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Woman still waiting to find out if "Red Headed Jane Doe" is her mother

More than three decades after a woman was found dead in rural Kentucky, Elizabeth Pilgrim is still waiting to find out if she's found the mother she lost.

For more than three decades, the identity of the "Red Headed Jane Doe" found in rural Kentucky has remained a mystery, but anxiously-awaited DNA results may finally solve it.

We featured the story in our Appalachian Unsolved series in 2017.

It was 1985, and two men looking for spare parts in a wooded area off 25E in Knox County, Kentucky, discovered a woman's body in a discard fridge.

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An autopsy showed the woman died from asphyxiation, likely unable to breathe after being shut up in the freezer.

She had red hair, a distinctive birthmark, and was wearing two gold chains, one with a gold eagle pendant and other a gold heart.”

It wasn't enough to identify her.

But that story, shared on Facebook, reached the aunt of a woman in North Carolina.

"It's just like she knew, you know?" said Elizabeth Pilgrim. "Of all the pictures and stuff she had seen, it just was a feeling."

Pilgrim believes the woman is her own mother, Espy Regina Black Pilgrim, who disappeared just weeks after she was born.

The family contacted Kentucky State Police, and submitted DNA samples to see if they are related. They are still awaiting the results.

"It was surreal," Pilgrim said. "I thought it was a joke at first because I had actually screenshotted the message from the officer and sent it to my aunt, you know? is this for real?"

Pilgrim said the woman looks strikingly similar to her old sister. She also recognized the jewelry the Jane Doe was wearing when she was found in 1985.

"I want it to be her. I don't want her to be dead, nobody does, but I want it to be her for the closure aspect of it," Pilgrim said. "I don't have to wonder and question anymore."

WLEX contributed to this story

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