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Woman Found in a Box in 1976 Known as The Benton County Jane Doe Still Unidentified

The bizarre case of this jane doe still has investigators questioning what happened four decades later

Megan Ashley
4 min readJul 19, 2023
An Artest Sketch of the Victim (Source)

October 8th, 1976, started like any other for Norman Skoog, a farmer in the small town of Otterbein, Indiana. As the afternoon wore on, Norman slowly began to finish work for the day when he encountered something bizarre in one of his many fields just off County Road 200. It was a white box. Only this box wasn’t a small discarded piece of rubbish. When he tried to lift it out of his field so that he could plow, he noticed that it was unusually heavy and called for help. Norman then loaded the box into the truck and took it back to his home a few miles away.

The Skoog family crowded around the box to see what treasures lay inside, but instead of gold or riches, they were hit with a pungent smell, the familiar stench of death. The box also emitted a strong, flowery, perfumey smell, almost as if someone had tried to cover the stench. Norman began cutting through layers of tape, plastic, and rope and discovered a broken perfume bottle. When they got past a few layers, they collectively recoiled in horror. Inside the three-foot long, two-foot wide, and one-foot tall box lay the remains of a woman.

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Megan Ashley
Megan Ashley

Written by Megan Ashley

She/Her, content creator, writer, true crime, and history enthusiast https://linktr.ee/truecrimemysteries

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