19-year-old vanished during 1988 road trip. Her body was just identified in Georgia
In September 1988, a 19-year-old woman called her mother to share her travel plans — she was in North Carolina, she said, and would soon travel back to Michigan.
She never made it to Michigan, authorities said.
This was the last time the woman would hear from her daughter, and for 33 years, no one knew what happened to her.
On March 24, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced that officials identified remains of a body they found in 1988 as the woman who went missing: Stacey Lyn Chahorski.
Chahorski was reported missing in Norton Shores, Michigan, by her mother, Mary Beth, in January 1989, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
In December 1988, deputies responded to the scene of a body found about 5 miles from the Alabama state line in Dade County, Georgia, according to a news release.
Authorities determined that the body was of an unidentified woman who had been killed.
For years, GBI agents and Dade County investigators attempted to identify the victim, authorities said. Multiple clay renderings and composites were done to recreate what the victim would look like — with no success.
In the mid-2000s, agents said the case was reassigned and new evidence was sent to an FBI lab in Washington, D.C. Analysts were able to make a DNA profile of the woman and entered it in the missing persons DNA database.
The investigation did not progress until 2015, according to the release. That year, new renderings of the woman were done to reflect an age progression.
“The GBI contacted the FBI about the possibility of using a new type of genealogy investigation that had been credited with assisting in solving other cold cases,” authorities said in a release, “particularly homicide investigations.”
Thanks to this technology, the remains were identified as Chahorski.
The woman’s mother was notified, and agents returned some jewelry found at the crime scene to her, FBI Special Agent Tim Burke said in a March 24 news conference
“Without the advancements in DNA technology, we wouldn’t have been able to be of assistance and have this success,” Burke said.
GBI Special Agent Joe Montgomery said the woman had been buried in Dade County since 1989 in an unmarked grave, but she will now “be reunited with her family as soon as we can.”
“Today marks the day where we hunt for the killer now,” Montgomery said during the conference.
The Michigan woman would have been 52 this year.
Montgomery said he thinks authorities have a good probability of solving the case and “bringing the killer to justice.”
“The biggest problem in being able to solve this case is we had no identity of the victim, so we had no starting point,” the agent said. “Now we have a starting point and that’s a big jump for us.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 3:21 PM with the headline "19-year-old vanished during 1988 road trip. Her body was just identified in Georgia."
