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A young woman killed crossing a road in California 27 years ago has been identified as Andrea Kuiper who was 26 when she want missing in 1990. Picture: Orange County Sheriff's Department
A YOUNG woman killed crossing a road in California 27 years ago has finally been identified.
Andrea Kuiper, a 26-year-old woman from the city of Fairfax in Virginia, was identified through fingerprints.
She had been hit by two cars as she tried to cross the Pacific Coast Highway in the seaside city of Huntington Beach in Orange County on April 1, 1990.
“We never forgot her and would regularly pull out her file to see if we could think of anything new to try,” Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s Supervising Deputy Coroner Kelly Keyes said in a statement released today (AEST).
“The investigators at the Coroner’s Office never stopped trying to figure out who she was.”
Kuiper’s information was provided to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and images of what Kruiper might have looked like were created.
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Andrea Kuiper who was 26 when she went missing in 1990. Picture: Orange County Sheriff's DepartmentSource:Facebook
A Facebook page was established to highlight the case, a psychic was hired at one point and Kuiper’s case was also featured on the television show Unsolved Mysteries.
A breakthrough in the case happened earlier this year when the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System joined forces with the FBI and got a forensic match.
The match came from a fingerprint project that closely examined the fingerprints of unidentified decedents against a growing database of old fingerprints, coroner’s officials said.
Investigators then went to Kuiper’s family in Fairfax, Virginia, through the local police department and gave them the long-anticipated information about what happened to their daughter in 1990.
“We are thankful to know what happened to our daughter after all these years,” Richard Kuiper, Andrea’s father, said in a released statement.
“Andrea was loved and respected. She was beautiful. But she was manic depressive, and therefore we had been through quite an adventure.”
Kuiper was wearing a black dress, pink sweater and size 6 pink heels when she died. She also had a ring made of human hair wrapped around her left ring finger and black toenail polish.
She moved away from home and, about two months before her death, a friend of Kuiper’s called her parents to let them know she was in California and was okay.
That was the last they ever heard about their daughter.
“The investigators at the Coroner’s Office never stopped trying to figure out who she was, just as they do with the more than 90 unidentified decedents that we have,” Keyes added.