A girl who was killed 40 years ago in a New Jersey town has been identified, and a suspect has been identified and charged with murder, according to local authorities.
Dawn Olanick, a 17-year-old from Long Island, New York, was identified as the body found in a cemetery in Blairstown Township, New Jersey, on July 15, 1982, according to the Warren County, New Jersey, prosecutor’s office. Olanick was given the nickname “Princess Doe” while her identity was unknown.
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The announcement of the identity of “Princess Doe” comes exactly 40 years after a worker at Cedar Ridge Cemetery found the body of a female in a wooded area, with an autopsy determining the cause of death to be “blunt trauma to the face and head with multiple fractures,” according to police.
New Jersey State Police also issued a warrant for the arrest of Arthur Kinlaw. Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder for allegedly killing Olanick in July 1982. Kinlaw is in prison in New York for a different murder conviction.
Olanick was identified with the help of DNA samples from relatives. The University of North Texas Center for Human Identification began testing the skeletal remains in 2007, and in June 2021, Astrea Forensics performed its own forensic investigation. Using the created DNA profile, scientists compared the profile with the DNA of Olanick’s sister.
Authorities continued to investigate the case since the body was discovered in 1982, and the DNA technology was what allowed them to identify Olanick, Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer said in a press conference Friday.
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“For 40 years, law enforcement has not given up on Princess Doe. Detectives have come and gone during that 40-year period, and all of them had the same determination to get justice for Princess Doe,” Pfeiffer said. “The key in this case, like most cold cases today, is science and technology. Without science and technology, Princess Doe would have never been identified.”
The case of the identity of “Princess Doe” was the first unidentified person case entered into the National Crime Information Center database by the FBI in June 1983.
