NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Eighteen years after the body of a woman was found in La Vergne, Tennessee, a nonprofit specializing in solving cold cases using DNA has identified her as a Connecticut woman.

The DNA Doe Project identified the woman as 40-year-old Mary Alice Maloney, who was a Connecticut native. She had been living in the Nashville area before her disappearance, according to the nonprofit.

A police officer discovered her body on Nov. 14, 2007, in a remote wooded area. There was no clothing found at the scene, the nonprofit stated, but some jewelry was found with the body.

Investigators believed her to be of African American descent and between the ages of 25 and 49. While her body was found in November 2007, she was believed to have died in the spring or summer of 2007.

La Vergne police contacted the DNA Doe Project after exhausting all leads. Expert volunteer investigative genetic genealogists uploaded her DNA profile to GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA.com.

“Our work is often complicated by the lack of people who have uploaded their DNA profiles to the public databases we can use for our cases,” team leader Jenny Lecus said. “That’s why one of the recommendations we make to families of the missing is to make sure your DNA profile is in GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNAJustice.org.”

In April 2021, a new DNA match appeared in the GEDmatch database, according to the DNA Doe Project. This match was of African American descent, and she shared nearly 2% of her DNA with Jane Doe. The DNA Doe Project team began building her family tree, and within weeks, they found that a distant relative of the new match had married a man of Puerto Rican descent in 1963, and four years later, they’d had a daughter named Mary.

Additional research led the team to discover that Mary had been living in the Nashville area up until 2007, but after that, she had disappeared from the records. The DNA Doe Project shared this information with the La Vergne Police Department, which later confirmed that the woman formerly known as La Vergne Jane Doe was, in fact, Mary Alice Maloney.