Diann Tatum - Ohio - LOCATED DECEASED

[LadyBlue]

A DNA match has helped identify Jane Doe remains in Michigan as those of a woman missing from Fayette County since 1988. Authorities are now classifying her disappearance as a homicide.

Diann Tatum, 26, was reported missing by her family on Oct. 25, 1988, four days after she left her home southwest of Washington Court House to visit her parents in Warren, Mich.

The case has remained open all these years.

But the Fayette County sheriff’s office said yesterday that skeletal remains found in August 1994 in St. Clair County, Mich., were recently identified as Tatum’s.

Her relatives provided DNA samples, and in March, that information was entered into the national DNA database. A match was made in April, and authorities used dental records to confirm the identification, the sheriff’s office said.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons database says only that Tatum left her Jeffersonville home in a 1986 Renault. The car later was found in Cincinnati.

A sheriff’s office spokeswoman said no one would answer any other questions about the case.

Michigan authorities and those in Fayette County are working together on the homicide case, the sheriff’s office said.
www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/05/01/missing-woman-identified.html

[LadyBlue]

Nineteen years after a body was discovered in stuffed in a refrigerator in an abandoned farmhouse in St. Clair County, investigators have learned who the person was. Now they will try to determine what happened.

The skeletal remains found by two boys in August 1994 was Diann Tatum, a married 25-year-old Ohio woman who was reported missing after she failed to arrive at her mother’s home in Warren, according to a news release issued Wednesday.

“I do remember that case,” St. Clair County Sheriff Tim Donnellon said. “She was located by some kids in a refrigerator in a farmhouse. From the looks of it, she had been there for some time.”

The farmhouse has since been demolished.

Authorities determined she had been shot in the head. The case remained open and unsolved for close to 20 years. Identification was recently made through DNA and dental records, according to the news release.

Police said Tatum left her home in Fayette County near Columbus in southern Ohio, in 1988, on her way to visit her mother in Macomb County. She never arrived in Warren and her car was later found at a motel in Cincinnati, but she had not been registered there. She was reported missing by family members.

When the remains were found in St. Clair County in 1994, they were examined by the St. Clair County Medical Examiner’s Office and then moved to the Michigan State University Anthropology Department for further preservation.

Earlier this year, genetic data from Tatum’s family members and the remains were entered into a database and a connection between the two was detected. The St. Clair County Medical Examiner’s Office in April then compared dental records between the remains and Tatum and confirmed the identity.

Investigators from the St. Clair and Fayette county sheriff’s offices plan to meet in the coming weeks on a joint investigation. They will not release further details or incident reports because the case involves an ongoing homicide investigation.
www.macombdaily.com/article/20130501/NEWS01/130509943/body-found-in-1994-in-st-clair-county-id-d#2