GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — The mystery of a missing mother of two young children has just been solved, after decades of heartache.
The outcome - tragic.
But her now-grown daughter, Janis Adams, is at peace after finding out.
Gwinnett County Police just matched Adams’ DNA with the DNA of unidentified human remains found in some woods nearly 40 years ago.
The remains are those of her mother, Marlene Standridge.
Police believe Standridge had been murdered soon after she disappeared, when her daughter was just three years old.
Standridge disappeared from Piedmont Park in Atlanta, in 1973.
Standridge was at the park with her 6-year-old son, and her 3-year-old daughter-- Janis.
The children suddenly couldn’t find her.
“It’s been a mystery,” Adams told 11Alive Thursday. “It’s just been a mystery that none of us have been able to figure out. My brother and I were always told that our mother kind of just abandoned us at Piedmont Park, and we never knew what happened to her.”
Janis Adams never believed her mother would abandon them. She tried everything over the years to find her.
A couple of years ago, she submitted her DNA to a data base, GEDmatch.
Last month, Gwinnett County Police Homicide Detective Brian Dorminy called her in, and told her that by coincidence this past spring, while investigating a cold-case homicide, he had submitted human remains to a DNA lab - the unidentified remains of a woman found, in December, 1982, in some woods near Yellow River Park.
Detective Dorminy submitted the remains to Othram Labs, which specializes in “using trace amounts of degraded forensic evidence to make identification.”
The lab’s website provides case histories of cold cases that were solved through its DNA testing methods.
Police said, back in 1982, that they’d recovered from some woods off of Deshong Drive near Yellow River Park, a skull, a bone from an upper arm, bone fragments, clothing including shoes, and also a nylon rope and other evidence. Police said then that the remains were of a woman who had been tied, murdered, and left there, unburied, six to 10 years earlier.
The rope “appeared to have been used to bind a victim, to either tie the victim’s arms behind her, or legs together,” police wrote in their report then.
The report also said that “it did not appear that any effort was made to bury the corpse that had apparently been left where it was lying.”
Since that discovery, police had no success identifying the remains, not knowing that Janis Adams was spending her life trying to discover what had happened to her mom.
Adams said she learned that her father never filed a missing person report. So, when police found the remains, years after her mother's disappearance, there was no way for detectives to cross-check the discovery with files of missing people.
Why didn’t her father file a missing person report?
“That is the million dollar question,” Adams said. “Why wasn’t anyone wondering, 'okay - where is this mother at?' I asked him, and he just said, ‘honestly, I thought she’d left with someone else. So why am I going to bother looking for her?’ And I’m just, like, ‘that is not a good answer. You had two children, did you never wonder for once that we would want to know, one day, what happened to her?’ Whenever we would ask him the question, he would just kind of shut down.”
Adams said she kept trying to talk with her father about her mother, right up until his death a couple of years ago.
Then, this month, the final DNA tests came back, confirming a match between the remains found in 1982, and Adams’ DNA--which had popped up in a search, after the lab established the DNA of the remains. The woman was Marlene Standridge, Janis Adams’ mother.
Adams said Thursday that police told her that her mother had probably been abducted miles away at Piedmont Park, then taken to the Gwinnett County woods and killed.
A possible suspect, police told her, is the same man police suspected at the time the remains were found--a man who was later convicted of murdering another woman at about the same time her mother was killed.
“It’s just a really wild story to be told, basically, that you were abandoned your whole life, but then find out that she probably was protecting us from this guy who ended up taking her,” Adams said.
It is a relief, she said, learning, along with her family now, how much her mother loved her and her brother.
“And I’ve prayed about it, and, I mean, thank God, I finally got the answers that I needed," describing her childhood with her father as difficult, as she grew and tried to find answers about her mom, and tried to remain positive despite it all.
"You can make anything of your life," she said. "It doesn’t matter the circumstances that you were brought up in. What matters is your reaction to those circumstances."
She and her brother want to have a funeral for their mom.
“Not a sad moment,” Adams said. “Maybe like, just something joyful for her. I think she deserves that after all these years.”
Adams praised Det. Dorminy and the Gwinnett County Police for never giving up on the case.
“It was a blessing” finding out, she said. “I mean, it’s awful that she was murdered, but I’m glad that we have that closure. I’m still processing it all. I’m glad that they have this technology, and hopefully other people will be able to use this technology and get the closure that they need."
Gwinnett County Police continue to investigate the homicide. They are asking anyone who might know anything to contact them at 770-513-5300. Or they can submit anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers and qualify for a possible reward: 404-577-TIPS (404-577-8477) stopcrimeATL.com.