“The way she planned it out, that was her,” said her sister, Annette Meyer Clough, one of two remaining immediate family members. “She was very careful. We couldn’t find her.”

Who is the ‘Christmas Tree Lady’? Lab seeks to ID woman in 1996 suicide

For a quarter-century, the unidentified woman in Pleasant Valley Memorial Park was known as “the Christmas Tree Lady,” because she had placed a small Christmas tree on a blanket next to her, sometime early on Dec. 18, 1996. Neatly coifed, smartly dressed, her pockets contained no identification but two envelopes with a $50 bill and the same typed note in each: “Deceased by own hand…Prefer no autopsy. Please order cremation, with funds provided. Thank you, Jane Doe.”

Then she lay down and suffocated herself.

Fairfax police tried for years to identify the woman, and her death became a lasting subject among true crime groups on the internet. In 2000, with help from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the police…