PHOENIX — Decades after her death, a woman who was found dead in Phoenix has been identified.
On Feb. 4, 1997, a woman’s partially burned body was found in an abandoned car that was engulfed in flames near 24th and Monroe streets. Officials say an empty purse with the name “Monique” was found near the woman’s body.
For years, the unknown woman was only identified as an African American woman between 20 and 50 years old. She was possibly an unhoused woman who had been seen in the area previously.
Phoenix Police Department eventually brought the cold case to DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit group with volunteer investigators who work to identify victims.
The team started working on the case in 2020 and was eventually able to identify the woman in January 2025.
They determined the victim was Monique S. Boggs, who was born in Mississippi and moved to Michigan when she was a child.
“…She appeared to have fallen off the radar in the 1990s,” said case manager Eric Hendershott. “But the most striking detail was that she had changed her name in the 1980s to Monique - the same name written on the purse found with our Jane Doe.”
Her family had known her as “Shirley Jefferson,” and they were not aware that she had ended up in Arizona.
According to the DNA Project, part of the difficulties they experienced were due to the fact that “African Americans are underrepresented in the DNA databases we have access to, while part of the devastating impact of slavery was to rip families apart and leave few traceable connections between their descendants.”
While the identity portion of this cold case has been solved, additional circumstances around the woman's death have not been identified.
