Police have determined the identity of “Little Miss Nobody,” a girl who was found dead in Arizona in 1960, according to a Tuesday press conference.
Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes identified the girl as Sharon Lee Gallegos during the press conference. Rhodes said the four-year-old child was abducted in July 1960 while playing at her grandmother’s house in New Mexico. Rhodes was also joined by Yavapai County’s Lt. Tom Boelts, who shared more of the story behind Gallegos’ case.
Boelts said the investigators had contact with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which he said offered to fund the exhumation and DNA extraction and testing of Gallegos’ body in 2015. The testing did not help the investigators to identify Gallegos at the time, according to Boelts.
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“Unfortunately, DNA science at that time, as advanced as it was, wasn’t advanced enough to give us an identity,” Boelts said. He shared that investigators recently received a call from Othram, a laboratory that offered to help identify “Little Miss Nobody.”
Othram was ultimately able to identify Gallegos using specialized DNA testing along with DNA samples provided by the child’s relatives, Boelts explained during the press conference. (RELATED: DNA Matching Identifies Woman 40 Years To The Day After Her Body Was Found)
When the remains of “Little Miss Nobody” were originally found, police believed that it could be Gallegos, according to the New York Post. However, the police later estimated the remains to be that of a seven-year-old girl and pursued other leads when a footprint comparison did not result in a match, the outlet reported.
The police do not know who allegedly abducted and killed Gallegos but are still investigating, according to KTLA.
Othram identified Gallegos as “Little Miss Nobody” in February after a previous attempt made in 2018 was “inconclusive,” NBC News reported.