Two Disappearances and a Jane Doe: The Nelda Hardwick Mystery

"Biloxi Sun Herald," August 17, 2013, via Newspapers.com

In previous posts, I have covered several cases of what you might call “anomalous reappearances”; that is to say, people who disappear and then turn up--usually dead--far from where they were last seen, and with no explanation of how they got there.  The following case is yet another of these mysteries.

34-year-old Nelda Louise Hardwick lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana with her four children and her boyfriend.  On the night of October 14, 1993, she put the kids to bed and left a note for her sleeping boyfriend stating that she was going to the store, and would be back soon.

It is unclear if Hardwick ever made it to the store or not.  All that can be said is that she never returned.  The following morning, the boyfriend told the police she was missing.  It was immediately assumed that this was a case of foul play.  Hardwick was a loving, conscientious mother who would never abandon her children, and she appears to have taken very little with her.  Unfortunately, the investigation essentially stalled there.  Hardwick was gone; most likely abducted, but there were no suspects, and no clues at all as to what might have happened to her.

There things stood until May 8, 1998, when a truck driver discovered a woman’s corpse near an exit on the 1-10 Interstate Highway in Hancock, Mississippi, about 250 miles from where Nelda Hardwick had vanished.  The woman had died after being hit by a car.  This hit-and-run was solved when some teenagers came forward after hearing the story on the news.  They explained that in the middle of the night, their car had hit something in the area where the body was found.  Assuming that it was just a deer or some other wandering large animal, they didn’t stop to investigate.

The Jane Doe was probably between 37 and 42 years old.  She had no teeth, and no dentures were found near the body.  She was between 5’3”-5’5” and 135 pounds.  She had gray eyes, and her naturally brown hair had been dyed.

No name was attached to the corpse until 2013, when Jim Faulk, the coroner who had autopsied the woman, announced that he believed that she was the missing Nelda Hardwick.  Hardwick’s family, after examining photos of the corpse’s relatively undamaged face, also insisted that this was their vanished relative.  As for where Nelda (assuming this was indeed her) had been all these years, Faulk offered the grim theory that she had been held captive, and then finally escaped only to be immediately killed by a passing car.  On the other hand, Nelda Hardwick had scars below each knee, and, as far as her relatives knew, had never had an appendectomy.  The Jane Doe had no scars below her knees, and her appendix had been removed.

There was another theory about the Jane Doe.  Some believed she was really a woman named Faye Alina Self, who had vanished from Red River Parish, Louisiana in 1983.  However, in 2006, a serial killer named Robert Browne who had lived in Self’s apartment building confessed to murdering Self and dumping her body in a river.

It was resolved that the only way to conclusively establish the Jane Doe’s identity would be to exhume her for DNA testing.  However, when her grave was opened, they found instead the body of a…John Doe.  

To date, the corpse of “Jane Doe” remains as mysteriously lost as Nelda Hardwick and Faye Alina Self.