ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- The body of a young woman murdered by a serial killer nearly 30 years ago was exhumed in Alaska Wednesday just weeks after the death of the man who killed her.
Investigators are hoping advances in DNA testing and facial reconstruction will help them identify "Horseshoe Harriet," believed to be in her late teens when she died.
Serial killer Robert Hansen, whose story inspired the 2013 movie Frozen Ground, brought investigators the body on April 25, 1984, near Horseshoe Lake.
"Hansen had led investigators to the remains, and he confessed to murdering that victim, and in 1985 it was buried as a Jane Doe," said Jason Grenn, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Social Services.
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Grenn said the body is now in a medical examiner's lab in Anchorage, where it will undergo testing paid for by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Dr. Angelea Williamson, from the NCMEC, said they hope the information will connect "Horseshoe Harriet" to a missing child in Alaska.
"She very well may not be this girl," she said. But unless they test her, "we will never be able to compare her to anyone."
The DNA testing will be done at a Texas university and the facial reconstruction imaging at the MCMEC headquarters in Virginia. If she is identified, Alaska State Troopers will notify next of kin, but if not, she will be re-buried at Anchorage Memorial Park.
Hansen died August 21 in an Anchorage hospital, at the age of 75. His health had been declining for a year, Department of Corrections officials said, and Wiliamson said that his death and the exhumation coming so close together was "pure coincidence."
He admitted to killing 17 woman and raping 30 more, and in 1983, pleaded guilty to four murders. He was sentenced to 461 years in prison.
Hansen targeted prostitutes and exotic dancers, kidnapping the women at gunpoint then flying them to remote areas to kill them. He admitted to sometimes setting the women free into the woods and then stalking them.
Only a dozen of his victims have been found.
