MANISTEE (WWJ) -- Twenty-five years after a woman's body was discovered on the shoreline of Lake Michigan in Manistee, advanced DNA technology was able to identify her, giving her family closure over two decades later.
On October 27, 1997, Michigan State troopers from the Manistee Post were called to the 4000 block of Fox Farm Rd, where an unclothed, deceased woman had washed up on the beach.
Aside from a single earring, there was nothing to help identify the woman. A medical report determined she had drowned and that her death was accidental with no foul play involved.
MSP broadcast information about the case to nearby states, but received no credible leads.
Fast-forward to September 2020, when detectives with the MSP Cadillac Post and the MSP Missing Person's Unit had the unidentified body exhumed for advanced genetic testing through the DNA Doe Project.
DNA analysis showed a possible match to the Thyng family in Action, Maine.
A brother in Maine and a daughter in Chicago provided DNA samples that confirmed the woman's identity as Dorothy Lynn Ricker (née Thyng).
News articles from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from 1997 provided further context about Mrs. Ricker's disappearance and death.
Ricker was 26 years old and lived in Chicago at the time she was reported missing.
Officers from the St. Francis Police Department in Wisconsin had encountered Ricker on October 2, 1997 -- before she was reported missing. They spoke to her briefly on a park bench looking out on Lake Michigan. Ricker mentioned she was from Chicago and said she was "enjoying the lakefront and the sun."
The following day -- October 3, 1997 -- police found Ricker's abandoned car in the same area where they met her the day before. When they ran her license plate, they found a missing/endangered person report filed by the Chicago Police Department.
What happened to Mrs. Ricker between one afternoon and the next is still unclear, but the MSP and the DNA Doe Project are grateful they could provide some answers for her family.
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