Jerry Strickland, Melissa (Missy) Munday -- What Happened After the "Unsolved Mysteries" Episode

By: Shane Lambert

Published: December 4th, 2020

NamUs added a new case file to their records of unidentified persons recently. On December 2nd, the organization added #UP76110. The case involves a Jane Doe in Arizona's Pima County.

According to NamUs, a "Skeletonized cranium and a mandible" were recovered from a "remote desert area on Tohono O'odham Nation." A mandible might be called a jaw bone by those that aren't familiar with the term. The torso of the decedent was not recovered and the limbs and hands of the individual are also unaccounted for at the time of writing. That does suggest that animals may have interfered with the remains and the head became separated from the body as a result.

Few details are known about this individual but it's a major clue, in my opinion, that her race has been listed as Hispanic/Latino. Pima County is an area that produces a lot of unidentified remains. One factor in this is that it is a very southern location in the United States, near the Mexican border. There have been a lot of transient Mexican nationals that have traveled on foot in Pima County in an attempt to reach Phoenix.

Whether #UP76110 is an unidentified American or Mexican national isn't clear but that the remains of this individual were found near the Mexican border in a region where many Mexican nationals are trying to make their way northward should not be ignored, in my opinion. It's possible that this Jane Doe met death through exposure to the elements as opposed to foul play.

Unfortunately, skeletal remains don't always yield many clues as to the time of death. Her estimated date of death is a broad range between 2010 and 2019. Furthermore, her age range is broadly estimated as 25 to 50 years old. 

Working on the hypothesis that this individual was a Mexican national attempting to reach Phoenix, it's not very probable that she would be toward the upper limit of that age range in my opinion. Walking from Mexico to Phoenix through the desert isn't something many women that are 45-50 years old would try. 

I would suggest that anyone working on this case should focus on missing Mexicans that headed northward in the 2010s that were never heard from again. My thinking would be that the decedent was someone in her 20s.