Las Vegas woman identified as Sahara Sue Doe after 44 years

For 44 years, the young woman once known as Sahara Sue Doe had no name. Now Las Vegas police say she was Gwenn Marie Story, a 19-year-old from Cincinnati who came west in search of her biological father, only for her life to end in a homicide that remains open.

Story left the Cincinnati area in the summer of 1979 and traveled toward California with two male friends. Those friends later returned to Cincinnati and told family they had left her in the Las Vegas area. On August 14, 1979, at about 9 p.m., a man walking through an open field near Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard found her body. The field sat on the former site of the El Rancho Vegas Hotel, a stretch of the north Strip that has since disappeared into the city’s later skyline.

The Clark County coroner ruled the death a homicide, and investigators determined Story had been stabbed to death. Police also recovered personal items at the scene, including a light blue-green button-up shirt, blue denim Levi’s jeans, a chain and a ring. Those details stayed with the case long after the trail went cold, preserving enough evidence for modern testing to take over where the old investigation stalled.

That next step came in September 2022, when Las Vegas police sent Story’s remains to Othram for forensic genetic genealogy. The Woodlands, Texas, company built a comprehensive DNA profile and used it to generate new leads. On November 15, 2023, detectives were notified that Sahara Sue Doe had been positively identified as Gwenn Marie Story, ending the mystery of who she was, but not who killed her.

The identification matters because homicide detectives cannot fully chase justice until they know the victim’s name. LVMPD homicide Lt. Jason Johansson said the case remains unsolved, and former Clark County coroner Michael Murphy had long pressed for answers, saying in 2016 that more than one person likely knew what happened and that the victim still deserved justice. The Vegas Justice League, founded in 2020 by Justin Woo and Lydia Ansel, has also backed genealogy testing in cold cases, helping fund Othram work that has solved nine local cases and 50 nationwide, with each Othram case costing about $7,500.

Gwenn Marie Story has her name back now, and the open field near Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard is no longer hiding a stranger. What it still hides is the person, or people, who stabbed her there and walked away.