COLLEEN ORSBORN - 15 yo (1984) Orange County FL

When 15-year-old Colleen Orsborn missed her bus, ditched school,
grabbed a pink bikini and left home on March 15, 1984, DNA science was
still young.When a fisherman found a knee poking out of the
ground near an Orange County lake a few days later - faded pink nail
polish left on the body's fingers and toes - there was still no DNA
database.For almost three decades, Colleen and the girl found in Orange County remained separate mysteries.


They shouldn't have."It's a tragedy that somebody ruled her out," Orlando's District 9 Medical Examiner Jan Garavaglia said Friday.Garavaglia
confirmed that a DNA sample from the long-unidentified girl by the lake
has been matched to Colleen, the pretty Campbell Junior High
eighth-grader who police believe was one of the first victims of serial
killer Christopher Wilder."It would certainly give us some sense
of peace," Colleen's older sister Margaret Carroll, who still lives in
Volusia County, said of the new activity on the case. "I don't know if
it'll ever be over for any of us. But by all means, we'd like to know
what happened to her."Colleen left her family's beachside home on
Butler Boulevard the same day Wilder, a 39-year-old Australian
millionaire who raced in the 24 Hours of Daytona at Daytona
International Speedway, checked into a Howard Johnson hotel in Daytona
Beach.At the time, two women Wilder knew - including an ex-girlfriend - had disappeared.Colleen's
family initially wondered if she simply ran away from home. Then weeks
passed. By the time Wilder died in a skirmish with state troopers in New
Hampshire - about a month after Colleen disappeared - police believed
he was responsible for 11 abductions and four slayings. Today, they know
he killed at least seven women and one teenage girl he abducted at a
Las Vegas beauty pageant.Those eight didn't include three
survivors Wilder either spared or left for dead. And it didn't include
Colleen, who local police were sure was his victim."I'm almost
certain she's a victim of Wilder. He was in town the day she turned up
missing," Larry Lewis, a retired Daytona Beach police detective who
worked the case, said Tuesday. "They'll never know who did it because
old Wilder killed himself."When the girl's body surfaced in
Orange County, Lewis said, police checked into whether it was Colleen.
He sent the Medical Examiner's Office an X-ray of one of Colleen's old
injuries - a broken arm - to see if it matched the body."He said,
'No, no, no, we don't have any evidence of a break there,' " Lewis said
of the medical examiner's response. "We had ruled her out because of
the broken bone; I'm pretty sure that was the biggest part of it."Garavaglia, who took over the examiner's office in 2004, said notations in the case file abruptly stopped sometime after that.The
match came in March 2010, six years after newcomer Garavaglia sent DNA
from all the agency's unidentified bodies to a national database. A
mitochondrial DNA sample - the type inherited from the maternal side -
matched samples taken from two of Colleen's sisters.When, despite
the match, the case still wasn't moving by December, Garavaglia asked
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to look into it."Once
we got the FDLE involved, then they were able to light a fire under some
people," said Garavaglia, also known as "Dr. G" on the Discovery Fit
& Health television series about her cases.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/02/2046637/dr-g-matches-dna-to-missing-daytona.html