Body found next to California road in 1987 identified as Navajo woman who had "explicit" letter sent to her after she vanished

Human remains that had been buried for decades in a California gravesite and marked as "Jane Doe" have been identified as Christine Lester, a Navajo woman who went missing from northern Arizona, authorities said. Lester's family said they received an "explicit" letter written to her from an anonymous person years after she vanished.

The Madera County Sheriff's Office hasn't publicly disclosed the cause of Lester's death because it doesn't want to jeopardize the investigation, CBS affiliate KPHO-TV reported Wednesday.

Officials with the sheriff's office near Fresno said a woman was found dead on the side of a rural county road in 1987 but couldn't identify her at the time. The body was exhumed in 2020 to create a DNA profile that authorities were able to match to one Lester's siblings earlier this year.

Lester's family received the remains Monday. Her siblings plan a procession Friday to escort the remains from Flagstaff to a family gravesite on the Navajo Nation, where a memorial service will be held - 36 years to the date she went missing and on a day that's designated to raise awareness of missing and slain Indigenous people around the globe.

There are roughly 1,500 American Indian and Alaska Native missing persons included in the National Crime Information Center Database, according to the Department of the Interior. 

The then-24-year-old Lester told her family that she was planning to hitchhike - a common practice on the Navajo Nation - from Indian Wells to the Flagstaff mall in May 1987 to buy gifts for Mother's Day. They don't know if she made it there, her siblings said.

"We've always had that hope that she'll come through that door and introduce her family," a brother, Herbert Rockwell, told KPHO.

Lester's siblings said they've cherished the good memories they had with her when she was alive.

"I'd just like to say 'Welcome home, Christine, Shadi, which means big sister,'" Rockwell said.

Her siblings told the station they have no idea who killed her but they did receive an odd letter written to Christine more than five years after she went missing.

"To this day we don't know who wrote it. She left in '87, and the letter was written back in '92 or '93. Which was really weird because she didn't have a boyfriend that we knew of," Rockwell told KPHO. "It was kind of explicit. I don't think Christine would ever do some of the things this guy mentioned. To me it was…he knew something about Christine."

That letter is now in the hands of authorities, the station reported.

The Madera County Sheriff's Office is asking anyone with information on Lester's homicide of to call the Madera County Sheriff's Office at 559-675-7770.

In:
• Cold Case
• DNA
• California
• Missing Person