Chautauqua County Abducted, Missing, Murdered and Unidentified Women's Initiative

Chautauqua County, in Western New York, has a population of 127,600, a median income of $33,458.00. Between 1976 and 2021, over twenty-five missing, unidentified and murdered individual cases have gone unsolved. Fourteen of these cases involved young women between the ages of 14-35 years of age. In June of 2022, the Office of the Sheriff of Chautauqua County formed an Unsolved Crimes Unit with two veteran homicide detectives to bring closure to the victim’s families and the community. This unit launched The Chautauqua County Abducted, Missing, Murdered and Unidentified Women’s Initiative. The Initiative has discovered additional missing person cases as well as identifying modus and situational commonalities. This presents the possibility of an individual or group of individuals were possibly involved in more than one of these incidents. In the ensuing forty-one years in which these cases occurred, over ten law enforcement agencies in the county have closed. Their records, in many instances are no longer available. The missing person cases are spread over five different agencies presenting the Initiative team an additional hurdle of gathering data, evidence, and reports from cooperating agencies. The Initiative's goal is to ensure all of the victims from over twenty-one unsolved cases, have their information logged into the proper databases, family reference samples gathered and entered into databases, identification and valuable evidence is located and catalogued, and surviving family members updated on the status of the case. The Chautauqua County Abducted, Missing, Murdered and Unidentified Women’s Initiative. Initiative team has formed an interdisciplinary approach utilizing the guidance with local and state Law Enforcement agencies, the Erie County Lab, the New York State Police Lab, The F.B.I Lab at Quantico, the FBI Investigative Genealogy Lab, as well as two private labs, for technical and forensic lab work,

The goals of the Initiative are: to insure all of the unidentified individuals discovered in Chautauqua County are identified and analyzed against all the available missing persons’ databases in the United States, Europe, and Canada. To return the newly identified individuals to their families as well as investigate their cause of death. To find four Chautauqua County women still missing. To examine the commonalities among seven abducted and formerly missing women against the commonalities of the still missing women. Generate forensic profiles of suspects from evidence collected in the Chautauqua County unsolved murder cases which has never been tested.

These funds, which will be managed by the Chautauqua Office of Sheriff will be available to local and state agencies in New York, specifically for use on the eleven of the fourteen cases unsolved cases identified below. Dependent on the level of funding from the Community Project Funding application, if successful, the Unsolved Crimes Unit will triage the cases below to determine which cases have the greatest probability for generating dynamic results within the one year time frame of the funding.