A woman died in Yosemite. She’s been linked to a cult and a serial killer.
, 2022-11-12 02:00:00,
One of Yosemite’s most unsettling cold cases just got a little closer to resolution — but it remains a mystery whether Patricia Hicks met her end at the hands of a serial killer, a fugitive cult leader or something else entirely.
In 1983, a family visiting Summit Meadow made a horrific discovery. While the kids enjoyed the glade, one stumbled upon a human hand and forearm. When investigators arrived, they guessed the arm had frozen during the winter and recently thawed. Despite extensive searching, no other body parts were found until 1988, when a skull with no jawbone was discovered nearby. Investigators combed missing persons reports and waited for someone to come forward with a tale of a long-lost relative, but no one did. Over the decades, forensic anthropologists attempted several re-creations of the woman’s face based on genetic markers and skull shape. But still, the Summit Meadow Jane Doe was an enigma.
It took the work of two generations of Yosemite investigators to finally match a name to the remains, the ABC News docuseries “Wild Crime” revealed late last month. For the first time, Yosemite park officials publicly announced the Jane Doe is Patricia Hicks, a woman with ties to a Merced cult leader who disappeared in the 1980s.
Hicks was born in the early 1950s in Washington. According to a 1971 article in the Spokane Daily Chronicle reviewed by SFGATE, her father was a cabinet maker…
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