SOLVED: Arizona 1989 cold case | She Vanished With Her Daughters—DNA Exposes What Really Happened

In August 1989, 28-year-old Marina Ramos was released from jail in Bakersfield, California, where she’d been serving time for shoplifting under the alias “Maria Ortiz.” Struggling with poverty but determined to “start fresh,” she arrived at her cousin Esther’s house with a quiet man she called Fernando—or possibly Monico—to pick up her daughters: 14-month-old Elizabeth and 2-month-old Jasmin. Nervous but resolute, Marina left with the girls. It was the last time her family ever saw them.

On December 12, 1989, tourists driving along Old Temple Bar Road in Mohave County, Arizona, spotted what they thought was roadkill. Instead, they found the nude, brutally stabbed body of a young Hispanic woman. With no ID, no jewelry, and no matches in the fingerprint systems of the time, she became an unnamed Jane Doe. Evidence suggested she’d been killed where she lay. Her case slowly went cold.

Two days later, on December 14, in Oxnard, California, a walker heard desperate infant cries coming from a women’s restroom in a park. Inside, a jogger discovered two little girls—about 14 months and 2 months old—lying on the cold, wet concrete, soaked and dehydrated but alive. No names, no belongings, no one looking for them. Witnesses vaguely recalled a young Hispanic woman, two Hispanic men, and a dark mini pickup truck near the restroom earlier. The babies entered the foster system, then were adopted by a loving family in Ojai. They grew up knowing only that they’d been abandoned in a restroom as infants.

Meanwhile, Jane Doe’s file gathered dust in Mohave County for over three decades. Detectives revisited it over the years, updating it with a DNA profile and better photos, but nothing matched.

In 2022, Investigator Lori Miller resubmitted the Jane Doe fingerprints using modern technology. This time, there was a hit: an old 1989 shoplifting arrest from Bakersfield under the alias “Maria Ortiz.” That woman’s true identity—confirmed through records and family—was Marina Ramos. Family interviews revealed she’d vanished with her two baby daughters and a man named Fernando/Monico.

Now investigators knew Jane Doe was Marina—but where were Elizabeth and Jasmin?

DNA from Marina’s relatives was uploaded to genealogical databases. Public campaigns, true crime coverage, and age-progressed images spread the story. In 2025, a strong DNA match surfaced: a woman in California who knew she and her sister had been abandoned as babies in an Oxnard park restroom in December 1989.

DNA tests confirmed it. The “mystery restroom babies” were Elizabeth and Jasmin, alive and grown, with loving adoptive families—and now, finally, the truth.

The case is still open. The man called Fernando or Monico, believed central to Marina’s murder and the planned abandonment of her daughters, has never been identified. But Marina is no longer Jane Doe, and her daughters have their names, their history, and the proof that their mother fought for a better life for them—right up until the day she died.