On May 14th, 1985, an unconscious woman was found along Highway 91, in Georgia. She was transported to a hospital in Albany, Georgia and treated, though authorities could not figure out her identity or how she became injured. She passed away on June 1st, of blunt force trauma, and remained unidentified until this week.
The four children of Mary Anga “Angie” Cowan, have been waiting for answers since their mother vanished suspiciously, almost four decades ago.
“I was 10 years old, and she was fun, and she was silly and then one day she was gone. I knew she was gone and I never imagined they would find her,” one of Cowan’s children, Angelique Hall said. “This is a shock from Georgia finding out that not only her body was found but that a town picked her up out of a ditch and took care of her last days. She was loved, and I hear [she was] buried.”
Despite the case remaining unsolved for so long, authorities put great effort into trying to determine Cowan’s identity. In 2012, they partnered with the FBI to send a sample of Cowan’s DNA into a private company for isotope sampling, although no leads were found. Later, a genotype was created from a bone sample, where the FBI found a living genetic match: one of Cowan’s children.
“The research yielded a high probability that the unidentified woman was Mary Anga Cowan, aka ‘Angie,'” the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation), said in a statement. “Agents obtained DNA from one of Cowan’s children and the comparison indicated a parent/child relationship.”
Though the mystery of how exactly Cowan died remains unsolved, her children take solace in knowing that she was found and cared for in her final days.
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