After 28 years, “Jane Doe” has a real name.
The Vacaville Police Department announced the news on its Facebook page that a woman found dead in Vacaville has finally been identified as Cynthia Merkley, also known as Cynthia Bilardi.
Detectives contacted her family and learned that Cynthia was 38 when she died and had lived between Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. She had been estranged from her family for several years before she died.
The identification of the woman, previously known only as “Jane Doe” by Vacaville police detectives, came following the use of updated fingerprint technology by the California Department of Justice.
On April 12, 1991, contractors were grading an open field off Nut Tree Road and Burton Drive during the construction of the Vacaville Premium Outlets when they discovered a dead body. Officers and detectives were dispatched to the scene and began investigating the incident as a suspicious death.
In December 1998, Vacaville police detectives and the Solano County Coroner’s Office exhumed the woman’s body and had a facial reconstruction performed by law enforcement expert Kevin Richlin, a detective with the Sunnyvale Police Department. The reconstruction model as well as an artist’s sketch rendering were sent out publicly to see if anyone recognized her.Detectives determined the body was that of a white female adult and that she had been dead for two to three weeks but were unable to identify her. No obvious signs of foul play or trauma were uncovered, and the cause of death was undetermined leading to a “Jane Doe” death investigation.
At the end of 2018, detectives were contacted by the state DOJ’s Missing Persons Unit, which said they was able to identify the Jane Doe as Cynthia Merkley, who apparently had also gone by the name Cynthia Bilardi.
Vacaville Police Lt. Chris Polen said the department had obtained Cynthia’s fingerprints upon the discovery of her body in 1991, but they were not of a high enough quality for the DOJ to identify her at the time. However, with the acquisition of new imaging technology by the FBI, the DOJ was able to use it to identify her.
“The Department of Justice took one of our old fingerprints, ran it through the new imaging software that the FBI acquired and they were able to get a match of our ‘Jane Doe’ and give us a name of Cynthia,” Polen said.
Cynthia was not reported as a missing person at the time of her death.
The department is calling upon those who knew Cynthia to provide more information to determine her cause of death.
Polen said the department is still trying to determine a number of details, such as what was happening in Cynthia’s life at that time and what she was doing in Vacaville.“Even after 28 years, detectives never gave up hope that our only ‘Jane Doe’ case would one day be identified,” the department wrote on Facebook. “Our hope is that this post will generate new leads for detectives to look into, to help determine what happened to Cynthia that fateful night back in 1991 that led to her untimely death.”
“There’s so many things that we need to figure out,” he said. “This is just the beginning for us.”
Anyone with information is advised to call Detective Andy Polik at 469-4814 or email him at Andrew.Polik@cityofvacaville.com. Callers may remain anonymous if they prefer.
