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A nearly 50-year-old cold case has been solved with the identification of a woman whose body was found near Ottawa.
She’s been identified as Lalla Jewell Parchman Langford after OPP investigators shared the victim’s DNA samples with the DNA Doe Project and genetic genealogy databases were searched.
“Once we got close, we uncovered newspaper articles specifically mentioning Jewell Langford’s disappearance. She was practically there waiting for us to find her,” C. Lauritsen, team leader at DNA Doe Project, said in a press release.
“The heartbreaking part is that Jewell’s mother clearly searched for her for years and unfortunately died not knowing what happened to her daughter,” added Lauritsen.
Langford was found by a local farmer on May 3, 1975, near the Highway 417 bridge — where officers found blood — south of Casselman, about 55 km east of Ottawa.
Her hands and feet were bound with neckties and she had been strangled with a flat, plastic-coated TV cable. Her body was wrapped with two pieces of green cloth and two towels — one depicting an Irish toast and the second displaying multiple flowers. As well, a J-cloth, black coaxial cable and a curtain rod runner were with Langford’s corpse which was estimated to have been in the water for about a year.
She became known as the Nation River Lady and in 2017 the OPP reopened the case to find out who she was and figure out the details of her murder.
A 3-D clay facial recreation of Langford was generated by the OPP and released to the public in an appeal for information.
But the investigation remained stalled until police partnered with the DNA Doe Project, a non-profit initiative dedicated to the identification of John and Jane Doe’s unidentified remains.
