After 44 years, remains of woman found near Strip in 1979 finally identified
Gwenn Marie Story was 19 when she decided in 1979 to leave the Cincinnati area with two male friends to hunt for her biological father in California. Her family never heard from her again.
On Aug. 14 of that year, a man walking through a field, the former site of the El Rancho Vegas Hotel in the area of Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, came across the body of a woman lying in the dirt, the Metropolitan Police Department stated.
The Clark County coroner’s office conducted an autopsy and determined she was the victim of a homicide, but because she was not identified, she became known as “Sahara Sue Doe” by authorities, police said.
That is, until Nov. 15 — 44 years later — when the DNA analysis firm Othram Inc. notified Metro’s homicide cold case section that Story had been positively identified through DNA.
Police homicide Lt. Jason Johansson confirmed Tuesday that Story’s remains were identified and that her homicide case is still unsolved.
“Hopefully one day we find some sort of resolution,” Johansson said.
Story was born on Feb. 23, 1960, according to Othram, which is based in The Woodlands, Texas.
Through interviews with her family members, cold case section investigators found out that the 19-year-old left the family home in the vicinity of Cincinnati sometime in the summer of 1979 to travel to California in hopes of locating her biological father, police reported.
Accompanying her on the trip from Ohio were two male friends, who then returned to Cincinnati in August of 1979 and informed Story’s family that they had left her behind in the Las Vegas area, according to police.
Her family never saw her again and never received any contact from her after she left home that summer, police said.
The cold case section got in touch with Othram in September 2022 and requested that the firm conduct a forensic genealogy investigation of Story’s remains, police said.
The firm’s scientists, using forensic materials from her body, extracted DNA and built a comprehensive genetic profile of the woman, the company stated in a release Tuesday.
“Othram’s in-house forensic genetic genealogy team used the profile in a genetic genealogy search to develop new investigative leads that were returned to (Las Vegas) investigators,” the company stated in the release.
The cold case section is still investigating Story’s death and police have requested that anyone with information about her, or the two males with whom she traveled to Las Vegas, to contact the homicide section by phone at 702-828-3521, or email at homicide@lvmpd.com.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on X.