On the morning of Sunday, October 29th, 2006, two men drove down a dirt road onto an oil lease off Fritz Swanson Road, just north of Highway 31 outside of Kilgore, Texas. They had come out to do some target shooting, but when they got down there, they smelled smoke. Off in the trees, a fire was burning on top of a wood pile, with something lying across it. One of them thought it was a mannequin.

Halloween was only a couple of days away, and he figured somebody had set a dummy on fire as an early prank. It was the smell that told them it wasn’t a mannequin. When they got closer, they could see it was a person. She was lying face down on the wood pile, and she was still burning.

Gregg County Sheriff’s deputies came out to the lease, and near the wood pile they found a gas can. Whoever had set that fire had probably done it only minutes before the two men walked up on it. Out at the gate by the entrance to the lease, investigators found tire tracks in the mud. They thought somebody had tried to get out that way—somebody who didn’t know the area very well.

The fire was so bad that at first investigators couldn’t even say whether they were looking at a man or a woman, or what race she was. There was no purse anywhere near her, and nobody could find any form of ID. What they did find was in the pocket of her jeans: two $20 bills, both of them charred. The jeans were a size 7/8 from a brand called One Tough Babe, and the top she had on was a sweater or shirt in a pale shade of purple.

Her body went to Dallas for an autopsy. The fire had burned more than 98% of it. What investigators could tell was that she was a young woman somewhere in her late teens or early twenties, white or possibly Hispanic. She was about 5’4″, and estimates of her weight ran from 96 up to 120 pounds.

The hair found next to her head was reddish blonde or light brown. There was bruising around her throat that could be consistent with strangulation, and there was hardly any carbon in her lungs, which told investigators she was already dead before the fire, and that she may have been killed somewhere else and brought out to that wood pile. Her teeth were perfect, and two of them were baby teeth that had never come out. With the fire doing what it did, nobody could officially say what killed her.

But the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office worked it as a homicide from the very first day. So now the county had a murdered young woman on its hands and no idea who she was. That fall, the sheriff’s office went to the public for help. A forensic anthropologist working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used her skull to build a clay reconstruction of what her face might have looked like, and that face went out on the news right along with her description.

The tips poured in. None of them could tell investigators who she was. They ran her DNA and her dental records against hundreds of missing people all over the United States. Nothing matched.

Closer to home, the names of several missing women came up, and investigators ran those women down one by one and ruled them out. One name came up again and again: Brandy Wells. She had last been seen leaving a nightclub in Longview on August 3rd, 2006—less than three months before the fire on the oil lease—and people kept calling the sheriff’s office about her. But DNA from Brandy’s family and her dental records both ruled her out.

On December 23rd, 2006, two days before Christmas, Gregg County buried the young woman from the oil lease in White Cemetery in West Longview. Her grave got a small flat marker that said Jane Doe, along with her plot number—block 1, 14A—and the date she was buried. People in Longview who had never met her started coming out to that grave and leaving flowers on it. In March of 2007, a member of Websleuths opened a thread about her and wrote that this one should be easy to solve, with a little sleuthing.

In almost no time, people were posting pictures of missing girls they thought she might be. One commenter noticed the brand of her jeans and wrote that it was sadly ironic considering her fate. That same commenter would later be the one who started calling her Lavender Doe, and eventually the sheriff’s office would start using that name as well. Over the years, that thread would run to 36 pages.

Out of everything in the police description, what so many of the strangers following her case kept noticing was her teeth. There was a pencil sketch of her, too. In 2008, the sheriff’s office put her information and her face back out to the public all over again. Lieutenant Kirk Hadex went through missing-person files for years and compared her DNA to the families of missing children.

None of it gave him a name. And so, on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013—almost seven years since they had buried her—Hadex went out to White Cemetery with a forensic anthropologist, and they dug her back up. They removed her skull from the casket and brought it over to Good Shepherd Medical Center, where it went through a CT scan. The scan was loaded onto a disc and sent up to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia.

Experts there would build a face on top of a 3D image of her skull, adding it one virtual layer of muscle at a time. Hadex told the Longview News-Journal that they would finally get a picture of what experts believed this girl had looked like. Later that fall, he told a TV reporter in Shreveport that it had been a vicious crime, and that she had to have gone through hell. The new face came out in February of 2014.

It was a great computer rendering of a young woman with her lips slightly parted. The sheriff’s office put a phone number and an email address for Hadex on the release, so that anybody who thought they knew her could reach him directly. And because so many people had asked about Brandy Wells over the years, the sheriff’s office explained one more time that DNA and dental records had already ruled her out. Starting in 2015, a woman on Reddit put up a post about her every year, calling her the girl with the perfect smile, and crossed off every missing person who had been ruled out.

Her teeth were so perfect that the woman wondered if somebody in her family was a dentist. At some point, Kirk Hadex retired from the sheriff’s office, and the marker at White Cemetery still said Jane Doe. In the fall of 2018, a woman named Amanda Gottschalk got a call with an opportunity she couldn’t turn down, from Jacksonville, Florida, about a case out of East Texas. The people calling were working with a lieutenant from the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office named Eddie Hope, and Hope was going to need her DNA.

Amanda had spent years making calls of her own. About every six months, the family would start the whole search all over again, calling around and looking anywhere they could think to look. Amanda would say, every single time, it was like opening the old wound back up. But the timing was hard.

When the sheriff’s office first reached out, the family was in the middle of a personal matter, and so Hope held off and gave them a little time to deal with that before he brought up another family member. A year earlier, in 2017, a man named Kevin Lord had come across the case while he was trying to match missing women to unidentified bodies in Texas. Before long, he found the Websleuths thread, too. It was her teeth that made him take a closer look.

One of the missing Texas girls he had been following had distinctive teeth as well. Kevin took his theory to Lieutenant Eddie Hope, who had inherited the case. That girl had already been ruled out, but Hope was grateful anybody cared. Kevin was a former computer programmer studying to become a private investigator.

When his program required an externship, he brought her case to a group of volunteer genealogists—which is exactly how the DNA Doe Project entered the picture. The DNA Doe Project had been started by Margaret Press and Colleen Fitzpatrick, and it ran on volunteers. The way it worked was simple: they would take DNA from an unidentified person and look for people who shared some of it in a public genealogy database called GEDmatch. Sometimes they got lucky, and a half-sister and aunt came back on the list.

But most of the time, all they got was second, third, and fourth cousins, and the volunteers had to build out entire family trees for every single one of those people and figure out where those trees met. When Press and Fitzpatrick started out, a lot of police agencies didn’t understand what they were offering, and they had to pick the ones that were open to it. That changed in the spring of 2018, when the same kind of family-tree work led investigators in California to the Golden State Killer. In July of 2018, the DNA Doe Project started working on Lavender Doe’s case with the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office, and Kevin Lord took the lead.

People donated about $1,400 to pay for the lab work on her DNA. When her results came back, her closest matches were a second cousin once removed, and a bunch of third and fourth cousins. One of the first things the volunteers figured out was that she had Czech ancestry. Kevin wasn’t doing it alone.

Volunteers like Lorie Gaff and Missy Kosky were building trees right along with him. The volunteers worked those cousins down until they found a woman named Valerie, who lived about 30 minutes from the oil lease where the body had been found. Kevin thought to himself, “This is it. We solved the case.

We found Lavender’s mother. ” But when Lieutenant Hope drove out to talk to her, Valerie had no idea who in her family it could possibly be. Valerie wasn’t her mother. When they compared her DNA to the girl on the wood pile, it turned out she was most likely a first cousin to the girl’s mother.

But Valerie’s family had more than 25 cousins in it, and the volunteers started building down through every one of them. That’s how they got to a woman named Robin Navatney. One of Valerie’s uncles had a daughter from an earlier marriage that Valerie didn’t even know about, and that daughter was Robin. She was the right age to be the mother of the girl on the wood pile, and at one point she had been with a man named John Dodd.

Kevin Lord would say that, from what they would piece together, Robin’s life hadn’t been very stable. Robin wasn’t going to be able to answer any questions for them. According to her death notice, she had died in her home in Muncie, Indiana, on September 22nd, 2006, when she was 50—about five weeks before the fire on the oil lease. But Robin and John Dodd had a daughter together.

The daughter was exactly the right age. Her social security number wasn’t being used, and when volunteers went looking for her online, they couldn’t find a Facebook page or Instagram account for her anywhere. What Kevin did find was an old MySpace page that belonged to one of her nephews. Very quickly after that, he was looking for another page that could have been hers.

In one picture, she was hugging a dog. In another, she was posing in a white miniskirt with long strawberry blonde hair. One of the volunteers was sitting in a coffee shop when it all came together, and would say later that everything just seemed to fit. They sent everything they had on the daughter to Lieutenant Eddie Hope.

Hope found out that the daughter’s father, John Dodd, was living on the streets down in Jacksonville, Florida. And John had a grown daughter living there—a woman named Amanda. Amanda was a half-sister to Dana. When Lieutenant Hope reached out to her, Amanda looked at the picture of the reconstructions, and she lost it.

She started crying. “I knew Lavender Doe was Dana,” she would say. Amanda would say later that her family knew immediately it was her, but knowing it and proving it weren’t the same. A DNA test went out to Amanda.

At the end of November, Kevin Lord told a TV station in Tyler that volunteers had come across some good leads, and that he was hopeful her case would be resolved soon. What the people working on it wanted more than anything was to see a real name carved into her headstone at White Cemetery. That same month, a few of the volunteers drove to Longview and stood at her grave, and one of them brought flowers the color of lavender. On January 29th, 2019, the results confirmed it.

Amanda would describe the moment Lieutenant Hope gave her the news as everything around her just stopping. After that, she said, it was like she could finally let out a breath. She could stop running the same searches over and over, and start working on getting her sister some justice. That same day, the DNA Doe Project announced on Facebook that it had identified Lavender Doe, but it didn’t say who she was.

Lavender Doe was Dana Lynn Dodd, Amanda’s little sister. She was only 21 years old. Two days after the confirmation, Amanda’s mother passed away. She was Dana’s stepmother, and Dana called her mom.

Amanda would say that was the hardest part, because her mom was the one who raised Dana. She died knowing that Dana had been found. On February 11th, 2019, the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office released Dana’s name to the public. She was the 10th murder victim the DNA Doe Project had put a name on.

Dana Lynn Dodd was born on September 6th, 1985. Amanda would say their father wasn’t really involved in Dana’s life, and Dana’s mother wasn’t around much either, so for a while she got bounced around between family members. She was definitely not a dentist’s daughter; her teeth had most likely just come in that way. She spent part of her childhood out in Arizona, and when she was 12, she came to Florida to live with Amanda and her husband.

Amanda was her half-sister and nine years older. Amanda would say Dana was a part of the family almost immediately. She laughed a lot, liked to travel, and was always up for going to the park, playing cards, or throwing a football around in the yard with her nephews. One of those nephews was in the first grade at the time, and Dana spent time teaching him math.

In Amanda’s house, the family sat down at dinner together, and they would go around the table asking each other how their day had been. Dana loved that. She told Amanda she looked forward to it because she had never had that when she was living in Arizona. And she looked up to Amanda’s mom, because she knew that she loved her.

In October of 2000, when she was 15, Dana left home with a boyfriend. The family would later hear that the boyfriend had died of a drug overdose in Ohio, and so they figured that if Dana was anywhere, she was somewhere up north. Amanda, her brother, and older sister kept searching up there through the years. One of her nephews messaged just about every Dana Dodd he could find on MySpace, and later he went looking for her on Facebook, too.

None of them were ever her. He was the nephew whose old MySpace page Kevin Lord had found. The family says Dana dropped out of their lives completely in 2003, and starting that year, they filed missing-person reports in more than one state, knowing only that she had gone to Ohio. Amanda would later say that they always wished Dana would just pick up the phone and call them, because she knew they loved her.

But none of them had any reason to think she was in East Texas. On September 6th, 2006, Dana turned 21. Her family was still looking for her up north. In October of 2013, the same week they dug up Dana so they could find out what she looked like, Lieutenant Kirk Hadex gave the Longview News-Journal a name.

It wasn’t hers. It was Joseph Wayne Burnett. Hadex told the paper that Burnett was a known sex offender, and the sheriff’s office had developed him as its suspect. When the TV station in Shreveport ran its story that November, it named him too, and described him as a convicted sex offender with a history of assaults on women.

Burnett was from Longview. He had been sentenced in 1997 for sexual assault in Rusk County, and by 2006 his job was painting oil wells. When the semen from the autopsy was tested, the DNA profile went into CODIS, the national DNA database. When it came back to Joseph Burnett, investigators talked to him not long after the body was found.

Burnett told them that yes, he had been with her, but he said he didn’t kill her. Investigators couldn’t place him out on the oil lease. What they could prove was that Burnett was living up in Upshur County and hadn’t registered there as a sex offender. In July of 2007, he was locked up for it, and he got 10 years.

He came up for parole in May of 2008 and didn’t get it. When they dug Dana up in 2013, the sheriff’s office was hoping it would finally give them hard evidence against him. He still wasn’t charged. In February of 2015, Joseph Burnett got out.

On July 19th, 2018, a woman reported her daughter missing to the Longview police. Her daughter’s name was Felicia Pearson. Felicia was 28 and a mother, and she had been living with her boyfriend at the Contesta Inn in Longview. When Longview police called the sheriff’s office about her that same day, the boyfriend listed on that report was Joseph Burnett.

Felicia’s mother believed she had been last seen at the motel with Burnett on July 15th. Burnett’s story was that he had left to get cigarettes, and when he came back, she was gone. But Longview police found out that Felicia hadn’t been at the motel on the day her mother thought she was last seen there. While Longview police were out searching for Felicia, the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office started checking up on Burnett and found out, once again, he had not registered his address.

They got a warrant for his arrest on July 24th. That was the same day Felicia’s body was found in the woods down a dirt road off West Birdsong Street. Burnett was picked up in Upshur County the next day. At first, he denied having anything to do with it.

About a month later, on August 21st, he gave detectives a full confession to killing Felicia. And then he started talking about a woman he had burned years before. On Monday, authorities announced Burnett had reportedly confessed to the July murder of Felicia Pearson and the 2006 killing of an unidentified woman known only as Lavender Doe. Six days later, Longview Police Chief Mike Bishop and Gregg County Sheriff Maxey Cerliano held a joint press conference.

They announced that Burnett had confessed to killing Felicia Pearson and also a woman everybody knew as Lavender Doe, and that a grand jury had indicted him for both murders. Burnett was being held in Gregg County Jail on bonds totaling $2. 5 million, and he was on suicide watch. Going by his confession, the sheriff’s office believed that on Sunday, October 28th, 2006, Dana was possibly walking the parking lot at the Walmart Supercenter on Ford Street in Longview, over by the lawn and garden area, trying to sell items out of a brochure to people going in and out of the store.

According to Burnett, she walked up to him too, and he didn’t buy anything, but he let her get into his vehicle. Police later said she got in with him somewhere between that Walmart and a Chick-fil-A out on Loop 281. The sheriff’s office said he killed her somewhere else, between 8:15 and 10 that night, and in his confession he said he strangled her with rope. Burnett claimed she had taken some money from him, and that’s why he did it.

But he left $40 in her pocket, because he said that was money she had earned. Then he put her on that wood pile out on the oil lease and set her on fire. Burnett never knew her name. The closest he could come was telling detectives that she might have gone by Ashley.

Sheriff Cerliano said that what they learned about her identity from the confession was limited. And so the sheriff’s office went back out to the public with her description and just asked who she was. Dana was last seen alive on a parking-lot video from that Walmart, selling her magazine subscriptions. Her best friend from high school would say that at some point they had skipped town to join a traveling crew that went around selling magazines.

Nobody had tracked down exactly which crew it was, but The Atlantic reported in 2019 that it was most likely how she ended up in Texas. And so, by the time Lieutenant Hope got in touch with Amanda in the fall of 2018, the man who had killed her sister had already been sitting in the Gregg County Jail for months. Burnett pleaded not guilty. Amanda told the Longview paper that her family would be in a courtroom for every single day of his trial.

In December of 2019, both cases were set to go in front of a jury in July of 2020. That trial never happened. The district attorney’s office spent about eight months working out a plea deal, and prosecutors said the families were on board with it. On December 15th, 2020, Joseph Burnett pleaded guilty to both murders.

He got 50 years for each of them, plus 50 years for failing to register as a sex offender, all running at the same time, and he was to serve 25 years before he could even be considered for parole. As part of the deal, he also gave up his right to appeal. The district attorney said that this way, nobody had to go through a long, drawn-out trial, and the families didn’t have to be exposed to the horrors of what happened. In court, Burnett said, “I want to get this over with.

I want everybody to get their closure. ” Then the families got their turn. Burnett stood next to his attorney and looked up at them the whole time while they spoke, and family members huddled close around each person who got up to talk. Felicia’s aunt told the court that Felicia was hardworking, outgoing, the kind of person some people would call the life of the party.

Felicia’s brother said she had never given up on the family. He talked about the two of them playing together as kids, and how their children were going to keep asking questions about their mother. Then he told Burnett that the next day was his birthday, and that every year from now on he would be grieving on it instead of celebrating. Then Amanda spoke.

She said that Dana would never get the chance to know her nephews growing up, or walk down the aisle, or become a mother herself. Speaking right to Burnett, she said she would never forgive him, and that it wasn’t because of hate—it was because he didn’t deserve it. She said that the last 15 years had been hard, because they had spent them wondering where Dana was and whether she was safe. “Instead, we got a phone call saying that some monster took her life away.

”

Afterward, District Attorney Tom Watson called it pure evil. He said there was no rhyme or reason to these murders other than that Joseph Burnett was an evil person. And he said that once they were able to put a name on her and sit down with her family, it really hit home for the people prosecuting it. Amanda has said that whenever Burnett does come up for parole, she plans to be at every one of his hearings, no matter how old she is by then.

Amanda’s family could have taken Dana home to Florida. They decided to leave her in Longview. For years, people who never knew her name had been driving out to that grave to take care of it and leave flowers. To the family, that meant she was a part of Longview.

Amanda told the people who came out to the memorial that they didn’t want to take her away from them. When she started to explain why it meant so much for Dana to be in Longview with the people here, her brother finished the sentence for her. He called them her true family. In September of 2019, Amanda and her husband flew in from Florida with her brother and his son.

Lieutenant Eddie Hope and several other officers from the sheriff’s office came to the service. Hope said it touched his heart that the family would leave her there. The family said they plan to come back to Longview once or twice a year to visit her. They set her new headstone on September 6th, 2019, and that would have been her 34th birthday.

Amanda said it was important to give Dana her name back on her birthday—the same day it had been given to her in the first place. The family also set a gold and black metal owl at her grave. Amanda said that to her, owls are always keeping watch.

Her stone now says Dana Lynn Dodd.