The North Jersey mystery of ‘Princess Doe’

On July 15th, 1982, a gravedigger named George Kise made a grisly discovery: the body of a young woman whose face had been smashed beyond recognition in a ravine next to the Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown. Kise was a gravedigger and had been digging a grave near the corpse.

According to a New York Times report at the time, police found the body along with her clothes and a crucifix on a gold chain. They thought the body would be identified by a concerned parent, but it never was. What police did determine was that she was a female between 15-19 years old, blond, and 5’2”, and had been brutally beaten.

An autopsy was performed looking for clues; the police checked her fingerprints against the FBI database and pored through 60,000 reports of missing girls from around the country to no avail. Anthropologists reconstructed her skull to make a composite sketch and circulated the picture; one woman claimed that she was her daughter, but the dental records didn’t match. The police chief and police then spearheaded an effort to raise funds to give her a proper burial with flowers and a headstone in the name of “Princess Doe.” The killer has never been caught.

More from New Jersey 101.5