Buckskin Girl: Marcia King

The case

Our summary of the public record. The small numbers show where each fact comes from.

In April 1981, a young woman was found dead in a roadside ditch west of Troy, Ohio. She had long auburn hair in braids and wore a distinctive fringed buckskin poncho, which gave her the name investigators and the public used for 37 years: "Buckskin Girl." Investigators said she had been killed a day or two before she was found. No one came forward to identify her, and later pollen and isotope testing suggested she had spent time in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico.

Early in 2018, the newly formed nonprofit DNA Doe Project worked with the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory to extract DNA from a blood sample that had been kept since 1981 and upload it to the public genealogy database GEDmatch. On March 29, 2018, volunteer genealogists found a likely candidate in about four hours. A relative's DNA confirmed the match on April 9.

On April 10, 2018, the Miami County Sheriff's Office, the county coroner and the DNA Doe Project announced that Buckskin Girl was Marcia Lenore King, 21, of Little Rock, Arkansas. She had left home in 1980 and was known to hitchhike. The Sheriff's Office said the investigation into who killed her would focus on the last month of her life, which included time around Pittsburgh and Louisville. As of this writing, no one has been charged in her death.