After sixty-two years, a missing girl who was known as “Little Miss Nobody” has been identified.
On Tuesday, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office held a news conference identifying the remains of a four-year-old girl who had been found in the Arizona desert in 1960 as Sharon Lee Gallegos.
They were able to identify the little girl with the help of DNA technology.
In 1960, a school teacher looking for rocks in the Arizona desert made the grim discovery. She found the burned remains of a little girl who would become known as Little Miss Nobody.
“In 1960, people had no idea that DNA would even be a technology,” Sheriff David Rhodes said. “They wouldn’t even know what to call it. It didn’t exist. But somehow, some way, they did enough investigation to preserve, to document, to memorialize — all the things that needed to occur so that some day we could get to this point.”
Over the years, Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office in Prescott, Arizona as well as the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children, National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and other organizations have been working hard to identify the remains.
But they were never successful.
The case went cold.
It wasn’t until recently that with the help of crowdfunding and a lab in Texas that Little Miss Nobody’s DNA was analyzed, and her identity was revealed.
Othram, the lab, received the case in December 2021 and by February they were able to return the results to the authorities.
The remains belonged to Sharon Lee Gallegos. The little girl was allegedly abducted on July 21, 1960 while playing with other children near her grandmother’s house in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
At the time police and the FBI were unsuccessful in finding Sharon or her abductors, according to ABC News.
When the teacher found the remains in the Arizona desert, 500 miles away, authorities suspected they belonged to Sharon, but technology wasn’t advanced enough to identify the remains.
While her identity has been confirmed, there’s still more work to be done.
But for now, her family is thankful for everyone who worked hard to identify her.
“We as the family want to say thank you,” Rey Chavez, Sharon’s nephew, said during the news conference. “Thank you for what you’ve done for us, thank you for keeping my aunt safe and never forgetting her. It’s still sinking in.”
This is great news, and it’s also promising that other cold cases can and will be solved giving closure to families who have lived without answers for years.
