Then late last year, a homicide investigator in Florida contacted family members. A woman’s body, uncovered in an apparent shallow grave in 1985 by construction workers on a beach near St. Augustine, had finally been identified through genetic genealogy. The investigator took DNA samples from family members, and in January the match was confirmed. Nearly 56 years after she disappeared, Jenkins was found.
A medical examiner ruled her death a homicide in 1985, though no cause of death could be determined because her body was decomposed. The St. Johns County sheriff’s office has resumed the investigation they began 39 years ago, when they had no leads and no name for their victim.
Jenkins’s family said they often wondered if she was still alive. Her disappearance was a regular topic at family reunions. In 1981, the man she had willingly fled Winchester with was arrested on murder charges in Georgia in the killing of his roommate and later sentenced to death. Authorities now wonder if he could have killed her.
Jenkins would have turned 81 last month. “I thought she was still alive,” said her younger sister Pat Allamong of Winchester, whose DNA was used to match the sample taken from the body in Florida. “That was a surprise,” she said of learning her sister’s fate. “That’s an awful way to die.” As a teen, Allamong sometimes babysat her sister’s toddler, “Little Norman,” and was doing so the day her sister disappeared.
Norman Jenkins, Mary Pultz Jenkins’s son, is now 58.
“I never knew the woman,” he said of the mother who left when he was 2 years old. He said when police notified him that his mother was dead, “You’re just like, whatever.”
But the sudden news that he would never meet his mother has slowly sunk in. A mail carrier in Yuma, Ariz., Norman Jenkins said he hadn’t been able to work for the last month, “and I can’t sleep at night.”
Mary Pultz Jenkins was identified through the work of Othram, a forensic laboratory outside Houston which launched in 2018 to perform genome sequencing specifically to help police solve cases by completing DNA profiles of victims, and sometimes suspects. Othram has identified thousands of unidentified people, some dating back to 1960, and it helped provide names in 2022 for two women in Fairfax County who had been unidentified for decades.
Othram creates DNA profiles, and then compares them to profiles uploaded into public DNA databases, looking for possible relatives. Once relatives are identified, police take over to locate the relatives, secure their DNA and see if it matches the unknown person. When a match is made, police are presented with a huge new lead to follow in an unsolved homicide: the identity of the victim.
“There shouldn’t be unidentified human remains,” Othram founder David Mittelman said. “If the remains are there, and there’s DNA, we should be able to identify the person. Nothing’s 100 percent, but there should not be a huge backlog of unaddressed human remains.”
According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a national centralized repository and resource center for missing and unidentified people, there are more than 14,000 unidentified bodies in the United States. Othram is working with nonprofit research institute RTI International to address the system’s backlog and enhance the availability of its services to police nationwide.
How was the case revived?
In late 2022, St. Johns County sheriff’s Sgt. Gene Tolbert attended a seminar in Orlando where genetic genealogy was discussed, and he thought back to the unidentified remains that were found on Crescent Beach, just south of St. Augustine, in 1985. Because the body was “completely skeletonized,” Tolbert said, there was no direct evidence to support a cause of death.
The medical examiner believed the victim was a white woman between the ages of 30 and 50 at the time of her death. She also had three surgical “burr holes” in her skull, indicative of someone who had brain surgery to address blood clots or sudden trauma. The remains also had multiple fractures of the nasal bones and healed fractures of multiple ribs and her lower legs. The medical examiner theorized these were the result of being involved in an earlier car crash or being struck by a vehicle, though not necessarily what killed her.
Tolbert said anthropologists examined the bones and determined that the woman had been dead for two years or longer, but when she died exactly was vague. More detailed isotope testing on the bones was inconclusive. In 2011, experts created a facial reconstruction of what the victim might have looked like, but no solid leads emerged, Tolbert said.
In the summer of 2023, Tolbert had some bones shipped to Othram. Soon, Othram had provided some leads and Tolbert hit the road, eventually visiting Allamong in Virginia and making a match with her older sister.
What did the family learn?
Jenkins’s family had no clue what had become of her after 1968. Born Mary Alice Pultz in Rockville, Md., she moved to Winchester after her parents divorced, then got married and had two children.
Allamong said Jenkins had been working as a waitress at a Holiday Inn in Winchester before she disappeared and that she liked to go out dancing.
Allamong was nine years younger than her sister, but she said Jenkins was always nice to her. “When I was 16, I would watch her kid, and then she left. Then I didn’t see her at all.”
It was common knowledge in the family that Jenkins had chosen to leave with John Thomas “Tommy” Fugitt, family members said. Fugitt was divorced from Jenkins’s sister Betty, and he too was never heard from again by the family.
“My mom and Betty tried to find her,” Allamong said. “They kept looking for her all these years.” Both women have since died.
Norman Jenkins said his father never talked about his mother, other than a running joke that “she went out for a loaf of bread and never came home.” His father remarried, and the family moved to Prince George’s County, Md., where Jenkins graduated from Parkdale High School.
Norman Jenkins enlisted in the Marines and sometimes pondered what happened to his mother. When the internet became available, Jenkins said he searched for any trace of her and posted notices on Facebook, but nothing came of it.
But when Tolbert tried to locate Tommy Fugitt after identifying Jenkins, he found something interesting: Fugitt had been arrested for murder.
In 1981, Fugitt had convinced his male roommate to make him the beneficiary on a $15,000 life insurance policy, then strangled him in Clayton County, Ga., legal records show. Fugitt was convicted of murder in 1982 and sentenced to death. He died in prison of a heart attack in 1995, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Could Fugitt have killed Mary Jenkins? He was in jail by 1981, and Jenkins’s body was found in 1985, but the date of her death was years earlier. Tolbert said he spoke to the prosecutor in Fugitt’s murder case, who said there was no indication of a female friend for the defendant. But Fugitt remains a “person of interest,” Tolbert said.
“For years, we’ve looked for her and looked for her,” said Audrey Lowther, Jenkins’s niece and Betty’s daughter. She said she hoped investigators could find medical records or a police report related to a possible car accident that caused her various bone fractures, and trace Jenkins from there.
Fugitt’s survivors could not be located.
“I just always thought,” Norman Jenkins said, “she just abandoned her family.”
But learning that she had been slain indicated that maybe she wanted to go home and couldn’t. “She probably ran off with the wrong guy,” her son said. “If she had an attitude, like me, she probably fought back.”
Anyone with information about the death of Mary Alice Pultz Jenkins is asked to contact the St. Johns County sheriff at 1-888-277-TIPS (8477) or by email at crimetips@sjso.org.
