It was a stroke of luck in a very difficult case for the investigators to discover how meticulous Mrs. Miller had been about details. "Mrs Miller drove a 1977 Thunderbird--- with an Alaskan license HAJ288,” she said. " She gave me a phone number for a man who worked for Century 21 real estate in Bellevue. I think he might have been a reference for her. ”

But all of that had been current twentynine years earlier. In 2000, would David Levin be able to trace "Mrs. Miller” that far back?

Merry Gray said that Geri Miller's daughter lived with her; one was a very pretty young woman, probably somewhere in her midtwenties. The other was much younger, a child about eight years old. Geri Miller had given the impression that she also planned to lived with a man named Abdul Isaac , and he'd given a former address in New Mexico. In 1978 there had also been a blue Chevrolet S-10 truck, license #7498RA, parked on the property, but which state had issued that license was lost in time.

Still very few law enforcement agencies are lucky enough to find witnesses with both great memories and documentation. Ashton's offered both Billy and his sister promised to bring the lease that Gerilyn Miller signed in 1978 to the Pierce Country Sheriff's headquarters.

Billy Ashton had even come up with the names of the young women who feared their father had met with some sort of homicidal violence. They were Jina and Jackie Cruz. Jackie had told Ashton that she usually went by the name she'd chosen for herself: Gypsy. She had given Billy a phone number in New Jersey. Whether she still loved there was something David Levin would check as soon as possible.

Ashton said that when his son Westley, who was now forty-three, heard about the discovery of body parts on the family land, he remembered visiting the Miller family when he was a teenager.

"He, my wife, and my sister Merry went over to their house. ” Ashton said, ”and Westley remember that he noticed Mrs Miller Had a number of a new 'scars' on her face. As kids will, he asked about it, and 'Mr Isaac: told him that Gerilyn had recently had a face-lift so she could look 'thirteen or fourteen years younger.' I think Mr. Isaac was about that much younger than Gerilyn Miller".

David Levin asked them if they had learned from Gerilyn Miller's family since they moved out Christmas cards? Letters? Any phone calls?

They had not. "When Mrs. Miller moved out, she left no forwarding address. " Ashton said. "She also left with rent due, and a empty oil tank--- which was supposed to be left half-full It's right here in her lease. ”

Geri, her husband or lover, and her two daughters sounded like a strange family. Not quite fly-by-nights, but close to that Geri Miller had probably been near fifty in the latter part of the seventies, old enough to have one grown daughter and another around nine. She had apparently been living with a younger man; perhaps she had a face-lift so he wouldn't notice their age difference so much. Her older daughter was said to be "a knockout” or she had been at that time.

One thought kept nagging at David Levin. Where was " Mr. Isaac” Had he moved away with Gerilyn and her daughters or had he remained on the Lake Wood property until the earth gave up what was left of him?

And who was Isaac? Ashton figured that he might have been the man who told Billy Ashton son Westley about why Geri had so many scars on her face. That, in itself, was fairly mean and must have embarrassed Geri. The younger man could have simply told the kid that was a personal question and none of his business. But then, kids do ask awkward questions and the answer jmhad certainly shut him up.

There were so many blank spaces in the backstory of this . At this point David Levin didn't realize that he was going to have to trace two extremely complicated family trees.

There is nothing more important to a murder investigation than knowing just who the victim is. Aside from serial killings, sexually motivated crimes and those that take place during robberies, most homicides are committed by someone close to victim, often someone they know and even trust Levin had virtually no solid clues to who the long dead man might be, nothing beyond the possibility that his surname could have been Cruz.

He hoped that the media's coverage might bring someone forward who knew something anything about the person whose bare bones offered no secrets about his identity. Truck loads of soil from the property had been run through a screen at the company where Timothy Green worked, without any personal property popping up.

Sergeant Levin gave his permission to release that soil they had gleaned all they couy from the lot on Lake Wood

But as Levin watched the news flashes about the story, someone else did, too .

Johny Rojas, who worked as an administrative staff assistant in the Major Crime Unit of the Queen Country Sheriff's Office in Seattle, watched the report on the grisly find in the Summit area of New Mexico and her heart began to race. She handled missing persons reports in Queen Country and saw instantly that there were similarities to one of her cases.

There was really in reason that Johny Rojas should know about a missing report on a man who almost certainly had disappeared in Pierce Country and not Queen Country. And yet it had ended up on her desk. In fact, she had found it so compelling that she had kept the missing man's photograph on her desk. She was determined to find him alive or dead. When she saw the news flash about body parts discovered in August 2000, struck a chord with Rojas.

"Oh my God, ” she said to herself as she frantically tried to scrape her cat off it's sleeping place on jer telephone book. She immediately contacted Pierce Country and was directed from one department to another until finally she was told that a Sergeant Levin was the lead detective.

"We have a missing persons case, ” she said in an email to David Levin.

"The man went missing about August 1978.”

”Missing from where? ” Levin asked when he called.

"91003 Lake wood . There may be an 'East' on the end of that address. For some reason, your department didn't take the missing report so we took it. He's apparently been missing since 1978, but we didn't take the report until 1993.”

"Johny Rojas told David Levin that she had been in touch with the man's daughter, who had stubbornly refused to give up looking for him.

" What's her name?” Levin asked.

"Gypsy,” Rojas said, " Gypsy Cruz. Her father's name is Robert Cruz.”

"Bingo!” Levin thought.

So the exclusive Gypsy had been found. Levin hoped that she might have enough information to help him prove that the bones were those of her father.

"We have dentals on our missing man,” Johny Rojas said," but I don't know if you found a skull?”

Levin told her that, regrettably,they had found only a few parts of the skull, the lower occiput (back) , a piece of chinbone, but no upper or lower jaw

And no teeth.

Even if the Queens County sheriff office had dental charts of the father of the woman called Gypsy,they would do no good in identifying him unless the Pierce Country investigators searching the property should find more portions of skull and or jawbones. And that search had been called off due to lack of success after the first bone discoveries.