‘Genealogy wiz’ helps identify Nashville’s ‘Leo Jane Doe’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — For nearly 26 years, no one knew the identity of a woman whose body was found floating in the Cumberland River.

It was a troubling mystery that Metro Nashville police and genetic genealogists spent years trying to piece together, until finally, they were able to make a breakthrough . Last week, the police department announced that the woman who had only been known as the “Leo Jane Doe” for multiple decades now had a name.

Diane Minor was a country singer, beauty queen and weather personality for WSIX-TV before the station changed ownership and became WKRN. She moved to Nashville as a teenager seeking her first big break in the music business but was originally from Alabama.

Eric Schubert , a 23-year-old genealogist from New Jersey, knew that she was from Alabama four years ago, but that was just the first clue to the massive genetic puzzle.

Schubert, who was been nationally recognized for his volunteer work on other cold cases since he was just a teenager, began trying to help detectives put together a picture of who the “Leo Jane Doe” was back in 2020.

At the time, he was working on a handful of other cold cases, including the death of 9-year-old Marise Chiverella, which was then one of the most notorious unsolved murders in Pennsylvania.

The college freshman had been doing genealogical work to help families find their ancestors as a hobby since he was 10 years old, with some articles referring to him as a “genealogy wiz.” He became interested in criminal cases at the age of 16, but thought that, realistically, no law enforcement agency would ever enlist his help.

“I was like 16, 17, 18 and thought no police department is going to email me and say, ‘Hey, Eric, you know, we heard about you. We would love to get your help on this case’,” Schubert said. “But the week I graduated high school, that’s exactly what happened.”

The Pennsylvania State Police decided to give Schubert a chance to help them solve the infamous cold case, and after hundreds of hours of research, he narrowed the potential suspects down to one man. Officials then confirmed the man was Chiverella’s murderer through DNA testing.

It was that work that soon connected Schubert with other police agencies. However, back in Nashville, things were a bit trickier.

Schubert quickly figured out that the “Leo Jane Doe” was from Chilton County, just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, but the sheer number of similar family names or endogamy in the genetic matches made it particularly difficult to zero in on her identity.

“The problem was there was too many. There weren’t enough stronger matches,” Schubert said. “So, there was almost, you know, there’s too many people. It was quite the opposite of a problem that we often run into in cases.”

That first clue made detectives turn their sights to Chilton County, where they tried to find anyone who might have had a missing relative in the Nashville area. Eventually, Schubert was able to narrow the woman’s identity down to a few surnames, but he was still hitting a brick wall.

“At the time, I just could not get past it, and worked on it for a while,” he said. “And I just sort of said, ‘OK, I’m going to graduate soon. I’m headed back to school. I don’t know what I can do here, but definitely we’re looking for a woman from Chilton County. Her surname is probably one of these two or three names’.”

Although he wasn’t able to uncover her exact identity, Schubert’s initial work laid the ground for the breakthrough that came a few years later when Metro Nashville police sent the case to the DNA Doe Project’s team of volunteer genetic genealogists.

Using carefully honed techniques to separate her genetic matches by parent, the team was able to find a match, which was then confirmed with DNA testing of one of Minor’s close relatives. Soon after, Schubert got an email letting him know the Jane Doe had finally been identified.

“It’s just so amazing to me that there were so many of these clues there, like some of these surnames in Chilton County. And it took a little bit more time, but that’s the beauty of these cases,” Schubert said. “There can be a lot of hands involved, there can be a lot of people working on it and sometimes you never really know when that phone call from someone’s got to come in.”

To Schubert, Minor bore a striking resemblance to the sketch detectives had created of her years ago and it amazed him to see the community learning more about the woman who had been without a name for so long.

“Just seeing so many people now come forward, watching the news and seeing people who recognize her, who knew her, you know, who listened to her music, things like that, I think is really incredible,” he said.

Articles from the 1960s detail Minor’s early ventures in Nashville as a singer and TV personality on the Stu Phillips Show. Some people have found records of her songs online and even recognized the singer from album covers.

However, there’s a large gap in information from between when Minor was a part of WSIX-TV and the early 1990s, when she was last known to be managing the Second Story Cafe in Nashville.

No articles regarding her or her career can be found past 1965. According to Metro Nashville police, there was never a missing person’s report filed for her. But now with her identity uncovered, investigators are one step closer in their search for her murderer.

As with many of the cold cases he’s volunteered his time on, Schubert said it feels nice to finally have some resolution. The 1998 cold case also highlights an important aspect of solving these often decades-old murders.

Genetic genealogists like Schubert rely on public databases of DNA samples to compare possible matches, and although it is possible to solve a case in other ways, having more samples can help families find closure much faster. People can upload their DNA on a host of websites such as AncestryDNA.

“This is not the only case where it can take a little bit to cut through that endogamy and to cut through that pedigree class. People uploading their DNA willingly and publicly, you know, that gives people like myself more samples to work with. And that can help solve a case quicker,” Schubert said. “It’s one of the roadblocks that are common in this field. So, the more people that upload…the quicker these cases can just be solved.”

As the MNPD’s homicide investigation continues, anyone with information related to the 1998 cold case is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 615-742-7463 .

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