A man walking through the woods near a Wilson tire plant in December 1977 spotted a human skull and flagged down officers — setting off a mystery that took nearly five decades to solve. Investigators now know her name: Cindy Marcell Blizzard, a 15-year-old runaway who vanished from Monkton, Maryland, in the spring of 1977, only to turn up dead roughly 280 miles from home. Her death is still classified as an unsolved homicide.
A Discovery That Sat Unclaimed for Decades
The remains and scattered clothing were found on December 29, 1977, in a wooded area near the Firestone plant at 3001 Firestone Parkway in Wilson, according to the Spring Hope Enterprise. The facility had only been operating for three years at the time, having been established in 1974, per the Wilson Economic Development Council, and remains one of the county's major industrial employers today. The Wilson Daily Times put the grim find on its front page the following day, and officers who responded — under joint jurisdiction of the Wilson County Sheriff's Office and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation — planned to return the next day to search for further clues.
J.G. Tank Jr., who was among those who responded to the scene, said a man had spotted the skull and alerted officers, and he estimated the remains could have been in the woods for as long as ten months. Officers later recovered more bones, hair indicating the person was white, and remnants of clothing. The remains were sent to N.C. Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill on December 31, 1977, where a medical examiner determined the victim was a white female roughly 16 to 23 years old who had likely been at the site for six months to two years. The manner of death was classified as undetermined, though investigators said the circumstances raised the probability of foul play.
Decades of Dead Ends
The case went cold for over three decades. In 2010, a state anthropologist reopened it, submitted the victim's teeth for DNA testing, and entered the resulting profile into CODIS and NamUs — the national databases used to match unidentified remains against missing-persons reports. The testing produced no match, and investigators who compared dental records against missing-person cases came up empty as well. Her case was eventually logged in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System under case number UP6681, according to DNA Solves.
That decades-long dead end is not unusual. Academic research published in late 2025 found that the FBI's CODIS database yields identifications in only 13% to 16% of unidentified remains cases, while forensic genetic genealogy resolves roughly half of NamUs casework, as Hoodline previously reported. CODIS depends on a direct hit against a known offender or missing person's profile already in the system, while genealogy techniques instead build out family trees from shared DNA segments, even without an existing match.
The 2024 Breakthrough
The case's fortunes changed in 2024, when the N.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner sent a bone sample to a forensic DNA laboratory. SBI Special Investigator Andy Murr, part of the agency's cold case investigative team, reviewed the case using advanced forensic tools and determined it qualified for advanced DNA testing. That testing was carried out by Othram, a private forensic DNA laboratory based in The Woodlands, Texas, which used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing to extract genetic material from the bone sample and build a SNP profile from hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, per DNA Solves.
A genealogy service then used that profile to trace potential relatives, eventually pointing investigators toward a 15-year-old girl who had run away from Monkton, Maryland, in the spring of 1977. Maryland law explicitly authorizes investigators to search public genealogy databases when trying to identify unidentified remains, a legal framework Hoodline detailed in its coverage of a separate Maryland cold case. Monkton sits roughly 280 miles — about a five-hour drive — north of the Wilson site where Blizzard's remains were discovered, according to WHMI.
Confirming a Name After 49 Years
Verifying the lead required coordination across multiple state and federal agencies. Investigators confirmed Blizzard's identity by working with the FBI's NCIC Investigation and Operational Assistance Group, the Maryland Department of State Police Homicide Unit, and the Raleigh Police Department's Intel Unit, according to the Sandhills Sentinel. The FBI unit assisted the Maryland and Raleigh teams as they worked to locate surviving relatives for reference DNA testing, ultimately confirming that the Wilson County remains belonged to Blizzard, missing for 49 years.
The case fits into a broader national pattern of cold cases cracking open through advanced DNA science. In August, New York City forensic officials used forensic genetic genealogy to identify the 1,651st victim of the September 11 attacks, part of what Hoodline described as a nationwide trend of medical examiners retrofitting old bone samples for modern genome sequencing, as detailed in Hoodline's earlier report.
Homicide Investigation Continues
Identifying Blizzard answers one question but opens another: how did a 15-year-old runaway from rural Maryland end up dead in the woods of eastern North Carolina, nearly 300 miles from home? Investigators continue to treat the case as a homicide, per the SBI's statement, and say they are still looking for answers about how she died and who may be responsible.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Wilson County Sheriff's Office at 252-237-2118, call the SBI Cold Case Tip Line at 919-582-TIPS, or email the SBI at [email protected]. Nearly five decades after her remains were found, Blizzard finally has her name back — but for her family and investigators, the question of what happened to her that year remains unresolved.
