The last time Anita Louise Piteau’s family heard from her was in February 1968, when she sent a letter and a postcard home to Maine saying she had visited Hollywood and taken a tour of stars’ homes. Ms. Piteau had gone to California just a few months earlier, eager to see a new part of the country. In her letter, she said she planned to return to the East Coast in May.
“‘I’ll see you then,’” she wrote, according to her niece, Laurie Quirion. “‘Love you. Talk to you soon.’ And that was it. Nothing ever again.”
Ms. Piteau’s disappearance haunted her family. She was one of seven siblings from Augusta, Maine, and her relatives spent the next 52 years searching for her.
“My mother and grandmother talked about her all the time and wondered every day: ‘Where is she? Why haven’t we heard from her?’” said Ms. Quirion, 60, who was nearly 8 when her aunt disappeared and who later made efforts to find her. “My grandmother said every time the phone rang, she was hoping it was her. And it was never her.”
On Thursday, investigators in Orange County, Calif., said they had finally solved the mystery of what had happened to Ms. Piteau.
Using DNA evidence that had been preserved for decades, investigators determined that her body had been left in a field in Huntington Beach, Calif., after she was sexually assaulted and killed in 1968, when she was 26.
For more than half a century, she remained a Jane Doe, buried in an unmarked grave in Newport Beach, Calif.
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office said that DNA evidence had also identified a suspect in her killing: Johnny Chrisco, who had been discharged from the Army with psychological problems in 1963. Mr. Chrisco died of cancer in 2015, when he was 71.
Last weekend, Ms. Piteau’s relatives held a memorial service for her and buried her remains in Waterville, Maine. At the ceremony, David Dierking, an investigator from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, recounted the decades of painstaking detective work it had taken to identify Mr. Chrisco as the suspect and Ms. Piteau as the victim in the county’s oldest unsolved homicide of a Jane Doe.
Ms. Quirion said she was deeply moved by the effort.
“We never in our wildest dreams thought that they were looking for her,” she said. “That they were working this case for that many years just blows my mind. I just thought we never knew what was going to happen to her.”
Todd Spitzer, the Orange County district attorney, said technology and the determination of the police, prosecutors, forensic scientists and investigators had “allowed Anita’s family to finally bring her home and lay her to rest.”
“The death of Johnny Chrisco prevented the full imposition of justice for Anita’s murder, and that is a wound that will never heal,” Mr. Spitzer said in a statement. “But it was the dogged pursuit of justice that ensured that it was not if, but when, we would finally be able to tell Anita’s loved ones who killed her.”
The case dates to March 14, 1968, when three young boys playing in a large farm field in Huntington Beach found the body of a woman. She had been sexually assaulted and severely beaten, and her neck was slashed.
The police officers who responded to the scene carefully preserved evidence from the field, including a smoked cigarette butt found near the victim’s body, the district attorney’s office said. The police worked the case exhaustively but were unable to identify the victim or her killer, and the case went cold.
Then, in 2001, investigators extracted DNA from the victim’s clothing and the sexual assault kit and developed a profile for an unknown male killer. Nearly 10 years later, a partial DNA profile that was taken from the cigarette butt matched the DNA from the assault kit. But still, investigators could not find a suspect.
In 2011, blood from the victim’s blouse yielded a partial DNA profile, which was entered into a missing persons database. The victim’s fingerprints were also entered into state and F.B.I. databases. But investigators could not generate leads to identify the victim.
The mystery began to unravel last year after investigators turned to genetic genealogy, in which DNA samples are used to find relatives of suspects and eventually the suspects themselves. The technique was also used to solve the rapes and murders of dozens of California residents by a man who became known as the Golden State Killer.
Investigators developed a family tree for the suspect that helped them identify him as Mr. Chrisco, who was not one of the initial suspects in the killing, according to the district attorney’s office.
Mr. Chrisco had been discharged from the Army in 1963 after he was diagnosed with “positive aggressive reaction,” which was defined as being quick to anger, easy to feel unjustly treated, chronically resentful, immature and impulsive, the district attorney’s office said.
He had a long arrest record and was married three times, according to the district attorney’s office, which said Mr. Chrisco was buried in Washington State.
Earlier this year, detectives, prosecutors and forensic scientists began working on a possible family tree of the victim. With the help of Colleen Fitzpatrick, a rocket scientist turned genetic genealogist, investigators identified Ms. Piteau through DNA matches with her siblings.
Mr. Dierking, who first came across the case as a Huntington Beach police officer in the 1990s, said the meticulous collection of evidence at the original crime scene had allowed investigators to solve the crime decades later.
“To think back to 1968, there was not any thought of DNA,” he said. “For those guys who worked so hard to collect and preserve that evidence and hold Johnny accountable even in his death, that was amazing. It’s a miracle. And the family had really concentrated on praying and asking for closure.”
Ms. Quirion said she was astonished when she learned that her aunt’s remains had been identified.
“It was like a weight had been lifted,” Ms. Quirion said. “We knew where she is, and she’s coming home.”
Last weekend, Ms. Piteau was buried in a family plot near one of her sisters, Ms. Quirion’s mother. Her simple stone marker includes the inscription “We miss you.”
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