Connecticut cold case victim heading to final resting place
For nearly 50 years, the body of Patricia “Trisha” Meleady Newsom, then known only as “Jane Doe,” lay in an unmarked East Haven grave.
This weekend, Newsom’s remains will head to her final resting place after being exhumed for the second, and final, time on Thursday, according to the East Haven Police Department.
Newsom’s remains will be cremated, at no charge to her family, by the East Haven Memorial Funeral Home and brought to Tennessee with her loved ones who are traveling to Connecticut this weekend to retrieve her ashes. For 47 years, Newsom’s family and friends had no idea what had happened to the teen after she ran away from a New York boarding school in 1974.
Newsom, who had been born in Idaho in the summer of 1957, moved to the East Coast with her family in the 1960s. She was sent to boarding school in Monticello, New York, in 1972 and ran away two years later. Authorities believe she was trying to hitchhike to Maine when she disappeared and was never heard from again.
In April, investigators announced that they were able to link her DNA to the remains of a woman who was found dead bound, gagged and wrapped in a tarp in a drainage ditch on Frontage Road in East Haven on Aug. 16, 1975, police said.
Her body was exhumed from the State Street Cemetery in Hamden on Thursday by the East Haven Police Department, the East Haven Public Works Department, the funeral home and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, police said.
“While this case remains under investigation, these latest developments are a full circle moment for us,” said East Haven Police Captain Joseph M. Murgo in a statement Thursday. “We are honored to be able to finally bring Patricia one step closer to her final resting place with other members of her family.”
Newsom’s sister Maryann Newsom Collette said in April that the identification of her sister’s remains brought her closure and tremendous relief. She was just 9 years old the last time she saw her sister.
Police in East Haven began searching for the remains in 2022, in hopes of extracting a sample, a feat that was met with challenges. Authorities searched the State Street Cemetery in Hamden in June 2022 and exhumed a body only to find the remains belonged to a male.
Investigators used a “ground-penetrating radar device” but found five times as many caskets as anticipated, some stacked on top of one another, before they were able to locate the remains they had been searching for and were able to collect a viable DNA sample. It then took about nine months to link the sample to Newsom Collette.
Newsom Collette and the police department have called on anyone with information about her murder to come forward. Police said the investigation into her death is ongoing.