Patricia Newsom: East Haven Jane Doe Identified
Patricia Meleady Newsom: East Haven Jane Doe
Patricia Newsom was born on June 20, 1957, and in 18 years, she would be dead—murdered by an unseen monster—and her fate would be hidden from her family for 48 years.
Patricia’s parents were Don and Betty Newsom. Don was born in 1929, and so was Betty.
Don grew up dirt poor in the Midwest and was a cattle driver as a young man. He grew up without a father—his dad died in 1929, when he was but an infant. Though Don had many siblings—he was the youngest of his father’s six children—as he grew up, his independence isolated him from them.
In 1951, Don and Betty, who were both 22 years old, got married in Philadelphia, near her family. She was a staunch Irish Catholic like her mother and father, who were Irish immigrants. They started having kids right away... their first child, John, was born two years after they married, and soon after came Patricia, then Peter, then Maryann. The family moved frequently with Don’s work. In 1964, Don, a 35-year-old young man, retired from the Navy and started his second career: he first got his MBA, and then worked for many years at ConEd, the electrical utility company in New York City, as an account manager.
A few years later, in 1968, a tragedy would befall the Newsoms that would change the future of all of their lives. Betty, the glue of the family, got cancer and died. She was just 39 years old and she left her four children without a mother. John was 15, Patricia was 11, Peter was 9, and Maryann was 3.
This is Don and Betty’s youngest daughter, Maryann Newsom Collette.
Maryann: “After that, my dad pretty much shut down emotionally. I only have what I hear to compare the dad that I knew with the dad other people knew. I think everything made my dad very sad when all that happened, and he shut down.”
The kids were scattered for awhile. They were closest to Betty’s extended family, so Patricia went to live with her mom’s sister in Ohio. Maryann lived with her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. The boys lived with other family.
Within a year or two the young widower married again. His new bride was half his age. 20-year-old Mary Ann Wigmore was just two years older than his oldest son, John. John never got along well with his dad and around the time that he and Mary got hitched, he left and would never live with them again.
Within a year of their marriage, Don’s final child, James Newsom, was born in Philadelphia. The next year, the whole Newsom clan minus John moved to Morganville, New Jersey as Don was starting his career at ConEd.
Maryann: “Everything changed. Because we moved from Pennsylvania—where we lived (where my mom’s family was)—to New Jersey. And when we made that move we were completely disconnected from my mother’s family...”
It was 1972, and the family had begun a new chapter of their lives in a new place. Don was 43, Mary Ann Wigmore was 23, Patricia was the oldest of the kids at about 14 years old, Peter right behind her at 13, Maryann was 7, and Jimmy was just 1.
For a reason that will remain a mystery for 50 years, in approximately 1973, Patricia was sent off to boarding school, likely a Catholic one.
Maryann: “Patricia did not get along very well with my stepmother. It’s a hard dynamic for anybody. But I know for a fact that things in that house were taken out of proportion. And the way it was told to me, Patricia was causing trouble for ‘The Kids.’ The Kids being myself and my little brother. She just wasn’t prepared to be a parent... Didn’t get along with Patricia at all, so I guess the easiest thing to do was to ship her away as far as she could.”
And it is around this time that Maryann’s memories of her older sister fade into nothingness. Her sister’s long brown hair and hazel eyes vanished from her life. She doesn’t remember Patricia ever coming home from that boarding school. It’s unclear why she was sent—rumors of her having difficulties with her stepmother predominate Maryann’s thinking. In family lore, Patricia disappeared from that boarding school on her own volition, having run away with a friend—to be free of the rules and consequences against which she was chafing. Patricia was about 15 when she was sent away.
In 1977, Don and Mary Ann Wigmore separated. Don gave his kids to her to finish raising. Peter was already 18 and would soon leave the house, but Maryann was 12 and Jimmy was 6. Don found a new woman, and Mary Ann Wigmore took the kids and moved to Ocean City, New Jersey. It was around this point that Maryann realized she might never see her older sister Patricia again.
Her stepmother forbid her from talking about her biological mother, Betty, her eldest brother, John, or her sister, Patricia. In 1979, Don and Mary Ann Wigmore officially divorced, and within months, Don married Joan.
A year later, Don had a routine physical at his doctor and they discovered he had cancer. He died within 6 months at 51 years old on December 29, 1980.
His ex-wife continued to raise Maryann and James to adulthood. Don had had almost no connection to his parents or siblings, and by extension, neither did his kids. And Betty’s family had been cut out by Mary Ann Wigmore, so that left the three of them on their own island.
Maryann Newsom Collette’s modern search for her sister
At the advent of the internet, Patricia Newsom was the first phrase Maryann plugged into the search engine. She often felt alone in her search, as if she were the only person who remembered her. She would look through gruesome photographs of unidentified Jane Does on websites, cross-referencing their vital statistics against Patricia’s hoping to find a match.
On November 24th, 2021, she created a Facebook Group called “FindPatriciaNewsom,” turning to her friends, family, and internet strangers, for help. People helped her, and Maryann made a critical decision that would change the future of the case: She created a NamUs profile for her sister, which brought it onto law enforcement’s radar. She also submitted her DNA to GEDMatch which made it searchable by the police and genetic researchers.
All that came to a head on April 10th, 2023, when she got the call of a lifetime.
August 16, 1975 - The East Haven Jane Doe
It was the summer of 1975 in East Haven, Connecticut.
On the morning of August 16th, 1975, a truck driver was making a routine delivery to Bradlees Department Store on Frontage Street. As he was pulling in around back at 10:00AM, he noticed something in the drainage ditch. Upon closer look, he discovered a long, vaguely cylindrical object that was wrapped tightly in a canvas tarp. Coaxial cable—the kind of cable that goes from your wall to cable TV boxes—was used to cinch the tarp. The driver knew right away that it was likely a human body that was being concealed, and he called the police immediately. A young detective arrived and cut a small hole in the tarp through which he could make out a human leg. Police believed that she had been killed elsewhere and brought to Bradlees.
The body, still wrapped, was taken to the medical examiner’s office that afternoon. It was bloated and showed signs of decomposition. News reports from the time suggested that she had been there between two days and a week. It was theorized that she was stuffed inside of a 30-inch drainage pipe upstream of where she was discovered, and it was the heavy rains that Saturday morning that dislodged her and carried her into clear view from the rear of the building. Once the tarp was removed it revealed a young woman’s body, fully nude, with no possessions or identification. Her head was wrapped in a towel and covered with a plastic trash bag and her mouth was stuffed with a cloth gag. Her hands were bound together behind her back with wire and her legs were similarly tied together at the ankles. Dr. Elliot Gross performed the autopsy on Sunday, August 17th, at the University of Connecticut Medical Center in Farmington. He ruled the death a homicide from asphyxia by smothering. They had no idea who she was.
The police put out a description of the decedent to the public. She was a young white or Latina female in her early 20’s with shoulder-length brown hair and hazel eyes. She had not had any children. Her ears were pierced and she was wearing small gold circular earrings. Police thought she might have a light mole on her chin. Her fingernails were short, her hands seemed unworn by labor, and her appearance was neat. Her dental work was extensive, which suggested she came from a well-to-do family.
Though her body was bloated from having been in the water, police were still able to get good quality fingerprints. Armed with a description, dental records, fingerprints, and a blood type, police believed it would only be a matter of days before she was identified.
As days turned into weeks, they created a composite sketch from the body which was published in the local papers and circulated in the region. Investigators went to hotels and motels and asked transient people whether they recognized a sketch of the woman. They sent flyers to numerous dental associations in hope that a dentist would recognize their own work. The medical examiner thought that her nose may have had a surgical alteration, so they sent flyers to plastic surgeons in the region asking if they recognized her. Police asked sex workers in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford if they knew her.
As weeks turned into months, the town was saddled with the responsibility of handling her body. They ended up burying her in State Street Cemetery in the nearby town of Hamden, Connecticut, where there were a number of other indigent burials and unmarked graves. Though she lived on in the hearts of the East Haven investigators who worked on her case, she faded from public view for twenty years.
1995 - Samantha Glenner revealed as a suspect
In May of 1994, the New Haven Register reported that the East Haven Police Department was revisiting the case. The police chief at the time, James Criscuolo, explained for the first time, to the press, a potential connection to a known killer. Nine years prior, in 1985, the wife of an East Haven policeman was thumbing through People Magazine in the waiting room of her dentist’s office when she came across a story: the murder of Amy Cave in Hancock, Maine.
Amy was a 59-year-old retired woman who was murdered and buried in a shallow grave near the shore. Her wrists were tied together with nylon rope, her feet were tied together with twine, and her mouth was stuffed with a plastic birdseed bag. Her head was covered with a white plastic bag and a larger green bag was pulled over the white bag and extended down to her waist. She had been beaten and strangled.
Her body was buried “beneath a rock wall” very near a boat that was owned by Samantha Glenner. Samantha Glenner, formerly known as Glen Robert Askeborn, is Transgender. I’ll use the name Glenner to refer to her. Glenner was charged with Amy’s murder and later convicted.
9 years prior, in 1975, Glenner lived in East Haven—about a mile from Bradlees Department Store—at the same time that the body in the drainage ditch was discovered. Police admitted, though, that Glenner was not on their radar at the time.
Connecticut Police saw enough coincidences that they sought an interview. In 1985, Glenner went to prison and for many years rebuffed the requests from the police, but in 1995, that door was opened. East Haven PD traveled to Thomaston State Prison in Maine and sat down with Glenner. Police later said that interview was “not too fruitful,”—Glenner denied any role in the killing—and they decided to hold off on a second conversation pending the results of a psychiatric evaluation of Glenner.
2020 - Investigation reopened
In 2020, East Haven police officers Joseph Murgo and David Emerman were both promoted to Captain, and they were both determined to restore the identity of their 1975 Jane Doe case, and with the rise of genetic genealogy, they believed that they could.
The medical examiner had kept a bone from her body—a pubic bone—but they were unable to recover any DNA from it. The new captains needed to find her body.
2022 - Exhuming the East Haven Jane Doe at State Street Cemetery
By 2022, they realized that she had been buried at State Street Cemetery, but it was no longer professionally managed. Records were sparse to non-existent, the grounds were barely maintained, knowledge of the cemetery was being forgotten.
We spoke to Captain Joseph Murgo of the East Haven Police Department.
Joseph Murgo: “When we made the decision to exhume her, the casket that they decided to put her in actually helped us a little bit, or so we thought. She was buried in a metal Ziegler casket, which is a non-ornate type of casket.”
“The problem with State Street Cemetery (once we got there) was that it was not in operation since the early 2000s. There was no cemetery directory or cemetery association that maintains the property. The southeast portion of the cemetery—that was not kept up at all. But those were all the locations of unmarked graves. We didn’t know exactly where she was buried.”
“The Hamden community really showed up for us. They directed us to a guy named Randy Guavin who is the last living descendent of the State Street Cemetery Association. He didn’t remember the exact location of where she was buried, but he had intimate knowledge of the way the rows were organized and the way certain things were done in the cemetery.”
“So we met him there a week or two later, and he basically said to myself and Joe Vitale, if you go to the Hamden town clerk’s office and you pull burial records from 1974 to 1976, and read them to me in succession, based on the way the rows were situated back then, he’d be able to pinpoint where she was buried.”
“We thought we were looking to a metal casket in a sea of wooden caskets. So he prodded down and we found what we thought to be her burial location. So we returned a couple of weeks later..”
“So we get there on June 8th, and somehow a ton of media found out about it, and we get down to the casket, exhume the body, and it is the body of a young man.”
“Finding the wrong body makes national news... Finding the right body only makes local news. CNN picked it up... it was all over the place... it was actually all over the world, ya know, ‘Police department digs up wrong body in exhumation case,’ and that’s just how the media is... ‘Sucks to suck, guys. You didn’t put the work you needed to, and you got the wrong body.’”
But Captain Murgo was undeterred. Despite the very public failure, he went back to the drawing board and came up with an even more sophisticated plan, knowing that it would be difficult to obtain a third search warrant should he come up empty-handed again.
Joseph Murgo: “A week or so later, we returned, but this time we came with an employee from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), who brought a ground penetrating radar (GPR) device to go comb the area in search of that metal casket that we were looking for. And what we found that day is even more shocking. Based on the burial records we thought we were looking for about ten caskets in the area—one being a metal casket and the rest being old wooden caskets—but we found about 35 caskets in the area. A lot of them were metal Ziegler caskets. A lot of them were stacked on top of each other, and packed close next to each other. So, as you can imagine it was a daunting task trying to pinpoint the one casket we wanted to exhume.”
They returned on Friday, July 1st, 2022, with the same large team that they had assembled less than a month prior. Their digging location was about 12 feet east of their first exhumation. All eyes were upon them as the excavated the soil. They revealed a metal casket—a Ziegler—and when they opened its lid, there was an autopsy sheet covering the body.
Joseph Murgo: “Once [Michelle Clark of the Medical Examiner’s Office] confirmed that there was no pubic bone, it was... it’s just really hard to describe... just an overwhelming sense of relief. To know that we found the right casket and the right person... I think we all had tears in our eyes at that moment.”
Identifying Jane Doe
The lab was able to quickly develop a full DNA profile of their Jane Doe and turned it over to Identifinders for them to begin their genealogical work. Genealogist Linda Doyle called Joseph Murgo.
Joseph Murgo: “I saw that I had gotten a voicemail, and when I saw the name, I was like, ‘Is this the phone call that we were all waiting for?’ So, I called her back, and she pretty much said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, we just identified Jane Doe. We have found her sister, and the amount of coverage on this missing person is amazing... I mean it was such an overwhelming moment... just to finally be able to put a name to our Jane Doe who didn’t have a name for 48 years. So just an incredible feeling—a pinnacle moment in my career for sure..”
Because Maryann was working simultaneously on her end to get the word out about her missing sister, Linda Doyle, with a modicum of internet sleuthing, was able to immediately verify the truth of their DNA discovery.
The next step was to break the news to Patricia’s now-58-year-old sister, Maryann, who was living in northeast Tennessee, 700 miles from East Haven, Connecticut.
Joseph Murgo: “We decided we wanted to get her the information as soon as possible, so we called the Sullivan County Tennessee Sheriff’s Department. He said, ‘Give me 15 minutes. I’m gonna shoot over to her house, and I’m going to get you on the phone with her as soon as I get there.’”
Joseph Murgo: “It was about fifteen minutes to the second. I was in the chief’s office with myself, deputy chief, my chief, and another investigator... He said, ‘Captain, I have Maryann Collette here on the other end of the phone.’ And I don’t even know how I said it or what I said... We were all choking back tears... it’s such an emotional moment... But I basically told her that her sister had been identified. She was a Jane Doe homicide victim that had been discovered in 1975.”
Joseph Murgo: “She fell out crying. We were all crying. It was just an emotional moment for every single one of us. It was just a moment I’ll never forget as long as I live.”
Maryann was deeply moved to learn that, in her 48-year search, she was not alone.
Maryann: “That is incredibly beautiful. To know that there was this whole town of people—we’re talking about a lot of people—invested in this that cared so much about her and didn’t even know who she was. To me that’s my knowing. Because you feel so alone. ‘Cause for the longest time it was just me. Just to find out that so many total strangers care that much... It’s really really hard to describe. ‘Cause if so many people hadn’t cared, she just would’ve been forgotten about, and I never would’ve found her. There’s no way I would’ve found her.”
Things moved quickly—this dynamite news would be difficult to keep quiet for long, and Captain Murgo wanted Maryann to help him announce it to the world.
April 2023 - The Press Conference
Maryann: “They gave us a police escort to the cemetery [before the press conference] because they wanted me to have some privacy with my sister without there being any press around. So we go up to the cemetery, and it was a grayish day, and it wasn’t raining yet, but it was one of those gray days. Now my sister and I loved the rain. We used to take ‘dancing in the rain’ quite literally. So they walked us (Maryann and her family) over to the gravesite and I asked them to say a prayer with me, and then I said, ‘God, here comes the rain.’ One of the detectives even said, ‘That was creepy...’”
Joseph Murgo: “The skies opened up on us... poured on us... and after learning a little bit about Patricia, she loved the rain, which was incredible. So as you can imagine, Maryann felt that that was her sister reuniting with her and the family.”
The group moved from State Street Cemetery back to East Haven Town Hall to face a sea of cameras and microphones.
Maryann: “I was absolutely terrified. My teeth were literally chattering as we walked in the door. Whatever came out of my mouth, came out of my mouth, but I was in complete terror. My husband was behind me, and my daughter was standing next to me, and I don’t think I could’ve done that without them there.”
After they announced her identity, they revealed a poster board that showed side-by-side the composite sketch of East Haven Jane Doe with an actual photograph of Patricia. The similarities were immediately evident.
Current theories / efforts
After the dust settled from the press conference, the East Haven PD returned to their files to see if knowing Patricia’s identity would change their understanding of the case.
Joseph Murgo: “Joe Izzo was the initial investigator at the time, and he never gave up on the case. He’s 81 years old now. We just had him in yesterday, just to pick his brain, just to show him some of the reports that he submitted at the time. He’s still a wealth of knowledge, and that case just never left him. You can imagine he was thrilled to find out that we had finally identified her. It was important to us to get him back in here to get his eyes on his initial reports just because of how accurate some of the information was.”
He’s still trying to pin down the exact timeframe that Patricia disappeared. It’s hard to explain.
Joseph Murgo: “She hadn’t been heard from or seen since... they’re placing it at 1973 or 1974. So that would mean two different summers—definitely one but possibly two summers—where I’m sure they wouldn’t allow their student body to live on campus over the summer for those two or three months, so she would’ve had to have come home at least during the summer of ’73 and ’74. They hadn’t heard from her for those two years, and then she was found dead in East Haven in the summer of ’75. So, three years of her being unaccounted for... that’s why it leads us to believe that if the boarding school theory does exist, and she met up with a friend, and she tried to get to Maine, she likely got to Maine, maybe stayed in Maine for a while, and then left...”
East Haven investigators are in search of any transfer paperwork or school records of Patricia in both Morgantown, New Jersey, and Monticello, New York. Captain Murgo believes that her religious upbringing might give them an advantage in their search. Maryann said that the only reference to Monticello, New York, was in text message from her stepmother.
East Haven Police have searched through their old court records and police files for any mention of Patricia, but many of those records are now gone—they don’t retain records of low-level crimes.
We asked if he had an operating theory on where the killer lived.
Joseph Murgo: “We do tend to think that whoever killed her was from the area. Whether or not they picked her up somewhere else while she hitchhiked, that’s yet to be determined, but we do—based on some of the initial reporting that was done when the case was hot and considering how accurate the information was—we do think her killer was local.”
The Samantha Glenner theory still looms large in the minds of investigators.
Joseph Murgo: “That was a suspect that they focused in on in the 80s and 90s based solely on the similarity in both homicides. And the connection to Maine was very interesting once we identified Patricia. But that’s where it ends. Yes, [Glenner] lived in Maine and lived in East Haven and dumped the body in pretty close proximity to where he lived. They were never able to discover any other evidence that related him to the crime. So it’s hard to tell whether those aspects of the crime were just coincidences or if he was one of the main suspects.”
Glenner just died in October of 2022, so even if she were found to be responsible, there would never be a trial.
Unanswered questions
There are many unanswered questions in this case—particularly about the crucial timeframe in Patricia’s life between the time she was 15 and 18.
First and foremost, what boarding school did she go to? Why was she sent there? How long did she attend? And what was the school’s reputation?
If she did, in fact, run away from the boarding school, when did she leave and why? If she left with a friend, what is their name?
And lastly, what did she do between the time that she ran away and the time that she was found murdered? Maryann is still haunted by this:
Maryann: “With me it all comes down to not so much who killed my sister. It’s more, who was she there at the end? Which sounds strange, but what led her to be there is my question.”
Joseph Murgo: “We want anybody who has knowledge of her at all—who’s ever known her—to reach out to us because we need to start from day one and move forward. So anybody that ever crossed paths with Patricia, who may have gone to school with her—even if it was the school back in New Jersey before she was sent to the boarding school—we want them to reach out to us. And if Patricia ever made it to Maine and anybody has any remembrance of her in Maine, we want them to reach out to us as well.”
Why wasn’t Patricia Newsom reported missing?
I wondered what confluence of factors led to Patricia having not been reported missing. One of the most significant is that her biological mother, Betty, had died when she was 11 years old. The second is that Don and his new wife Mary Ann Wigmore had limited contact with Betty’s extended family—particularly Patricia’s maternal grandparents. Third is that Don didn’t consider raising the children a fundamental part of his responsibility—he was focused on his career—and the woman that he married, Mary Ann Wigmore, had a difficult relationship with Don’s teenage daughter. Still, the fact that she was never reported missing is hard to swallow.
Maryann: “I think it was a symptom of the times. I think it was a symptom of my dad just thinking, ‘She’s pissed off and she’ll get back to me. I’ll hear from her.’ And I think it was also, don’t blow the image—the upper-middle-class nice Dutch colonial... all that. I just think that what it really came down to is my stepmother just disregarded her, and I think that my dad really did think that she would get back home at some point.”
And lastly, Don died 5 years after Patricia disappeared, leaving only her stepmother and siblings as the potential torch-bearers in the search. Still, Maryann always knew that if she were in real trouble, she had someone to call: her father.
Remembering Patricia
Her sheet-metal casket has held her body in purgatory for 48 years. She will be exhumed a second and final time, and her body will be cremated, in accordance with the wishes of her family. Maryann will keep Patricia’s cremains with her for a while in Tennessee because, she explains, “quite frankly, we’ve been apart too long.” She’ll reunite Patricia with her mother, Betty, and the rest of the Clinton clan, in Philadelphia, at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, scattering her ashes amongst the well-cared-for grounds and gravestones. It will be a homecoming for Maryann as well—she has never visited the grave of her mother, the mother she lost at 3 years old. Maryann, looking to the future, said, “That is everything [to me]. Tell me that's not beautiful.”
Maryann may take a moment to reflect on the few memories that she still has of her late sister: her love of singing, her favorite band (Simon & Garfunkel) and her favorite song (“The Sound of Silence.”) She participated in choirs and glee clubs.
Maryann: “She was a very loving, caring human being. She would’ve been a force for good in the world. I really kinda idolized her when she was younger. I guess that’s kinda normal for a sister. But I also feel like she protected me in a lot of ways. She had a comforting presence. You could talk to her when things got turbulent. I think she just tried to make things better for me but she had a little attitude.”
Maryann remembers Patricia as a pacifist and a budding hippie—a flower child who wore her hair long. She remembers her as a jokester—the ‘laugh box’ that Tricia used to prank Maryann. She remembers the bad French words that Tricia taught her from her high school language classes.
But this playful childlike Patricia was lost to time and supplanted by another image.
Maryann: “It’s hard in a way because you can’t have a discussion about this without the words bound, naked, dumped, ditch, tarp... all those words... and you have the fear that that’s what she’ll be reduced to. And for awhile, you know, maybe that’s what she was reduced to. But not anymore. Because now she’s not Jane Doe. She’s not East Haven Jane Doe anymore. She’s Patricia. And that makes a difference.”
Maryann said, "Whatever led up to [her murder], that was one moment in time. And there have been decades and decades and decades of love shown to this girl that desperately needed it. She a was a lovely human being. [I know] she would be really happy to know how well-loved she was. Even if she if wasn't well-loved in life, she surely was in death."
Patricia’s killer may still be out there, anxiously watching the recent developments in the case, perhaps listening to this podcast, wondering whether the remaining puzzle pieces will be assembled into a complete picture of a conviction. Someone took Patricia’s life, and perhaps there is time left yet for justice.
If you have any information on the murder of Patricia Newsom, please contact Capt. Joe Murgo of the East Haven Police at (203) 468-3820.
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, Patricia Newsom: East Haven Jane Doe Identified. To hear Patricia’s full story and more from the interviews with Maryann Collette and Captain Murgo, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.
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Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Newsom (Patricia’s mother)
Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Newsom (Patricia’s mother)
Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Newsom (Patricia’s mother)
Patricia Newsom (~12 years old)
Patricia Newsom (~10 years old)
Maryann Newsom (left), Patricia Newsom (center), Peter Newsom (right)
Patricia Newsom (~13 years old), last known photo
Patricia Newsom (~13 years old), last known photo, touched up by unknown artist
Peter Newsom, Patricia’s younger brother, died at 28 years old
Aerial photography of Bradlees Dept Store, 1975 (Shared with Murder, She Told by the East Haven Police Dept)
Bradlees Dept Store, 1975 (shared with Murder, She Told by the East Haven Police Dept)
East Haven Jane Doe composite, 1975
Artistic sketch based upon East Haven Jane Doe composite, 1975 (unknown artist)
State Street Cemetery (Hamden, CT)
East Haven PD Captain Joseph Murgo at State Street Cemetery (left)
Map of State Street Cemetery (Shared with Murder, She Told by the East Haven Police Dept)
USDA employee operating a GPR (ground penetrating radar) unit, locating the burial site of East Haven Jane Doe
Sounding rod being operated to determine the material of the caskets buried below
Elizabeth “Betty” Newsom’s headstone, Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Cheltenham, PA; future location where Patricia’s cremains will be scattered
Herbert “Don” Newsom, buried on Long Island at Calverton National Cemetery
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Connecticut Post, Hartford Courant, New Haven Register, North Haven Citizen, Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Journal (Meriden, CT), here.
Written by various authors including Allan Drury, Justin Muszynski, Lisa Backus, Meghan Friedmann, Michelle Tuccitto, Terry Sutton, and Virginia D. Sederis.
Photos
Photos from Google Maps, East Haven Police Department, FindAGrave, and Maryann (Newsom) Collette.
Interviews
Special thanks to Maryann (Newsom) Collette and East Haven Police Captain Joseph Murgo.
Online written sources
'Descendants of Mesias (Cyrus) Hall' (Annette Potter Family Genealogy)
'Herbert Donald Newsom' (Find a Grave), 2/25/2000
'Patricia Meleady “Trisha” Newsom' (Find a Grave), 10/25/2007
'East Haven Jane Doe' (Stories of the Unsolved), 5/11/2019
'New Haven County Jane Doe' (Cold Case New England), 7/11/2022, by Jordan Sears
'Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Clinton Newsom' (Find a Grave), 1/15/2021
'93UFCT - Unidentified Female' (DoeNetwork)
'Found Deceased -Patricia Newsom' (WordPress), 1/13/2023
'East Haven Cold Case: Murdered Teen Jane Doe Identified...' (Patch), 4/17/2023, by Ellyn Santiago
'Major Development - 1975 Jane Doe Homicide' (Facebook), 4/17/2023
'Peter Gregory “Pete” Newsom' (Find a Grave), 4/18/2023
'FindPatriciaNewsom' (Facebook), 5/14/2023, by Maryann Newsome Collette
Credits
Vocal performance, audio editing, and research by Kristen Seavey
Writing, research, and photo editing by Byron Willis
Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey