The desert wind blows cold in the winter along the strip of scrub just north of the Mexican border.

Sean Goff sat in jail in San Diego and said not a word as police scoured leads in their search for the wife he told them he’d killed.

And in the desert, that pile of rocks under the Palo Verde tree was attracting attention. An old desert hand named Ruben Conde got a bad feeling when he saw the place.

Ruben Conde, hunting guide: It was big too big to have an animal or dog buried there and then I got to smelling and you could smell, uh different smell than an animal.

Conde was once a hunting guide... he’d smelled death before.

He called his son, a federal ranger with Bureau of Land Management. The next day, January 10, 2004, the ranger gingerly moved aside a few rocks. That’s when he found it.

Conde: I found a partial portion of a head and a torso and it just became apparent it wasn’t an animal.

Was it a man or a woman? Young or old? What was the cause of death? And who, out there in the middle of nowhere, had gathered hundreds of pounds of rocks and carefully crafted a tomb?

A Maricopa County Sheriff Detective brought the badly decomposed  remains back to the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix for an autopsy.

Laura Fulgitini, forensic anthropologist: The first thing that we do when we get a skeletal remain is lay it out in anatomical position, so that we can inventory the remains, figure out what’s there, and what’s missing.

Doctor Laura Fulginiti, Fulgi to her colleagues, is a forensic anthropolgist—an expert at identifying bones.

Some answers came quickly. Fulgi determined among other things that the victim was young, female, and African American.

She’d given birth at least once. She was somebody’s mother.

But from here on, her discoveries were increasingly alarming.

The victim’s skull and ribs bore witness to a violent death. She’d been stabbed at least 12 times in the chest. The bones of her face were wrecked by blunt force. Someone had smashed her face in.

And as Fulgi examined the bones more carefully, she began to find things she’d never seen before.

Fulginiti: There were elements missing from her.  Key elements, like her teeth. Her jaws were literally, the level of the bone of her teeth had been excised.

On a hunch, the detective, observing the autopsy,  asked Fulgi to check the victim’s hands.

Fulginiti: I looked, and sure enough, the tips, the bones of her fingers, not her fingertips, not her fingernails, remember she’s a skeleton.  The actual bones had been sliced off.

Something awful, sinister, and deliberate had been done to this woman. Doctor Fulgi was outraged.

Fulgitini: Goddamn CSI, because that’s clearly what had happened.  Somebody had watched too much TV, and they knew exactly what to get rid of to try to thwart us. 

No finger prints, no dental records—and quite possibly not even DNA.

Since getting DNA from such badly decomposed remains was very difficult and expensive, they’d have to start out low-tech.

They’d go back to the drawing board — literally.

Fulgitini: Initially, we had thought that a forensic artist  reconstruction would not be possible, because we had pieces of her face and they were disfigured and distorted and we weren’t sure what we could do with it

Still, forensic artist Detective Bob Powers was keen to try.

Bob Powers, forensic artist: This is a last ditch attempt at an identification. And then if it fails, then the odds are that this person will never be identified.

He and Fulgi had had success in the past, but this was a long shot. Still...

Powers: It was like an oval jigsaw puzzle.

They pieced the skull bones together, used clay to fill in the missing pieces and recreate teeth.

Powers: I’ll go ahead and I’ll start sketching—starting very light at first.  And the first thing I want to do is get the placement of the features; the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. 

Finally—a sketch.

Sketch by Det. Bob Powers

But months went by.

Apparently it looked like nobody.

And then, by sheer luck, Bob Powers spotted a picture on a missing persons flier. It reminded him of his sketch.

Powers: There was a resemblance.  It could be her.

The possibility was enough to go the expense of getting a DNA sample.

Sheriffs contacted the woman’s family obtained her DNA.

And?  Disappointment. It wasn’t her…

But by now, that DNA sample had made its way into an FBI database.

And there she was.

Fulgitini: We were right, putting her face back on her is what gave us her story.

Eight months after she emerged from that pile of rocks in the Arizona desert, the woman had a name.

A name you know by now. 

Did the ex-youth pastor, the loving, polygamist husband and father also know the horrifying story her bones were about to tell?

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