More On: missing Indiana girl
Body was found more than 30 years ago ID'd as missing Indiana girl Tracy Sue Walker from 1978
Girl's bones found in Tennessee more than 30 years ago have been linked to a 15-year-old girl from Indiana who went missing in the 1970s.
The unidentified body that investigators had called "Baby Girl" was matched to Tracy Sue Walker through DNA technology, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations said Tuesday.
Walker was last seen in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1978. Her body was found in Campbell County, Tennessee, about 400 miles away.
Investigators don't know how she ended up in so many different states or how she died.
Walker's body was found on April 3, 1985, in the Big Wheel Gap area of Elk Valley, about seven years after she went missing.
Forensic anthropologists couldn't figure out who the body belonged to, but they did know it was a white female between the ages of 10 and 15, so they called her "Baby Girl."
Investigators sent a piece of the body to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification to try to find out who she was more than 20 years after the body was found.
Scientists at the university made a DNA profile that was put into both the Combined DNA Index System and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
In 2013, an agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations and an intelligence analyst looked into the case again to see if there were any new clues that could help find out who Baby Girl was.
After nine years, the case was finally solved when a piece of the girl's body was sent to a private lab that analyzes human DNA.
Scientists at the Othram lab did forensic genetic genealogy testing. In June, they found a possible relative of the child in Indiana who had the same DNA profile.
Using DNA information, police in Tennessee found possible family members in Lafayette, Indiana. They talked to one person, who told them that a family member had gone missing in the area in 1978.
With the help of the Lafayette police, the investigators got family DNA standards for Baby Girl's possible siblings and put them in the DNA database.
This week, the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas confirmed that Baby Girl was in fact Walker.
Now, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations is trying to find out what happened to Walker.
The bureau wants anyone who knows anything about the case or who Walker was with before she died to call 1-800-TBI-FIND.
