Murder of Reet Jurvetson

One year later, in April 2016, a formal announcement was made that the body had been conclusively identified as being that of Reet Silvia Jurvetson, a 19-year-old native of Montreal who had been living in Los Angeles for just weeks prior to her murder.

In June 2015, Jurvetson's older sister, Anne, was contacted by friends who had been searching through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and who had noticed a similarity between a contemporary morgue photograph of the then-unidentified woman and Anne Jurvetson's estranged sister. In response to the notification, Anne submitted a DNA sample for comparison to a sample retrieved from a bloodstained bra belonging to the deceased which had been retained and stored, and from which DNA had been obtained.

The postcards she had sent to her parents and closest friend on October 31 had informed them she was contented, had decided to stay in California, and that she had found an apartment within a four-storey building named the Paramount Hotel. These postcards would prove to be the final correspondence her family and friends ever received from her. Furthermore, Jurvetson is not known to have established any other close acquaintances throughout the relatively short period of time she had lived in Los Angeles prior to her murder beyond this individual and a likely roommate of his, and neither the man she had traveled to meet, nor his roommate had ever filed a missing person report on Jurvetson. Composite sketches of these individuals were created by the Los Angeles Police Department from descriptions created with the cooperation of a witness from Montreal who had known Jurvetson prior to her departure to California. This individual reiterated to investigators the fact that Reet had met "Jean" while she had worked in Toronto, and also stated she had specifically traveled to California to meet with this individual after his own previous departure from Montreal. This witness has also stated this individual had been a medical student who had closely resembled Doors singer and songwriter Jim Morrison. Furthermore, witnesses recall this man had a slight French accent. The second individual considered "of interest" to the Los Angeles Police Department in their investigation into Reet Jurvetson's murder is the first suspect's likely roommate: a man with a Beatles-style haircut, possibly also named "Jean", who is known to have informed a close friend of Reet in the spring of 1970 that he and the first suspect had lived with Reet in Los Angeles the previous year. This individual had claimed Reet had left the two men of her own volition; he had also made brief attempts to assure Reet's close friend she (Reet) had not been in any form of danger when she had left the two men, making a statement to the effect of: "Oh yeah, she was with us for a couple of weeks and then she left on her own and everything's fine. She was happy."

On November 16, 1969, the fully clothed body of a white female was located in a dense bushland off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, California by a 15-year-old boy who had been birdwatching. The victim had died of multiple stab wounds—predominantly inflicted to her neck—approximately two days before her body was discovered dumped in the ravine at the side of the drive. A tree branch had prevented her body from rolling fully down the ravine and into a 699-foot-deep (213 m) canyon, and her body lay against this branch just 15 ft (5 m) down the ravine. An autopsy conducted the following morning determined that the victim's body had been discovered within 24 to 48 hours of her murder.

Reet Silvia Jurvetson had departed from her home country of Canada to visit a man named "John" or "Jean" in California in the late summer of 1969. Several weeks after she had arrived (and just two weeks prior to her murder), she wrote a postcard in the Estonian language to her family which described her general satisfaction with her life in Los Angeles, and encouraging her parents to maintain contact with her via correspondence. Another postcard was also sent to her closest friend. These two postcards were the final contact her family and friends ever received from Reet. Her family did not report her missing, as they had known just how adventurous Reet had become in her later teenage years, and presumed she was simply "making a new life for herself". The Jurvetsons had made tentative efforts to contact Reet throughout the years, although all had proven fruitless. Her sister, Anne, would recollect in 2016 that, in addition to the family's hope Reet would contact them as and when she felt the urge to do so: "We did not know how to find someone on the other side of the continent."

Reet Silvia Jurvetson (Estonian: Jürvetson; September 23, 1950 – c. November 14, 1969) was a 19-year-old Estonian-Canadian woman who was murdered in California in November 1969. Her body remained unidentified for 46 years, until an online mortuary photograph was recognized by her family and friends in 2015. Prior to her identification, Jurvetson's body had been informally known as "Sherry Doe" and officially as "Jane Doe 59."