Young Woman Found Stuffed In Duffle Bag Remains Unidentified 34 Years Later

On the afternoon of February 14, 1988, a man looking for aluminum cans found a large duffle bag inside a dumpster off Kaiser Road (now the bypass) and Old Perkins Road in Millen, Georgia.

Inside the bag was a human body wrapped in plastic and duct tape. The man returned to his car, where his girlfriend was waiting and left. When they returned shortly after with a friend, a brown car was near the dumpsters. It drove away as they approached the area, and they contacted the Jenkins County Sheriff’s Office.

The body was determined to be a female between 16 and 25. She was 5'4" and 140lbs with long dark hair. The young woman was initially said to be Hispanic but is now thought to be of East Asian descent.

She had been dead for 4 to 7 days, and her cause of death was asphyxiation. Although she was found naked and with her feet tied, there were no signs of sexual assault.

Shortly before being killed, the young woman had her lower molar extracted, and the socket had healed. Her upper teeth were crooked, a characteristic called “winging” often seen in Asian and Native American people.

The dumpsters, which were not in sight of pedestrians, had last been emptied around 11 AM on February 12. Interestingly, two children told authorities they had seen a car in the area that day. It was similar to the one the man would see when he found the body two days later. The kids watched as a middle-aged couple threw something in the dumpster while one of them cried out, “my baby.”

The nylon duffle bag had steel wheels and a distinctive zipper pattern. The young woman was also found with a maroon bedspread and an “ornate” green pillow, both with a satin “rosette swirl” design. There was also a towel with embroidery of a butterfly and sheets.

Authorities do not believe Jane Doe was from the area. Millen had a population of about 3,000 at the time, and no Asian families resided there.

One theory is that the unidentified woman was illegally brought to Georgia, where most women trafficked and forced to work at massage parlors are Chinese. There is a strong possibility that the bedding found with her originated from one of these establishments.

Ralph Crowe, director of Crowe-Fields Funeral Home, helped Millen’s then Sheriff retrieve the young woman’s body from the dumpster. He expanded on the human trafficking theory,

“They had just started opening Asian spas in Augusta and in Savannah. You’d see the advertisements in the Augusta paper and what not. It hadn’t been too long before that they had found a shipping container at the docks full of Asian people that they took into custody.”

Another theory involves the now-deceased Johnny Young, a 23-year-old Millen resident at the time. Authorities received a tip about him a few days after Jane Doe’s body was found.

Johnny had returned from Orlando, Florida, on February 9 with a large suitcase. A relative drove him home and would later realize his bedroom carpeting was similar to a fiber found on the tape that bound the young woman. He denied his involvement.

In 1991, authorities received a call from a man they believed was Johnny claiming responsibility for the crime. They found him in New Jersey, where he denied making the call and implicated his uncle.

This uncle had previously told authorities his nephew was involved in drug trafficking and was associated with a Puerto Rican woman. After some money was stolen, the woman ran away with Johnny. A local told the uncle they were worried the unidentified body might belong to this woman.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) has admitted that the facial reconstruction released at the time was likely inaccurate due to the state of the woman’s decomposing body.

Authorities have been unable to connect the crime to any person or network. The identity of Jenkins County Jane Doe remains a mystery 34 years later. In 2021, Crowe said he was still hopeful she would get her name back one day,

“We still have her on the shelf back here thinking one day that somebody kin to her will come because GBI has DNA from the autopsy.”