Snohomish cold case detectives ID missing woman 41 years after Lake Loma disappearance
Jun 16, 2022, 1:33 PM | Updated: Jun 20, 2022, 9:30 am
Alice Lou Williams (Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office)
(Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office)
Snohomish County Sheriff’s detectives have matched skeletal remains found in Skykomish to a missing person case dating back to 1981.
In 2009, US Forest Service surveyors found a partial human cranium in a ravine on Beckler Road. No other remains were discovered to help identification.
The lack of human remains made the inference of basic facts about the deceased near impossible: detectives could only gather the partial cranium belonged to a woman in her 40s.
The FBI performed extensive genetic testing on the remains to no avail.
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In 2017, the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Detective tapped the DNA Doe Project to build a DNA profile of the deceased, again to limited success. Detectives tried again in 2019 with DNA Solutions, a laboratory in Oklahoma City, for microarray DNA testing. The remains were insufficient to create a genetic profile.
In March 2022, Othram, Inc. in The Woodlands, Texas, was able to extract enough DNA to allow detectives to match the remains against genealogical histories. GEDmatch, along with Family Tree DNA/ Gene by Gene, was used to match the remains to several families.
Detectives discovered that Alice Lou Williams was a close genetic match, a woman reported missing under suspicious circumstances from her Lake Loma recreational cabin in July 1981.
On June 10, 2022, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Matt Lacy officially identified Alice Lou Williams and classified her death as a homicide.
Anyone with information about this case is asked to call the Sheriff’s Office tip line at (425) 388-3845.
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