(CNN) For 37 years the woman's remains have been in a lonely, nameless grave at Our Mother of Sorrows Catholic Cemetery in Reno, Nevada.
Police knew almost nothing about her, just that she was found shot to death near Lake Tahoe in 1982. And no one had been looking for her.
But with the help of DNA sleuths, who used samples from the crime scene, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office was able in the past year to find some closure, identifying the victim and the suspect, whose names they announced Tuesday.
James Curry was arrested in 1983 and charged with murder.
"This is an incredible story, and I am extremely proud of the work done by everyone who took part in this case over the past three decades," Sheriff Darin Balaam said.
The woman was Mary Silvani, who grew up in the Detroit area, moved to California and was probably estranged from her family. She was 33 when she died, dressed for a fun day by the water, her bathing suit underneath a T-shirt and shorts.
Her body was found near a popular hiking trail on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. With authorities unable to identify her or her relatives, she was buried in an unmarked grave.
He was James Curry, who spent time in prison in Texas and ended up in California. Authorities believe he killed a husband and wife who owned rival storage units. When he was caught, he told police about another body in one of his storage units.
While he awaited his murder trial in 1983, he tried to take his own life and died from injuries days later. He was 36 years old.
It is unknown whether Silvani and Curry knew each other, whether he took her to the lake that day, or whether he came upon her by chance.
Those questions will always remain a mystery.
A lecture on forensic genealogy changed the case
Authorities originally thought Silvani, who had no ID, was born in Europe based on "unique dental work" and an inoculation scar, Balaam said. They compared her DNA, fingerprints and dental records to hundreds of missing women who were physically similar to their victim.
They were no matches, and no one who knew Silvani filed a missing person's report.
She became known as Sheep's Flat Jane Doe, a name given to her based on the trail where she was found.
The trail to finding her killer was cold for many years.
The case had gone on so long detectives who followed it had retired. And until five years ago the sheriff's department didn't have a unit that focused on cold cases.
Seventeen months ago, some of the detectives from the sheriff's office went to a convention where they saw Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International and the DNA Doe Project lecture on forensic genealogy.
"You have to credit the sheriff's department for some forward thinking," she said.
Authorities announced Tuesday that they had use DNA to learn the names of Silvani and her killer.
Authorities last year sent DNA from the victim and the suspect, found on the Silvani's body, for genetic testing. Genealogical sleuths from the DNA Doe Project used a DNA database called GEDMatch to identify family members of the victim. They tracked down her parents and learned they had only one daughter.
Silvani had been fingerprinted after a 1974 misdemeanor arrest, and the victim's prints matched.
If everybody had not done their job as this went along, this case never would have been solved," Detective Kathleen Bishop said.
A spokesman for the sheriff's office, Bob Harmon, said there has already been conversations about placing a headstone with Silvani's name on it at her grave.
https://www.washoesheriff.com/press-releases.php?id=1900047
The following appeared in the May 10, 2019 edition of Detroit Free Press:
MYSTERY SHOOTING VICTIM A DETROITER
37 years after fatal killing, authorities solve case
GENEALOGY RECORDS, DNA HELPED PUT THE PUZZLE TOGETHER
Tresa Baldas Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY NETWORK
For decades, she was known only as Sheep's Flat Jane Doe.
In 1982, the 33-year-old unidentified woman was found shot to death near a Lake Tahoe hiking trail. She appeared to be dressed for a day at the lake, wearing a powder blue T-shirt, jeans, yellow sneakers and a bathing suit under her clothing.
She had no identification. No one was looking for her. So she became known
as Sheep's Flat Jane Doe, named after the trail where she was found by a group of hikers. Her remains were buried in a nameless grave; the case went
Sheriff Darin Balaam speaks during a news conference
at the Washoe County Sheriff's headquarters in Reno on Tuesday. The department recently solved the cold case killing of Mary Silvani. JASON BEAN/RGJ
An artist's sketch of the 1982 Jane Doe shooting victim.
Mary Silvani's Mackenzie High School yearbook picture.
cold.
Almost 37 years later, with the help of DNA detectives, genealogy records and dogged detective work, the mystery was solved. The victim in the lonely grave is Mary Silvani, a Pontiac native who grew up in Detroit, attended Mackenzie High School, had two brothers and eventually moved to California.
Forensic genealogists used the victim's DNA to track down relatives, including two distant cousins who had used ancestry sites to research their family trees, and a nephew who still lives in the Detroit area. Family members who spoke to the Free Press said they learned Silvani also had a child, whose whereabouts are unknown.
Investigators also tracked down neighbors who grew up next to the Silvani family in Detroit and helped confirm her identity.
Detroit police also played a crucial role. The department had kept a set of Silvani's fingerprints from a 1974 misdemeanor loitering case. Based on this set of fingerprints, authorities in Nevada were able to confirm that Sheep's Flat Jane Doe was Mary Silvani.
“This is an incredible story,” Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said in a Wednesday phone interview, noting Detroit Police played a crucial role in the case. “They did exactly what they needed to do. If Detroit had not kept those fingerprints - back then they weren't digitalized - we never would have been able to (connect) those points.”
Detroit Police, who were contacted by Nevada detectives last summer, found the decadesold fingerprint card after digging through old archives in a massive warehouse.
“It certainly was a pleasant surprise that we were able to locate it after all this time,” said Detroit Police Lt. Martin Stefan, noting the discovery of records from a decades-old misdemeanor case is “certainly pretty rare.”
“Some records are kept for just these kinds of reasons,” Stefan said. “Theoretically, they didn't need to be retained. It really was just a lucky situation that they managed to survive all this time.”
Then there were the persistent forensic genealogists who uploaded snippets of the victim's DNA into a database called GEDMatch. This led to cousins, her nephew and eventually her parents: John and Blanche Silvani of Detroit, who had two sons and one daughter, all of them deceased. It was the same technique successfully used in the Golden State Killer investigation.
“Without them,” Balaam said of the forensic genealogists, “we never would have solved this case.”
It was the DNA of a nephew and closest living relative, Robert Silvani Jr., 53, a lifelong Detroiter who recently moved to Newport, that helped the scientists solve the puzzle.
“I just want to let her know that she was loved,” Silvani Jr. said in an interview Thursday, noting he had only heard about his Aunt Mary once from his mother. “I never knew my aunt ... it would be really nice if I could do something for her.”
What he wants is to “get her a nice headstone,” said Silvani Jr., who learned about his aunt's death a year ago when DNA researchers reached out to him via Facebook and told him that they had linked him to a relative of a homicide victim, and that they needed his DNA.
“You can imagine what was going through my head,” Silvani Jr. recalled, noting he was “very surprised” and eager to help.
“I was all for it. I always wanted to take an ancestry thing. I was just very surprised that she was murdered,” said Silvani Jr., who still feels in the dark about his aunt's death. “I'm finding out a whole lot, but not enough still. ... I really think she would be like me. ... It just drives me crazy not knowing things.”
Angel Capriles, a distant cousin of Silvani's from New York City who was also contacted by DNA researchers, is also aching for more answers.
“She deserves people to know her name. She was a person and somehow life just ate her,” Capriles told the Free Press this week. “It's hard for me because she deserves more than what happened to her.”
Capriles, whose mother was first cousins with Silvani, landed on the radar of DNA researchers after joining a study on 23andMe. She has lupus, and took advantage of a free kit for people researching their ancestry and health. That put her in touch with a distant cousin. The two started building a family tree when an investigator called her and said her DNA may be linked to a Jane Doe case.
“I was shocked. ... I didn't expect that. We all thought that everybody was just living their lives,” said Capriles, whose mother knew Mary and spoke of her often. “It's hard on my mom the most. I remember her talking about Mary during my childhood.”
According to relatives, Mary Silvani's mother died in 1980 - two years before her daughter. Her father died in 1964. The three Silvani children lived together in Detroit after that so that Mary could continue high school, but all eventually went to California and went their separate ways.
According to family and Nevada authorities,
rs
the only known photo of Mary is a picture that a detective dug up on the Internet. She is pictured with a group of students, a club or school group of some sort, in the 1966 Mackenzie High School yearbook. He said detectives contacted the school, but learned very little.
“We tried to talk to the school. Whey they called back, they said, 'there's no senior photo,'” Balaam said, noting there were no other yearbook
photos of her found, or records of her graduating.
Silvani was identified in late summer of 2018, though detectives chose not to release her name because the suspect was still unknown. It took three days to learn the name of the victim, and another five weeks to confirm her identity.
The killer was much more difficult to find.
The making of a Jane Doe
On July 17, 1982, Silvani was found shot to death near the Sheep's Flat area, just off of MountRose Highway, a few miles above Incline Village on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. She had been shot twice in the head, and was sexually assaulted, authorities said.
Initially, the victim was believed to be of European descent based on an inoculation scar and unique dental work. Authorities compared her DNA, fingerprints and dental records to hundreds of reported missing women who matched her description, but there was no match.
The suspect's DNA taken from the victim's bloody shirt and evidence from the crime scene were entered into the FBI's DNA database, but no matches were found for the killer, either. There was also a sexual assault kit with more DNA evidence.
The case went cold for years. The initial detectives on the case retired. And the sheriff's office didn't get a dedicated cold case unit until 2014.
The following year, a detective named Dave Jenkins put forward a fresh theory: The victim may have been an American, became voluntarily estranged from her family and that's why no missing report was ever filed.
It wasn't until February 2018 that Jenkins' theory would gain momentum. Detectives with the sheriff's office attended a lecture on forensic genealogy in Seattle presented by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick of the DNA Doe Project. They solicited her help in finding the suspect's family.
Researchers sent the suspect's DNA to a private lab and uploaded it to GEDMatch. Some 2,000 hours of research later, they got a match: The suspect was the grandson of a Texas couple.
Then came a twist. The suspect was an illegitimate child fathered by one of the couple's sons. His mother lived in Dallas, had a son out of wedlock and raised him under a different family name.
That son was their suspect: James Richard Curry, a Texas native and serial killer who confessed to three California murders in January 1983, just five months after Silvani's killing.
Curry attempted suicide after being taken into custody in 1983. He died Jan. 7, 1983, from self-inflicted injuries. He was 36.
It was Curry's two children who helped solve the case. When detectives approached them about Silvani's homicide, the children voluntarily provided DNA samples.
The case was closed.
“When you get a case like this - it starts with a woman found dead, no clue who she is, just a body - and to prove the whole story, who she was, who did her in ... It's amazing the power of the data that we have now,” said Fitzpatrick, the forensic genealogist and key player in cracking the case.
Fitzpatrick is founder of DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit that works with law enforcement to help identify Jane and John Does and return them to their families. She also works with Identifinders International, which uses genetic genealogy to identify suspects and worked on finding Silvani's killer.
Fitzpatrick noted that authorities still don't know whether Silvani and her killer knew each other, how she wound up near that Nevada hiking trail that day, or where she was headed.
“There are some things we will never know, “ Fitzpatrick said. “But still, we got to the bottom of who was there, who these two people were, and some kind of thought on what happened.”Forensic genealogist Margaret Press, who also worked the Silvani case, believes there's a lesson in her tragedy: People need family, or a friend to look after them.
This was one of the main glitches in Silvani's case. There was no one looking for her.
“All the twists and turns and mysteries surrounding her life - we find so common with our (Jane and John) Does. ... Part of the challenge for us in doing the research - and the reason they are 'Does' is because they often come from a very fractured family,” Press said.
She stressed: “If even cousins don't know you exist ... if you don't have family to come looking for you when you come missing, then who do you have?”
A broken family
Silvani came from a fractured family scarred by tragedy and abandonment.
Mary Edith Silvani was born in Pontiac on Sept. 29, 1948. According to relatives, she grew up in Detroit largely with her two brothers and father. Her mother, whose maiden name was “Curry,” coincidentally the same last name as her killer, was estranged from the family and died in 1980. Her father died in 1964 when Mary was still in high school.
Following her father's death, an aunt from the Bronx came to Michigan and brought the three Silvani children back to New York, hoping to keep Mary. But her brothers wanted her to finish high school in Detroit, so they came back to Michigan.
The children split up. Mary moved to California, as did her brother Charles,who died by suicide three months after his sister's killing and was also declared a John Doe for a brief period. According to family and the L.A. Times,Charles Silvani was wanted
for the fatal shooting of a popular Fresno bar owner in 1972, and killed himself a decade later by jumping off an 11th-story building in San Diego. His alleged accomplice in the fatal bar shooting was charged and convicted.
Mary's other brother, Robert Silvani Sr., stayed in Detroit, married and had a son. But over the years he became estranged from his family, left Michigan, moved to California and died in Oregon. His son, Silvani Jr., was 4 when his father left him. He is now 53.
“I had zero family. My dad moved to California. My uncle Charlie moved to California. And my Aunt Mary went to California,” Silvani Jr. said, noting he is now learning about the family he never knew through Mary's death.
About a year ago, sometime last April, he recalled the DNA Doe Project reaching out to him on Facebook. They had linked him to a relative of a murder victim, and needed his DNA. That relative was Capriles, a distant cousin from New York City whom he never knew he had, but is now in close contact with.
Last July, researchers confirmed Silvani Jr. was Mary Silvani's nephew, but he had to keep quiet until they found the killer.
On Wednesday, at a news conference in Reno, the killer's name was revealed.
“I'm finding out a whole lot,” Silvani Jr. said, “But it's still not enough.”
Big break leads to answers
According to Balaam, the key break in the case was when detectives in his office attended the Seattle lecture and ran into Dr. Fitzpatrick, who has a doctorate in nuclear physics and once worked for NASA. The DNA technologies employed by her research group were a key tool in solving the case.
Balaam explained that with forensic genealogy, researchers use only little snippets of DNA, not the full strand.
“That's how they tracked Mr. Curry,” he said. “When they ran the names, there were 35 families that could have been a match.”
But the genealogists narrowed it down by constantly digging, and with the help of Curry's children, who volunteered for DNA testing.
“I gotta commend his two children,” Balaam said. “How tough to have someone knock on your door - knowing your dad has already confessed to three murders, possibly committed a fourth - and learn there's maybe a fifth?”
Along the way, there were also some glitches in identifying Silvani.
According to Fitzpatrick, once the researchers narrowed down her parents, there was an older relative who told them that the couple had two girls and one boy. So they weren't sure if they had the right Mary Silvani. The breakthrough was running down the next-door neighbors in Detroit who grew up next to the Silvanis, and confirmed that the couple had two boys and one girl. The older relative had made a mistake, she said.
“That cost us months,” Fitzpatrick said.
But the dedicated researchers refused to give up.
“What we really want to do is return names to people so that families know what happened,” Press said. Closure aside, the Silvani investigation is looking to soon provide something else: a headstone with Mary Silvani's name on it.
Her distant cousin Angel Capriles is working on making that happen, saying: “I really just want Mary to be known.”
Contact: Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress. com. Follow her on twitter @Tbaldas
An artist's sketch of Jane Doe in the July 19, 1982, edition of the Reno Evening Gazette. the 33-year-old unidentified woman was found shot to death near a Lake Tahoe hiking trail.RGJ
Photos of James Richard Curry are displayed at a news conference in Reno. A match with a genealogy database and DNA from Curry's kids solved the case.JASON BEAN/RGJ
James Richard Curry, now deceased, in a 1983 booking photograph. He has been identified as the killer of a Detroit woman 37 years ago. WASHOE COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
Robert Silvani Jr., 53, with his daughter Jessica Erin Silvani, 24. Robert Silvani was the nephew of victim Mary Silvani.SILVANI FAMILY