Teen victim in Oakland cold case murder identified after 57 years
By Carlos E. Castañeda
Oakland police announced a breakthrough in a cold case homicide investigation with the identification of a teenage girl found murdered nearly six decades ago.
On October 2, 1969, police officers responded to the former Hotel St. Louis on 7th Street, about a block away from Oakland Police Department headquarters, where a female victim was found dead in a hotel room. Witnesses reported seeing her enter the room with a white or Native American male just after 2:45 p.m., and less than 30 minutes later, hotel staffers heard a scream. The suspect left before officers arrived.
Police said the cause of death was determined to be strangulation. The victim had no identification, and her identity remained unknown for decades. On Thursday, Oakland Police Chief James Beere announced that the victim previously known as “Jane Doe” was positively identified as Joanne Yvonne Burdick, known to her family as “Joanie,” who was 16 years old when she was killed.
Beere said determining Burdick’s identity was made possible by collaboration between the department’s cold case investigators and the FBI.
“We recognize that no investigation can change what happened to Joanie,” Beere said. “We hope today’s announcement will provide answers to her family and we continue to pursue justice 57 years later.”
FBI investigators located a living relative of Burdick who provided a DNA sample that confirmed Joanie’s identity, police said.
“Joanie’s identity has been restored through the dedicated work by the Oakland Police Department and the Coroner’s Office with forensic support from the FBI,” said . “The FBI San Francisco field office formally joined this renewed investigation in 2020 to assist the Oakland Police Department with forensic analysis, genealogical expertise and laboratory support. Modern forensic tools made it possible to revisit evidence that could not be fully analyzed decades ago.”
“Thank you to every single individual who worked on this case, past and present, for caring enough to give Joanne her name and to give her family closure,” the Burdick Family said in a statement.
Police said that the original investigation determined that Taylor Morris Teaford was a potential suspect in the killing of Burdick. Teaford has a long criminal history and was also named as a suspect in the fatal shooting of his grandmother and the shooting of his sister in Madera County in 1972.
Months before Burdick’s death, two other women were found murdered near the Oakland Estuary and at Berkeley Aquatic Park, and authorities linked both deaths and Burdick’s death to Teaford, leading him to be dubbed as the “Crew Cut Killer.”
Teaford was never arrested and remains a fugitive. He was once on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
