Identifying ‘Midtown Jane’: NYPD Cold Case Unit Solves Decades-Old Mystery Thanks to 9/11 Victim

In 2003, when workers were breaking up the foundation of a building in Midtown Manhattan, New York, they experienced a truly terrifying moment: the skull of a teenage girl headed their way. 21 years later, a special cold case unit of the New York Police Department was able to confirm the identity of “Midtown Jane”. And that’s thanks to a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The body found in February 2003 was that of a 17- to 19-year-old man who, according to investigators, had been tied with cables and strangled at least 30 years earlier. The young woman was then wrapped in a carpet and cemented in the basement of the building on West 46th in Midtown Manhattan.

Until the end of the 1960s, this was the place where the nightclub “The Scene” was controlled by the mafia, where Jimi Hendrix and the band The Velvet Underground played among others. In the remains of the carpet, the cops also found a watch, children’s toys and a signet ring with the initials “PMcG”. Because DNA technology was not yet advanced enough, the investigation into the identity of the dead or the killer came to nothing.

Until the “cold case” team led by Detective Ryan Glas took up the old case again in 2022. Using high-tech forensics, DNA could be extracted from the bones and fed into the electronic databases of family trees. This allowed the experts to find a distant relative of “Midtown Jane”. She was genetically related to a woman named Patricia who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Her family submitted her DNA for identification in 2001. Glas: “We were able to identify a 90-year-old cousin of the dead in Florida. The woman remembered that her sister had once babysat some young cousins ​​in Brooklyn.

Cold case investigators mapped Patricia McGlone’s genetic information, linking it to her skeletal features. The young woman must have looked something like this.NYPD

This information and the ring now led to the identification of “Midtown Jane”. Her real name was Patricia Kathleen McGlone, she grew up in Brooklyn and was last seen alive in the late 1960s. Glass: “She only went to public high school in Sunset Park in Brooklyn for eight days. We learned that in 1968 or 1969 she married a man in his early 30s.

Now Glas and his team want to use traditional police investigative work to find out who killed young Patricia more than 50 years ago. The focus is on her husband at the time, who Glas does not want to reveal yet: “He had a connection to the building in which her body was found. We are trying to get more information and solve the murder case!”

The signet ring found on the remains of Patricia McGlone, with her initials PMcG.NYPD

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