“It’s really on me, and you can feel that responsibility,” Detective Clayton Evens of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota told Dateline about working the Bone Lake Jane Doe case. He’s been assigned to it since early 2024.
Thirty-two years ago, a local man walking on the shore of Bone Lake — a quiet, rural fishing spot in Scandia — spotted something bobbing in the water. “When he called 911, he actually thought that it was a mannequin’s head,” Blake Trantham, a criminal intelligence analyst for Washington County, told Dateline.
It was not a mannequin’s head. It was the head of a woman. There was no body. The decapitation had been a clean cut, according to the medical examiner.
It was June 12, 1993. Authorities estimated the woman had been dead for two to three days. She couldn’t be identified, so she became known as the Bone Lake Jane Doe.
For more than three decades, that’s the only name she’s had. “We don’t know who she is now. We didn’t know who she was then,” Det. Evens said.
According to Trantham, the medical examiner estimated the woman was between 20 and 40 years old, and her dark hair was cut short, in a spiky style. She had piercings, three on each ear. And she went completely unrecognized by the people of Scandia.
“It’s a pretty rural town up there. So there’s probably not a lot of short, spiky-haired women running around in Scandia, especially in 1993,” Det. Evens said. “So, you know, you could try to make the assumption that maybe [she] was more from the metro area, but that’s completely speculative.”
A day after Jane Doe’s head was found — and about 40 miles away in St. Paul, Minnesota — another discovery, in another body of water. This time, it was a foot, with red nail polish on two toes, cut in the same manner. “It was found on the banks of the Mississippi, just north of Pig’s Eye Lake,” Det. Evens told Dateline. “It was a family fishing, and they just kind of stumbled upon it.”
Authorities initially assumed the two partial remains were connected because they were found within a day of each other. In 2007, that connection was made official when the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) got confirmation through DNA testing. “It was, you know, 100% guaranteed that, yes — that it was a match,” Det. Evens said.
“The medical examiner, too, identified that the cuts — the cuts through the bone were similar,” Trantham said. According to Evens, because the remains were incomplete, the medical examiner was unable to determine a cause of death. The manner of death was listed as “unidentified homicide.”
“Bone Lake is secluded,” Det. Evens said. “It might have a crick coming in and out of it but nothing remotely [connected] to the Mississippi. So it definitely — it wouldn’t have been, you know, in Bone Lake and then ended up in the Mississippi down there.” To authorities, that indicated someone had scattered the remains. No other remains have ever been linked to Bone Lake Jane Doe.
The discoveries in Bone Lake and the Mississippi River meant investigators would have to cast a wide net in regards to identifying both the victim and potential suspects. “There’s numerous metro areas on each side of the Mississippi going all the way up,” Det. Evens explained. “You’re talking between those two points, hundreds of thousands of people metro area-wise. So it’s a pretty big search area with a pretty large population in between.”
In the 32 years since Bone Lake Jane Doe’s remains were found, no one has come forward thinking they might know or be related to her. “In our county, we didn’t have any in that area — missing people — that would kind of match who she was or the description of her,” Det. Evens said. “So I don’t believe in ‘93 that they actually had to kind of rule anybody out just because there wasn’t really anybody that really matched her description in our area.”
In the weeks following Bone Lake Jane Doe’s discovery, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office did receive an anonymous confession. “Somebody called in,” Det. Evens said. “Somebody did confess to it. They didn’t know who it was. It wasn’t like in ‘93 they were really, you know, tracing phone numbers or anything like that.” While authorities can confirm it was a male voice on the call, the caller was never identified.
“The caller said, ‘The rest of the body is under Mendota bridge, so go look there. I put her there,’” Det. Evens said. The call was very brief — “two, three sentences,” he said. Because of that phone call, authorities conducted a search in the Mendota Bridge area, which crosses the Minnesota River shortly before it meets the Mississippi, about 15 miles from where the foot was found. “There was a search done basically kind of underneath the Mendota bridge,” Det. Evens said. “Nothing of significance was found from that search.”
Over the decades, several attempts have been made to identify Bone Lake Jane Doe through DNA. In 2021 — 14 years after the initial testing confirmed the connection between her head and foot — the Minnesota BCA tried again to identify the woman. “They were unable to successfully test the remains,” Det. Evens said. “So a sample of the foot was actually sent to another private company in Oklahoma called DNA Solutions.” According to Evens, that company was also unsuccessful. “Just due to the age and the condition of the DNA being almost 30 years old at that point,” he said.
In 2022, the DNA Doe Project started fundraising to use Bone Lake Jane Doe’s DNA to conduct forensic investigative genetic genealogy. According to their website, the case is now fully funded, but the status remains pending. “As of last year, they still had difficulty obtaining enough DNA to analyze it,” Det. Evens said. “That’s kind of our last update we’ve had — from March of ‘24.”
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office has a handful of cold cases they are dedicated to solving, including the 1988 disappearance of Sue Swedell, covered by Dateline in 2024. “It’s tough. Obviously, the cold cases are cold for a reason because there wasn’t a whole lot of information to go on in the first place,” Det. Evens said. “But with new and ever-evolving technology with DNA, the hope is that something will match.”
Detective Evens knows that in a Doe case, the investigator is often the only person advocating for the victim and feels the weight of that responsibility. “It’s only me or the next detective that gets the case after this, [we are] the only ones attempting to represent her,” he said. “So it really might hit a little bit more home just because she doesn’t have that family.”
Anyone with information about Bone Lake Jane Doe’s identity or case should contact Det. Clayton Evens at 651-430-7818 or the Washington County Sheriff’s Office at 651-430-7600.
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