Crime stories — by their mystery alone — tend to draw the curious. The intrigue. The unknown. The whodunit. The names of the key players and their involvement.

But some crime stories have factors that make it even more compelling. Add the catch-all moniker of Jane Doe, the lack of true identity for decades and the work of someone hell-bent on putting a name with the unknown body found alongside a DeSoto County road, and you have traits that draw even more interest.

Reporter Rob Moore has pursued those factors with his coverage of a Jane Doe — later identified as Lorie Ann Mealer Pennell — tying a name to the unnamed. This week he brought in the work of Amber Edlin, a DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office employee instrumental in giving an identity to the woman’s body found on U.S. 78 in January 1985.

Edlin pulled all the puzzle pieces together — some of them very obscure — to confirm that the woman found by a UPS driver was Pennell. There were new DNA links and tests to help with familial connections. There was evidence discovered in a storage shed — hairs taken when the then-Jane Doe was found.

The story is interesting on its own, but Moore has a knack in these types of reports to bring you into the spaces where Edlin works. Where she pursues the clues and the connections. They are the details that carry you along with the recounting of the case years in reaching a resolution.

The “pungent smell of marijuana” from the evidence room near Edlin’s office. “Binders stuffed with case history” of other cases involving unknown identities. The corkboard bearing Pennell’s picture along with a binder of the case “which has passed ownership countless times over the decades,” Moore wrote.

The work, the reporting, the details make the story more interesting than it is standing on its own. Those traits put you in Edlin’s office watching her work as the case unfolds.

The result of Edlin’s research and pursuit is the discovery of Mealer’s brother living in Southern California, the connection leading to some history of the missing woman. Who she was. Where she was from. What events led to her last breath taken. Maybe even a link to a serial killer that authorities wonder if is responsible for a string of deaths through the midsection of the country.

Maybe even Pennell’s.

A symbolic measure of the work — a bit of closure if you will — is a headstone in an Olive Branch cemetery. At a gravesite that once only bore the name of Jane Doe.

Now, the marker has “Lorrie Ann Mealer Pennell,” the result of a lot of work, a lot of investigating and Amber Edline pulling the right strings to answer the unknown. - Suburbs editor Clay Bailey 

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