Doug Hyde Unlimited.
The company appears to have dissolved in 2001, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s website. But, according to a Marietta Daily Journal report, detectives managed to talk to a person named George who worked there at that time. That, however, led nowhere, investigators told the newspaper.
Other clothes found with Miller included a blue Playboy Bunny T-shirt wadded up between her legs, a Western-style long sleeve blouse with frilly ruffles that covered her arms and Western-style boots with a thick fleece lining. Only her left boot was still on her foot, and it had a metal plate in it, “suggesting a special shoe,” according to the GBI. The right boot was placed over her lower body.
Even with so many clues left behind, the case stumped investigators for decades. Part of the difficulty seems to have been that no one appeared to be actively searching for her.
Police said they found no missing person reports when they entered her name into the National Crime Information Center. Even a facial reconstruction of what she might have looked like produced no new information through the years.
Investigators in Georgia and across the country, however, have recently solved hundreds of cases that had little to no hope for closure by tapping into the vast web of genetic information housed in public genealogy databases. When they uploaded the Cobb woman’s DNA, they eventually found Miller’s half-sister. That connection was later verified with additional DNA testing.
Those close to the case did not provide information about surviving family members, and the AJC could not locate any relatives for comment.
But knowing Miller’s name is just one piece of the puzzle. Detectives still need to find her killer. They are asking anyone with information to contact the Cobb County Police Department’s Major Crimes Unit at 770-499-3945.
