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Jessica Bettencourt (DNAID Host)
On December 20, 1987, a dog walker was walking their canine on a crushed shell roadway near the intersection of 130th Avenue and 72nd Court North, a mile northwest of Acreage Community park in Royal Palm Beach, Florida. At the edge of a wooded area, the dog took interest in something in the brush. The dog owner was shocked to peer into the undergrowth and see human bones. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and the Medical Examiner's office sent personnel to the scene in response to the dog walker's 911 call. Sure enough, skeletal human remains lying in the brush 50ft from the roadway were found and collected. Evidence at the scene was sparse. The body wore no clothing or jewelry, and there were no personal possessions lying nearby. It appeared that the Body had lain there for quite some time, as much as three years. The medical examiner's office conducted an autopsy on the remains and consulted an anthropologist. They learned that the doe was a white female in her 20s or 30s, 5 foot 1 to 5 foot 6 inches tall. She had no identifying marks or distinguishing features that could help give her a name other than brown hair with gray streaks, a fractured right clavicle from an old injury, and that she possibly could have had a back injury or arthritis. I know you're wondering about the cause of death. Unfortunately, the medical examiner was unable to determine it. There were no tool marks or bullet marks on the bones. The medical examiner officially ruled the cause of death undetermined because it could not be determined whether Jane Doe's death was natural or not. Because she was found nude with no personal items or identification, and because Jane Doe did not just perish nude in a stand of trees by accident, the case was treated as a homicide by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. The area of Palm beach county where the Jane Doe was found was rural at the time and was known as something of a dumping ground for the more populous neighboring counties like Broward and Dade. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's office had about 30 unidentified bodies from this time period on their books. Jane Doe had almost certainly been transported to the location where she was found in a vehicle, but where she came from, no one could hazard a guess. No reports of missing women from the area matched up with the dental scans collected from Jane Doe. Of course, since she was skeletonized, fingerprints were not available. And back then, there was just not much more the investigators could do to identify the woman. They published the limited information that they had in the local newspapers. They sent teletypes to other agencies, and they placed information about the Jane Doe in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Book of unidentified human remains. After the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office exhausted all avenues of investigation and failed to identify Jane Doe, her remains were put on the shelf at the office of the District 15 medical examiner. It was protocol to bury unidentified human remains if they had any tissue remaining. But this Jane Doe did not. So she was boxed up and shelved, and there she stayed for several decades. In 2005, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office collaborated with the University of North Texas center for Human Identification, which had received a grant to help clear Jane and John Doe cases through DNA testing. Palm Beach County Jane Doe's remains were sent to UNT and an STR DNA profile was successfully obtained and entered into the codis. Unidentified Human remains database for comparison against missing persons being sought by family members who had DNA on file. She was also entered into Namus as up 1213. A forensic sketch of her face was constructed and released to the public and a second was done in 2014. In 2019, Palm Beach county forensic imaging specialist Paul Moody created a clay reconstruction of Jane Doe's face using her skull. None of this helped. In 2023, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office collaborated with the District 15 Medical Examiner, Palm beach county in another effort to identify Jane Doe. In order to fund submission of a physical sample from Jane Doe to OTHRAM Labs, they used grant money from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. OTHRAM prepared a SNP profile for Jane Doe and initiated an IGG analysis by uploading her profile. OTHRAM genealogists got to work. Unfortunately, I have no details on the igg. I reached out to OTHRAM for information but did not receive a response. Their public release says only that they generated leads and communicated those leads to the Palm beach county investigators. After receiving othram's report, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office contacted relatives of Jane Doe and were eventually able to obtain a confirmatory DNA sample from her daughter Jessica that identified her in February 2024 as Missing Person Patty Lisa Lugercio Rust Patty Lisa Lugercio was born in New York on August 9, 1962 to biological mother Josephine Napoleoni. Josephine had other children and could not raise Patty, so she was adopted by Josephine's sister Elizabeth B. English and her husband Anthony Lugercio of Brooklyn. She was raised on Long island with Elizabeth and Anthony Sr's sons Stephen and Anthony Jr. And Patti attended Oce High School. There's a group photo from the 1978 yearbook that includes Patty, although no senior photo of her that we could locate. We know that she graduated from Oceanside, though she remained close throughout her life with her biological sister Josephine's daughter Denise Napoleoni, whom she called a cousin as they were raised by sisters Josephine and Elizabeth, even though they were actually siblings. Patty's adoptive brothers Anthony Jr. And Stephen moved to South Florida around 1979. Their parents, Elizabeth and her husband Anthony Sr. Soon followed. They persuaded Patty to move to South Florida in the early 80s. All the family members lived in a beachfront apartment complex owned by Anthony Sr. And Elizabeth, which was inhabited and frequented by some criminal types and often visited by police. On September 29, 1983, Stephen was arrested for cocaine trafficking. Patty's daughter Jessica told me that Patty's brothers Stephen and Anthony Jr. Were both involved in drug trafficking. On July 10, 1984, Anthony Jr. Was arrested for felony theft. Both were arrested on later dates in 1987 as well. On various dates in 1988, Anthony Jr. Was arrested and rearrested for grand theft in the third degree. As for Patti, she married Kenneth Allen Rust on November 11, 1984, in Broward, Florida. Their daughter Jessica, was born on May 17, 1985. A dissolution of marriage between Patti and Kenneth was filed on August 21, 1987, but it's unclear who filed it. Patti was last known to be living in Lauderdale by the sea in Broward county in 1987. Her unidentified remains were found December 20th of that year 50 miles away in Royal Palm beach in Palm Beach County. She was a Jane Doe there for nearly four decades. Many of Patti's family members passed away while she was unidentified. Her father of record, Anthony Leguisio Sr. Died in 2003, and Patti was listed as a surviving family member in his obituary. Her mother of record, Elizabeth, died in 2007, but Patty was not listed in her obituary at all. After Patty was identified, investigators from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's office Located her husband, Kenneth Allen Rust, and interviewed him about how his wife ended up a Jane Doe in Palm beach county in late 1987. After their marriage, Patty and Kenneth had moved from the Lugercio apartment complex around the corner to an apartment owned by Elizabeth's friend. The couple lived there with their daughter Jessica, and Kenneth traveled extensively for his work as an audio engineer. He told the modern investigators that his wife Patty, was involved in drugs and had been to rehab at least once. He said when he got back from a work trip sometime in 1987, Patty was gone. He tried to find her but couldn't. He never saw her again. Kenneth said he did not file a missing persons report on Patti because he felt she had left on her own. Interestingly, Kenneth said that he had not been the one to file the divorce petition in August of 1987. He said that Patty's parents had been the ones to file it, which no one can verify, but could possibly have been done as part of the custody proceedings involving little Jessica. It sounds as though Patty was missing before this divorce petition was filed. Investigators tried to reconstruct Patty's timeline. Patty and her daughter had a visit from her sister slash cousin Denise on February 1, 1987. The last known photo of Patty was taken at this time. On March 30th was the last deposit receipt Patty recorded in her checkbook in the amount of $88.05. Apparently money was tight for Patti and Kenneth and they often scrambled to pay the bills and were sometimes overdrafted. Patty maintained the checkbook for the shared account. Investigators learned that the last check written out of Patty's checking account and documented in her check Register was on April 15th of 1987. The check was for $45 written to Publix Supermarket. Then Patti failed to show up for her daughter's second birthday a month later on May 17. This despite the fact that according to Denise and her daughter Jessica, Patti was a diligent and loving mother, doting on her daughter, taking her on outings, maintaining a baby book for her with regular ent and enjoying being a stay at home mom. After Patty vanished, baby Jessica was taken in by the couple who had raised her mom, Patty Elizabeth and Anthony Sr. They filed an emergency petition for custody on February 19, 1988. They went on to file a child support case against Jessica's father, Kenneth Rust. In October of 1990, Detective William Springer of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, who came out of retirement to work cold cases for that agency, even though he's now in his 80s and who's a amazing work you've heard me talk about in several episodes, has done some work on Patti's case. He recently spoke to Denise, Patty's sister, who was raised as her cousin and was very close with her. Contrary to what Kenneth Rust told investigators, Denise did not believe Patti had ever been involved in drugs or been to rehab. She was a stay at home mom living in an apartment that was clean and neat. Her daughter was well cared for and there was no evidence of drug use or dependency. Jessica grew up with her family telling her and others that her mom Patty had left with friends or was an actress in California and she was going to come home. But she now knows that the couple who raised Patti, Elizabeth and Anthony Sr. Really had no idea what happened to Patti. And she recalls that they expended significant time and resources looking for Patti at shelters and using psychics and so on. Little did they know that she had almost certainly been dead. Since spring 1987, Jessica Rust has been very open about the life changing discovery that her mother had been identified. In February 2024, she posted a YouTube video titled Bringing My Mother Home Grief and Gratitude. It talks about getting the phone call from the police asking her if she knew someone named Patty Lisa Rust. The video is very raw and honest and documents the rollercoaster of emotions Jessica experienced as she saw her family tree documented by police took a DNA test and recognized that she had answers about what happened to her mom for the first time in her life, and she posted the following statement on Reddit and other places, quote My name is Jessica Rust and I am the daughter of Patti Lisa Rust. What I know of my mother comes mostly through photos and the memories of others that I've collected through my life since she went missing in 1987 without a trace. That was until January 9, 2024, when I got a call from the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department. Through the diligent efforts of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and Othram's Forensic Genealogy, they were able, through genealogy reports, to match me as a possible relative of unidentified human remains found in Palm Beach, Florida in 1987. After submitting a DNA sample, the skeleton formerly dubbed Palm Beach County Jane Doe 1987 would be confirmed to be my mother. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, we used so many outlier resources, up to and including bounty hunters and psychics to attempt to locate Once the Internet was established, I had only ever searched for her by name, social and identifying information. It's wracking me with all kinds of shame to have never thought about combing the Doe network. I'm trying not to dwell on the pain and remind myself of the new hope and closure this has brought me and my family. This was an answer I accepted most of my adult life I would never find. Despite decades of searching, it seemed impossible after all this time. But if my life has taught me anything, it's that everything is possible. And while the conclusion is a devastating one, I remain grateful to all those who helped me finally put her and the questions to rest. As you can imagine, I have only just begun to grieve this news, but I wanted to start with gratitude. Thank you to everyone who has supported me and my family through this time. Thank you to all the detectives from past, present, future and even those on the Internet. I can't tell you enough what a light it was to see how many netizens took time out of their lives to attempt to crack these unsolved cases and submit tips. I'm so incredibly grateful and humbled by your hope, patience and prayers. I urge those who are missing their loved ones to never give up hope and never stop advocating for those who are no longer here to do it for themselves. Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Cold Case detectives are currently investigating Patty Lisa Rusk's case as a homicide. There are a lot of unknowns and they are seeking information from the public. Palm Beach County Cold Case Detective William Springer wants to hear from anyone who knew Patty or her husband Kenneth, or who might have any information about her case. Specifically, the time period between the date of Patty's last Checkbook entry in April 1987 and when the divorce petition was entered in August of 87 is very undefined. Was Patti in rehab and battling a drug problem as her husband said? According to her relatives, there is no evidence of that. Recent photos before her disappearance show a vibrant, healthy young mom who was just managing her home, her money, and her and her daughter's lives just fine. Her family also maintains that Patti would never have just left. She came from a very close knit Italian family and had no resources to fund a life on her own. Also, as a devoted mother, she would not have missed her daughter's second birthday and stayed away during custody proceedings. It certainly does not seem likely to me that Patti abandoned her daughter, something Jessica grew up believing. Now that we know she'd been dumped an hour from home in Palm beach county by someone who stripped her of all identification, her clothing and her rings and any other identifying items, it suggests that she was killed by someone who did not want to be connected to her. If she had just overdosed, it seems unlikely that someone would have gone to all that effort. No, someone wanted her disposed of. And as of now, it's unclear who. Her husband did not report her missing and her brothers were criminals who no doubt brought unsavory types into the family's inner circle. Detective Springer will have his work cut out for him trying to unravel this nearly 40 year old mystery. Please help if you can. When people hear that Mint Mobile plans are only $15 per month, they wonder what's the catch? Well, I can tell you from first hand experience, there isn't one. 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Jessica Bettencourt (DNAID Host)
Another Jane Doe case was recently solved by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, unrelated to the Patty Lisa rust case. On January 18, 1978, Bob Campbell, a construction worker operating a bulldozer clearing woodlands and fields to expand a subdivision, was shocked when his heavy equipment brought up a human skull along with a scub full of earth. Campbell later told the Miami Herald, quote, I was going through the bush and this white object caught my eye. I got closer and I realized it was a skeleton. First I found the head and lower jaw, then the pelvis and what looked like a few other pieces. End quote. Human skeletal remains had been partially buried in a wooded area 4/5 of a mile from Montoya Circle south in the Boca Del Mar subdivision of unincorporated Boca Raton. This location was south of Palmetto Park Road between Power Line Road and Interstate 95. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, along with the county medical examiner, responded to the scene and collected the remains. They found the entire skeleton except for one lower arm bone. They also found the remnants of what appeared to be a nightgown and female undergarments. Medical examiner Dr. Hugh Dorsch and Florida Atlantic University anthropology professor Dr. Yassar Iskhan examined The remains, which had no remaining tissue but had remnants of brown hair. The doctors determined that the remains were those of a white female, 5 foot 2 to 5 foot 5 inches tall, and muscular, but with two ribs that were fused where they met the spine from an old injury. She had also had a molar removed via a previous dental procedure. The Jane Doe was estimated to be between 17 and 29 years of age, but later that window was narrowed to about 20 to 25. She was believed to have been dead for at least a year and up to four years. The manner of death was ruled a homicide, even though the cause of death was not evident from analysis of the bones. The case was investigated as a homicide because Bob Campbell and his fellow construction workers reported that when clearing the land before finding the skull and remains, they had found an old rope hanging from a tree right nearby. They took down the tree as part of the clearing process and discarded the rope. Then they located the bones in the same spot. So the contemporary investigators could not rule out the possibility that the rope was involved in the death of the Jane Doe, but nor could they confirm that it was. Believe it or not, Jane does was the second skull found by construction workers in the same subdivision in recent months. In April of 1978, a woman's skull had been found just off Power Line Road. And this was the reason investigators considered whether this skull and the subsequent body found in the same location could be the work of serial killer Gerard Shaffer, the sadistic serial killer of numerous young women who raped, tortured, and killed his prey in the Florida Everglades. I covered Schaeffer extensively in my episode on Susan Poole, who was identified by Detective Springer via IGG in 2022. Investigators had found personal items of numerous missing Broward county women among Gerard Shaffer's things when he was arrested. So they knew he had unidentified victims. And there was reason to believe these skulls might be at least one of them. According to a January 19, 1978 article in the Palm Beach Post, investigators had found a supposedly fictional manuscript written by Shaffer that said, quote, we drove up Powerline Road. We turned off onto a dirt road. I asked her to put on a blindfold. I told her there was nothing to worry about, which was a lie. I tied her hands behind her and put a noose over her head that I had put up the previous afternoon. I tightened it, and I would pull the rope occasionally to hear her beg, end quote. So there it was, Schaefer detailing a, quote, ritualistic rape murder near the spot where the skeleton was found, right off Paraline Road near I95. Police had done an extensive search of the area that was now a subdivision in April 1973 after Shaffer's arrest based on his manuscript. But the skulls and other remains were not found until 1978. And remember the rope that the construction workers had seen right near where they subsequently found the skull and remains? Gerard Shaffer was known to torture several of his young female victims by hanging. It was a logical suspicion that the Boca Raton Jane Doe could be one of them. Once Jane Doe was found, three missing Broward county women thought to possibly be Shaffer victims were compared to Palm Beach Jane Doe because their descriptions included some consistencies with her details. One of these was leigh Bonadees, a 25 year old Fort Lauderdale woman who had been missing since 1969. Lee had been a neighbor of Gerard Shaffer's and a bracelet of hers was found in his room. The April 1978 skull found off Powerline Road was later identified as Lee's. The other two women were Carmen Halleck and Belinda Hutchins. Two gold teeth Schaefer had held onto turned out to be Carmen's and items of Belinda's had also been found in his room. But neither of them were Boca Raton Jane Doe. She remained nameless by January 24th. The Fort Lauderdale News reported that, quote, Palm beach sheriff's deputies today said they have almost ruled out any connection between a skeleton found in the Boca Del Mar subdivision last Wednesday and convicted murderer Gerard Shaffer. Deputies released a more complete description of the as yet unidentified victim. The anthropologist and pathologists tell us that the skeleton was there between one and four years, said a Sheriff's Office spokesman. Shaffer was in jail during that period. End quote. Gerard Shaffer had been convicted in 1973. If the scientist's assessment of her time of death was correct, he could not have killed Boca Raton Jane Doe. After all the dust settled and investigative efforts failed to identify Jane Doe, her case went dormant. She was boxed up and put on a shelf and stayed there for decades before her case was revisited. She was entered into NamUs as UP772, but no matches were ever made between her details and a known missing woman. Reopening the case in 2024. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office sent Jane Doe's bones to OTHRAM in July of that year to see if they could obtain a SNP profile. Extraction and sequencing was successful, but again, I have no details on the IGG. In August of 2025, Othram provided the Palm Beach Cold case detectives with names of living persons they believed were closely related to Jane Doe. In September of 2025, Detective Springer traveled to Virginia to collect a reference sample from a suspected male relative of Jane Doe. This man willingly cooperated and reported that there had been a missing woman in his family, but she'd returned. But then another relative, that man's aunt, said the missing woman had not in fact returned. Her name was Patsy and she was missing. Detective Springer, meanwhile, obtained a consensual reference sample from another relative in South Carolina and then finally from a woman in West Virginia who proved to be a sister of Boca Raton Jane Doe. On December 2, 2025, Jane Doe was identified as Patricia Ann Falls Richie of Harrisonburg, Virginia, known as Patsy. Patsy Ann Falls was born on December 3, 1953, to Lydia Virginia Johnson and Roy Lee Falls Sr. Of Rockingham County, Virginia. Her older brother, Rory Lee Falls Jr. Tragically passed away in 1958 in a drowning accident. Patsy attended Broadway High school, and on September 24, 1971, at age just 17, she married 24 year old Donnie Wayne Richie. We know next to nothing about Patsy Richie's life after this time. Detective Springer interviewed her sister who said that they grew up with an alcoholic father and were shuttled around between other relatives and that Patsy's husband Donnie, whom she married as a teen, was abusive. Detective Springer was also told that Patsy and Donnie had a child, but he's been unable to locate that son or daughter who was given up for adoption after Patsy vanished. It's unknown why Donnie did not raise the child that was his. So what happened to Patsy? After Patsy was identified, her sister in law, now deceased, told the detective that she saw Patsy in 1977, then age 23 or 24, getting into a truck with an unknown trucker at a Harrisonburg, Virginia truck stop. She was never seen again after that. She was still married when that final sighting occurred, but a divorce appears to have been granted on June 9, 1977. No one knows where Patsy was, where she went, or whom she was with during the time between this 1977 sighting on an unknown date and when she turned up dead in January 1978 in Boca Raton, Florida. Her parents are both deceased and her former husband Donnie passed away in 2013 after a lifelong career as a roofer. Detective Springer told me her husband is an unlikely suspect in whatever happened to Patsy since he had no known connection to Florida and no one in the family recalled him traveling there. And now they know for a fact that Gerard Shaffer did not kill Patsy. He was in prison when she was last seen alive. Someone else dumped her in the same general area as Schaefer's victim, Leigh bonadees. Right off I95 in Boca Raton, Detective Springer and I discussed the idea that a serial killer trucker killed Patsy. And of course that remains a distinct possibility given where she was dumped and that she was last seen getting into a truck. But Detective Springer tells me Patsy's body location was separated from the interstate by a fence, making it less likely that she was quickly dumped from a big rig and she was in her night clothes. Assuming that the nightgown found was something she was wearing, it seems maybe she was killed by someone who had access to her when she was dressed for bed. Now, Palm beach county authorities are offering a $3,000 reward for information. They're asking for anyone who may have known or encountered Patsy Falls Richie in the years before her death to get in touch, either by calling Crimestoppers at 1-800-458-TIPS or cold case investigator Detective William Springer at 561-688-4013. I asked Detective Springer whether it was just continual frustration and disappointment to work these cold case homicides and never find resolution. He had a much more positive take. He told me that he derived satisfaction from ensuring that these does are identified and returned to their families. It's important for the families to know their loved ones didn't willingly abandon them. Think of the impact the identification of Patty Rust had on her daughter Jessica, who had always felt her mother just left her. And in Patsy Richie's case, Detective Springer tells me that her sister was very happy to know what happened to Patsy. That means something. If you haven't already, please consider testing your DNA and uploading it to one of the open source DNA databases accessible by law enforcement and opting in. You can make a difference. Thanks for listening to this episode of dnaid.
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Podcast Summary: DNA: ID
Episode: Doe ID Pati Lisa Rust and Patricia Falls Ritchie
Host: Jessica Bettencourt
Release Date: June 22, 2026
This episode of DNA: ID, hosted by Jessica Bettencourt, explores the application of investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) in solving cold case homicides involving unidentified female victims, often referred to as Jane Does. The episode goes in-depth into two recently solved Palm Beach County, Florida cold cases: those of Patty Lisa Rust (formerly known as Palm Beach County Jane Doe, 1987) and Patricia Ann Falls Ritchie (formerly Boca Raton Jane Doe, 1978). Focusing not only on how each woman was identified decades after her death but also on the family dynamics, criminal context, and personal mysteries that remain, the episode asks not only “who” these women were, but “why” their deaths occurred and examines the ripple effect on their families.
[02:38] - [07:27]
[07:28] - [08:30]
[08:31] - [11:19]
[11:20] - [16:16]
Jessica Rust, via Reddit, 2024 ([16:51]):
"What I know of my mother comes mostly through photos and the memories of others… That was until January 9, 2024, when I got a call from the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department. … It's wracking me with all kinds of shame to have never thought about combing the Doe network. … This was an answer I accepted most of my adult life I would never find. Despite decades of searching, it seemed impossible after all this time. But if my life has taught me anything, it's that everything is possible."
[17:25] - [19:58]
[20:00] - [24:32]
[24:33] - [26:43]
[26:44] - [28:17]
[28:18] - [29:37]
Det. William Springer ([29:49]):
“It's important for the families to know their loved ones didn't willingly abandon them. … That means something.”
Jessica Rust ([16:51]):
"I'm trying not to dwell on the pain and remind myself of the new hope and closure this has brought me and my family."
Bob Campbell, construction worker ([20:16]):
“I was going through the bush and this white object caught my eye. I got closer and I realized it was a skeleton.”
Jessica Bettencourt, on Patty Rust case ([17:45]):
“Now that we know she’d been dumped an hour from home … stripped of all identification, her clothing and her rings … if she had just overdosed, it seems unlikely that someone would have gone to all that effort.”
Det. William Springer ([29:49]):
“It's important for the families to know their loved ones didn't willingly abandon them.”
Jessica Bettencourt maintains a respectful, thorough, and empathetic tone throughout the episode, focusing on the human stories behind the headlines and the ongoing pain of families left behind. She highlights not only technological breakthroughs but also the investigative and emotional complexity of Doe cases. The episode urges listeners to consider contributing their DNA to open-source databases, emphasizing the community-driven aspect of modern cold case resolutions, and appeals for any information that could help further the cases or provide closure.
This episode offers an engrossing, compassionate, and informative look into the confluence of forensic innovation and decades-old mysteries, testing the boundaries of what’s possible with determination and new technology.