More than four decades after the last time two Californian girls, Rebecca Dinkel, who was 19 years old and her mother, Nancy Webster, 37, were seen alive. Officials then used DNA to connect a skull discovered by a group of hikers.
The El Dorado County Prosecutor's Office announced in a press release Tuesday that a partial DNA sample taken from one of the teeth of the skull had led the detectives of the two women who went missing in 1974.
Before disappearing, Webster had received a threatening call from his then-boyfriend, Clifton Mahaney. The prosecutor's office at the time was able to sue Mahaney, who was found guilty of intentional homicide.
In 1981, hikers discovered a human skull with a gunshot wound in El Dorado County, but this does not correspond to any recorded dental records. The investigators buried the skull in a grave with the inscription "Jane Doe".
In 2017, the Attorney General's Cold Case Homicide Working Group decided to rehearse the case and exhume the skull. Officials asked Dinkel's sons, Brion and Clinton, to provide their own DNA to the investigators, which then revealed a match to the skull.
Brion Dinkel said that discovering that the skull came from their mother was "a kind of relief", but also sparked "feelings and questions deep inside".
"The whole process of mourning has resumed," said the two brothers at the station.
The brothers now plan to give their mother an appropriate burial and are grateful for the tireless work of the investigators.
