Her body was found in Macon almost 40 years ago. But who she is remains a mystery

Editor’s note: This story is part of an occasional series about unidentified human remains found in Middle Georgia. If you have information about the unidentified woman described here, please call the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office at 478-751-7500.

Though the body was lying in the front yard of a house, it was more than a month before anyone noticed it.

One Thursday afternoon nearly 40 years ago, a woman who lived on Riverside Drive in Macon was outside hanging laundry on a clothesline when something caught her eye.

There in a sparsely wooded area about 15 feet from the road, 47-year-old Estoria Bowman saw what she later described as a “yellowish shape.”

“I got close enough to tell it was a human, and then I backed off and waited for my husband,” Bowman told a Telegraph reporter at the time. “I didn’t want to find out what it was by myself.”

The body had been decaying for six weeks just 200 feet from the front door of Bowman’s cinder block home when she found it Sept. 8, 1977. It belonged to a black woman, authorities later determined, in her early 30s or 40s.

In the weeks before the gruesome discovery, a strong rotting smell had pervaded the entire neighborhood near Arkwright Road, Bowman told The Telegraph.

“I can’t believe it was there for so long, and I never saw it before,” she said. “I thought it was a dog or something. I never even went to look.”

Animals had scattered some of the remains. Several people in the neighborhood told police their dogs had returned home smelling foul.

The idea terrified many families in the neighborhood, and some decided to shoot their pets in case they had developed a taste for people as meals, according to Telegraph archives.

It took hours for authorities to collect the bones. A 20-person search team combed about four miles of woods east of the house.

Bibb County sheriff’s investigator Harry Harris handed each of the men plastic evidence bags.

“Look for bones,” Harris told the search team. “I don’t give a damn if they’re fish bones, cat bones, dog bones or chicken bones — any bone you find — (put it) in the bag.”

The woman’s hands and shoulder blades were never recovered.

There was little for police to go on.

Nobody reported missing in Middle Georgia had characteristics even approaching hers. It’s possible she was from out of town.

The woman was naked, and a purse was nowhere to be found.

Interstate 75, constructed about a decade earlier through Macon, had made it easier for out-of-town criminals to come and go quickly without detection.

Police figured the woman had been strangled and dumped there, but the cause of her death was never determined.

Neither was her identity.

An ‘armchair detective’ could crack the case

Forty years later, the case has gone cold.

All the detectives and investigators who worked the case are now retired. Bowman died in 2008 at 78 years old.

There have been hundreds of killings in Bibb County since the woman’s body was found. She was one of 20 homicide victims here in 1977. By 1982, the sheriff’s office and police department had at least a dozen more unsolved cases to crack, according to Telegraph archives.

The sheriff’s office, which recently moved some departments to an annex building on Third Street, has an entire room that contains nothing but cold case files, Bibb County sheriff’s Capt. Shermaine Jones said.

Unless someone comes forward with a tip or new information, Jones said there’s not a lot for investigators to go on.

But at some point, the dead woman’s remains were sent to the GBI crime lab in Atlanta. There, forensic artist Marla Lawson, now retired, made a 3D reconstruction of what the woman’s face could have looked like.

A picture of the woman’s face, created by molding clay onto her skull and painting it, was taken and uploaded to the GBI website years later.

From there, the picture is fed to other websites devoted to helping identify the dead.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System is a national repository and resource center for missing and unidentified persons records. The website, along with others, such as the Doe Network, are resources used by coroners, law enforcement officials and the general public.

GBI forensic artist Kelly Lawson, the daughter of Marla Lawson, said a number of cases have been solved by people she calls “armchair detectives.”

“There’s a lot of people throughout the country who, when they’re retired or maybe unemployed, they take time to visit certain websites” such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, Kelly Lawson said. “You take your missing persons reports and unidentified remains and try to compare the race, the age, the approximate time found, the height and those kinds of things.”

Lawson recalled a reconstruction her mother completed for a Native American woman who was killed and dumped in north Georgia.

In 1978, Juanita Adams left her home and 2-year-old son in South Dakota to participate in the Trail of Tears march in Washington D.C.

During the march, she was kidnapped and killed, her body dumped in Hall County.

“She sat for a long time here before she had a chance to get her reconstruction done by my mom,” Lawson said. Adams “had very unique features in that she had been involved in a car accident, which had (resulted in) surgical features on her face, including a glass eye that was found with the body.”

Marla Lawson included the scar in her 3D reconstruction. The picture of Adams “just sat on the website.”

Thirty years later, Adams’ family watched an episode of the TV show “Bones” and saw a facial reconstruction completed on someone’s skull. It made them think that Adams could have had one.

“So they went on Google and typed in ‘unidentified Native American female,’ ” Kelly Lawson said. “Up pops the reconstruction, and they knew it was her. ... All along her family was waiting for her in South Dakota.”

When Adams’ bones were finally returned home, her son was 33 years old.

This story was originally published August 28, 2017 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Her body was found in Macon almost 40 years ago. But who she is remains a mystery."