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A Florida woman named Maria Telles-Gonzalez was found dead in South Carolina's Lowcountry region in 1995, but it took decades before modern genealogy testing was able to help detectives identify her remains.
Even since they did in December, they've been unable to locate two persons of interest in the case, which remains unsolved.
The saga has unfolded in the same region where Alex Murdaugh, 54, is now convicted of killing his son and wife.
The Murdaughs are not tied to Telles-Gonzalez's case, but the family exerted influence over the prosecutor's office in the area for years.
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Maria Telles-Gonzalez was later identified as the woman whose body was found in South Carolina in 1995. (Beaufort County Sheriff's Office)
The Murdaugh family, prominent in the region through their private law practice and decades-long control of the 14th Circuit Solicitor's Office, attracted national attention in the wake of the double murders of Murdaugh's wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, at Moselle in 2021, for which Alex Murdaugh has recently been sent to prison for life.
He gunned them down near the dog kennels and called 911 to claim that he had stumbled upon the scene on his way home from visiting his terminally ill father, who died days later.
While there have been other unsolved homicides in that Lowcountry region, one has received sparse attention – the murder of a woman who spent decades as an unidentified Jane Doe, uncovered again Thursday with a search of unidentified bodies in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System within the 14th Circuit.
A state highway department worker in Yemassee uncovered a grisly scene in 1995: A woman who had been strangled to death and dumped in the drainage ditch along Cotton Hall Road.
The Beaufort County Sheriff's Office is looking for information on this unidentified man in connection with the cold case investigation into the murder of Maria Telles-Gonzalez, who was found dead in 1995 but remained unidentified until November. He is believed to have been her boyfriend at the time she went missing from her family's home in May 1995. (Beaufort County Sheriff's Office)
The victim was wearing only her underwear, and there were no signs of her purse, identification or any other belongings. According to SLED, there was evidence she had been killed somewhere else and dumped along the roadway.
Police had only a physical description to go by that included two surgical scars – one on her neck and one on her abdomen. The case went cold.
In 1999, cold case investigators took another look at the case and could not find any missing persons cases matching the victim's profile.
In 2004, Beaufort investigators learned of a missing woman named Sybil Warren, who matched their victim's description, however DNA testing came back negative. Another possible lead in 2011 went nowhere for the same reason.
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The Beaufort County Sheriff's Office is looking for information on this woman in connection with the cold case investigation into the murder of Maria Telles-Gonzalez, who was found dead in 1995 but remained unidentified until November. Her name might be "Patricia." (Beaufort County Sheriff's Office)
In December 2020, cold case investigators turned to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia firm that specializes in forensic genealogy, which produced a list of potential distant relatives.
Beaufort investigators announced in December that with Parabon's help, they'd identified her as Maria Telles-Gonzalez of Kissimmee, Florida. They learned that she had never been reported missing, although she had last been seen by her husband and three children in May 1995.
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Investigators were working to identify two persons of interest in the case – a woman whose name "may be" Patricia, and an unidentified man who may have been her boyfriend.
Anyone with information on Telles-Gonzalez's murder or disappearance is asked to contact investigator Bob Bromage at 843-816-8013 or via email at robertb@bcgov.net.
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