Solving a 50-Year-Old Murder Case in New York

I
t’s a hot summer night in 1969, and for those of a certain age — young enough to turn on, tune in, drop out — Steve Paul’s the Scene is your place. As a spectator, a musician, a hanger-on. A place where the music comes first, even if you do end up scoring dope or going home with somebody.

The line to get in stretches all the way down West 46th Street and around the corner to Eighth Avenue. It’s a long walk down rickety steps to a dark, crowded, cavernous basement that’s more like a maze. There’s Steve Paul, not yet 30, tall and striking, with a mop of dark hair and attired entirely in blue, doing his usual insult shtick to weed out the chaff —and anyone he hasn’t insulted is clearly somebody.

Like Linda Eastman, Paul McCartney’s lady, the one who takes all the pictures. Or Jimi Hendrix, ready for another jam session lasting until at least 3 a.m. Or that record exec — Ahmet Ertegun or Clive Davis, maybe — ready to sign up the hot new band that has only played here. Or Johnny Winter, honing his blues act with his long mane of white-blond hair, or Jim Morrison, lighting everyone on fire, including himself.

Everyone is ready to party, shimmy on the dance floor, take a hit, then another, and make out (or more). But what the audience doesn’t see is the tension on Steve Paul’s face, wondering if he’s going to get shaken down so badly the price will be his life. Or the sadness of knowing that all parties have to end, almost always by someone else’s decree.

The party would end for someone else, too, a terrible secret that same basement harbored for more than three decades. She was first known as Midtown Jane Doe, when her remains were found in 2003. Twenty-one years later, in April 2024, the New York City Police Department announced her true identity: Patricia Kathleen McGlone. Only 16, her life thrown away, strangled, wrapped in a rug, and buried in cement.

She was never supposed to be discovered. She was never supposed to be known. Even tracking down a picture of her has proven elusive. So many of the people in Patricia’s life, like her mother and father, her con-man half brother, and a much-older husband who is the key “person of interest” in her death, were awfully adept at disappearing before their secrets and lies could be revealed.

For decades, Patricia McGlone was a cipher, a ghost. Now, her story can finally begin to be told. Her life and death are intertwined with the story of New York and its music scene in the 1960s — full of rising stars and wannabe mobsters jostling for prime position — and with the way things used to be done, until they weren’t.

A “bone case”: That’s what law enforcement calls cases where the remains are skeletal, years interred, evidence eroded or disappeared altogether with the passage of time. The remains of the girl soon nicknamed Midtown Jane Doe certainly qualified.

The building where she was found, 301 W. 46th St., had few tenants left in February 2003, stubbornly clinging to apartments that had housed sex workers, drug addicts, and others just trying to get by. The storefront had changed several times since the Scene closed, housing a pornographic-video shop, a dive bar, and now, a restaurant, which intended to turn the basement into a walk-in freezer.

Demolition was the building’s endgame. (Its replacement, the Riu Hotel, wouldn’t be finished until 2016.) On Feb. 10, 2003, construction workers noticed a raised concrete slab behind an aging coal furnace in the basement. Six feet wide, five feet long, and a foot high. It seemed out of place. One of the workers took out a sledgehammer and smashed it.

A skull rolled out.

The arriving cops quickly deduced there’d been a crime. The slab revealed so much awfulness, later confirmed through forensic anthropology: the bones of a girl, lying in the fetal position, hands and feet bound together by an extension cord also wrapped around her neck. She’d been bundled up in a rust-colored rug, and at some point, cement was poured on top of her. The girl wore a size 32A bra, clear pantyhose, and a glittery frock. They recovered a ring with the initials “P Mc G,” a Bulova watch issued in 1966, a dime dated 1969, and a plastic toy soldier. And there was DNA from an unknown source — possibly a white male — from a hair found in the rug.

There was so much evidence — unusual for decades-old remains — and yet identifying Midtown Jane Doe stumped the NYPD. They knew she was between 16 and 21 years old, standing between four feet 10 and five feet four. She came from a middle-class family, the cops surmised, because she’d had significant dental work done, though there was more recent tooth decay.

For decades, Patricia McGlone was a cipher, a ghost. Now, the story of her life can finally begin to be told.

But other clues shifted the time window on the body’s placement. A bag of rat poison found in the slab was initially believed to have been manufactured in 1979. A clothing label from the International Garment Workers Union, which didn’t appear to exist before 1988. If the girl hadn’t died in the 1960s, then she must have been born later. So when detectives searched for potential missing persons, they began with the birth year of 1958 — five years too late.

The NYPD was also thrown off by additional testing that seemed to indicate the girl was of Irish descent, but likely from the Midwest — and, perhaps, part of the “Minnesota Strip,” the area of Hell’s Kitchen where sex workers congregated between the 1960s and early 1990s that earned its nickname from the urban myth of young Midwestern women being deliberately trafficked there. “At this point, we believe she was a young, middle-class woman who probably hopped on a bus to New York full of dreams, but who ended up on the streets,” then-lead Detective Gerard Gardiner told the New York Post four days before Christmas 2003.

It would take another two decades for the NYPD to learn that the girl had been born and raised in Brooklyn, and that the watch, dime, and toy soldier were the most significant clues. Some of the delay owed to the red herrings, still not entirely explained, but due, perhaps, to construction work in the 1970s and 1980s. A lot had to do with the condition of the bones, which were too degraded to extract enough DNA for testing at that point.

As time went on, tests grew more sophisticated. With more than 1,250 cold cases in the New York City area, most from the 1980s and 1990s involving decades-old human remains, every new identification bolstered the chances Midtown Jane Doe could be next. Even then, given the minuscule amount of DNA, it took several tries and a lot of luck — but eventually there was a meaningful result, thanks to the work of Astrea Forensics in California. “They probably spent the better part of a year working on it,” says Bradley Adams, head of forensic anthropology at New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner. “They wouldn’t take no for an answer. And shockingly, they ended up with a profile.”

An actual profile meant the cold case had become hot again. Gardiner had long since retired, and after cycling through several other detectives, the case was now being investigated by Ryan Glas, a Bronx-based detective who joined the cold-case unit in 2021 and was assigned Midtown Jane Doe a year later.

In March 2023, the unit ran Midtown Jane Doe’s DNA profile through CODIS, the national DNA database maintained by the FBI, without success. The next step was to try its luck with investigative genetic genealogy, the technique that made headlines in 2018 when used to identify the Golden State Killer, effectively changing the game with respect to unsolved murders.

Genetic genealogy had been around for years, used to trace family-tree connections or find lost or adopted relatives. But its application in criminal investigations turbocharged the profession, with star genealogists like CeCe Moore (seen on Finding Your Roots), Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press (founders of the DNA Doe Project), and labs like Parabon Nanolabs in Virginia and Othram in Texas. More than 650 cold cases have been solved through their efforts so far.

DNA from unidentified victims or perpetrators could be uploaded into public databases like FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch — the one that caught the Golden State Killer — and generate a list of probable relatives. Ideally, the DNA similarities could be close enough to discover a child, parent, or sibling. Finding a first cousin was also a great result. Most often, the possible matches were more distant, third or fourth cousins, and a full family tree would have to be built to figure out whom the uploaded DNA profile belonged to.

That was the task for Linda Doyle, a veteran genetic genealogist who joined the NYPD on contract in June 2022 and would become one of the first-ever full-time staff genealogists for any police department the following year. Doyle, tall with ash-blond hair, turned to genealogy after working as a tour manager for musicians like Lights and Mandy Moore: “Problem-solving is the thread that has connected all my careers,” she tells me. She often works on many cases at a time, and the enthusiasm and excitement she expresses as she describes her work is palpable. But when she tells me about Midtown Jane Doe, it’s clear from the catch in her voice and the rise in pitch that this case was different. Surely, someone must be looking for her?

Doyle found promising news from studying the public DNA-database results. There was a first-cousin match on the paternal line, and a first cousin once removed on the maternal line. “So we knew there would be an intersection of these two genetic networks coming together with a union that produced the child,” she explains. She scoured public records, old newspaper articles, obituaries, and court documents. And the only name that seemed to intersect both of these family trees was a girl named Patricia McGlone.

“The lab wouldn’t take no for an answer. And shockingly, they ended up with a profile.”

Bradley Adams, head of forensic anthropology at New York City’s
Office of Chief Medical Examiner

Doyle discovered the name in an obituary for a man named Bernard McGlone. She thought of the ring found with the remains. “It was a really great clue,” she says. More digging by Doyle and Glas unearthed guardianship papers in a Brooklyn court, a marriage record in Virginia, and birth, baptismal, and confirmation records for Patricia. All signs pointed to an identification.

But investigative genetic genealogy can never confirm a person’s identity. It’s viewed as a presumptive lead that requires additional verification to stand up in court. Midtown Jane Doe would have to be matched to a relative through mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the maternal line.

Doyle and her team looked again at the maternal first cousin once removed. She turned out to be the mother of a victim in the Sept. 11 attacks, and had submitted DNA for identification purposes. That DNA profile was still on file, and it matched. Midtown Jane Doe was Patricia Kathleen McGlone.

Her identification was announced in April 2024, six months after Doyle joined the NYPD full time. But far too many questions remained. How did Patricia end up in the basement of Steve Paul’s club, and why?

There were rock-music clubs all around New York City in the 1960s: Ungano’s on the Upper West Side, the Cheetah Club farther down Broadway, Fillmore East on Second Avenue. But none quite produced the same sense of nostalgia as Steve Paul’s the Scene. “People were always being seen at the Scene,” says Lucy Sante, author of the essential New York history Low Life, who’s currently working on a book about the city in the 1960s. “It was a kind of music-industry hangout. You’ve got all these record-company executives, music-publishing people, and musicians.” It was an industry bar, but “it was also a hip bar,” Sante adds. “It’s got this cachet of being the bar of its time for a certain contingent.”

Paul had already cycled through several lives by the time he opened the Scene in 1965, at just 24 years old. Born and raised in Dobbs Ferry, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, Paul moved to the city when the ink on his high school graduation certificate was barely dry. He had a dream of owning a club like the ones that had long fascinated him on television: “I’d create me a world of reality within the world of reality. Make your dreams come true,” Paul said in 1967.

While still in his teens, he did public relations for the Peppermint Lounge — where the Twist became a craze — saving up money for his dream palace. He found it in Hell’s Kitchen, a rough neighborhood in transition, which had been staunchly controlled by an Irish-mob faction run by Mickey Spillane — the gangster, not the pulp novelist — whose grip had begun to slacken as young upstarts began to assert themselves.

Paul alighted on the basement of 301 W. 46th St., which housed a speakeasy called the Cave of the Fallen Angels during Prohibition. Its 5,000 square feet, with irregularly placed brick walls and passageways, was a true labyrinth, designed for getting lost, hiding out, or both. It was perfect.

“We’ll try and make it last, but it won’t. Nothing great lasts.”

Steve Paul on the Scene in 1967

The Scene, Paul would later say, was supposed to be “a common denominator for the fusion between music, musicians, people who like music, and people who are music in their very being.” And in the early years in particular, the club did just that, bringing together the likes of Andy Warhol and the Factory (who shot a film there), Tennessee Williams, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Pryor, Liza Minelli, and “swarms of jet-setters, Broadway dancers, motorcycle riders, and Manhattan’s moneyed elite,” per a 1967 profile by the rock magazine Hullabaloo.

Leonard Bernstein showed up one night, walking to the edge of the dance floor to check out the masses. When a Newsday reporter went up to ask the famed composer and conductor what he thought of the nightclub, Bernstein paused, looking out at the dance floor and then back, grinning. “You don’t think in this place,” he said.

For the next couple of years, the Scene hosted bands on the verge of intense fame. The Velvet Underground did multiple shows there. So did the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Rascals. Paul became so connected with new talent that, for a spell, he even hosted television specials, one memorably showcasing Aretha Franklin as “Respect” was climbing the charts. There was also room for novelty, what with Tiny Tim of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” fame opening many a night, when it wasn’t a karate show by the martial artist who also doubled as the club’s bouncer.

But the bubble soon burst. The lines got shorter, the crowds thinner, and by early 1967, the Scene was in serious trouble. “We owed $90,000,” Paul told Hullabaloo. “We weren’t even doing business on Saturdays. You know where that’s at. Real nowhere is the address.” It took a bailout from a group of artists including Allen Ginsberg and a change in focus: From now on, the Scene would concentrate almost exclusively on rock music.

The club’s second life gave it a necessary jolt. The Doors had a residency there throughout June 1967, their earthy energy attracting an in-the-know audience ready to spread the gospel of Morrison and his bandmates. (“I like to hang around Steve Paul and listen to him rap,” Morrison once said of the Scene. “He’s funny.”) Audiences thrilled to sneak-preview boldfaced names, before they were names, like Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, and Three Dog Night. Some, like Hendrix, would return often after they became living legends: “[The Scene] was like a mini-forum model for every arena he would ever play,” Hendrix’s biographer, David Henderson, wrote in Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky. “The shouting stark frenzy of the close room is what he brought with him to every stage around the world.”

And the Scene gave back equal energy, with its anything-goes jam sessions that could feature people like Hendrix, Morrison, and Janis Joplin rolling around in a fight — “The three of them were in a tangle of broken glass, dust, and guitars,” recalled Danny Fields, former manager of the Ramones, in 2012. “The bodyguards had to send them home, each in their own limousine.” Or the most notorious night at the Scene, when a drunk Morrison pretended to give Hendrix a blow job onstage, moaning all the while into the microphone.

The good times continued to roll. But there was an expiration date, even if Paul couldn’t quite predict when it would arrive.

Even after identification gave back her name, the mystery of who killed Patricia McGlone is still a bone case, because like skeletal remains, the facts hardly add up to a complete picture of who she was and how she lived.

The lack of known information about her seems almost intentional. But Patricia’s life also reflects an earlier time when transience was easy, when digital records were almost nonexistent — no smartphones, no internet, no established local youth shelters, no national runaway hotline — and when more-troubled lives could be shed with the ease of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

“A kid could disappear into these subcultures,” says Karen Staller, author of Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies. “If a young person doesn’t drop a dime in a payphone and call home, there’s no tracking of that kid.”

Patricia’s parents were married, except they weren’t. A Virginia certificate confirms the June 23, 1952, union of long-haul trucker Bernard McGlone and his much-younger wife Patricia Gilligan. Bernard said he was 45; he was 50. Pat’s age is listed at 21; she was actually 20. The bigger problem was that Bernard was already married with children — twice.

The father of two sons from a first marriage that ended in 1935, Bernard met Helen Zatorski in the early 1940s. They were married near Niagara Falls in 1943, then returned to Brooklyn, where Bernard Joseph Jr. was born in August 1946. Itinerancy was an asset in his job: How easy was it to start a third family? So easy that Helen and the younger Bernard had no inkling for years. Not of the bigamy, nor of baby Patricia, born on April 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, and baptized at St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Ridge three months later.

Bernard Sr. — and yes, with so many repeated names, it gets confusing — somehow kept his dual families separate. That apparently changed around 1957, when he left Helen and his namesake son, now 11, for his other family, though he “kept in touch,” according to a private timeline of his life that Bernard Jr. would write decades later, titled “Sad But True.” A year later, Helen was diagnosed with breast cancer; she died in 1960 at age 46.

Bernard Jr. was 14. He had nowhere else to go, so he moved in with his father, stepmother, and half sister Patricia in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There’s little doubt that Bernard Sr. was away a lot. Perhaps he had abandoned this blended family, too. Whatever the case, he died in June 1963, officially 53 but really 61. He left both of his younger children a little more than $1,700 — about $17,000 today — to be doled out piecemeal through Pat, until they turned 21, after which each could access the cash in full.

That’s when things grow murkier. And for Patricia, much bleaker.

Patricia was 10 when her father died. School records confirm she’d faithfully attended P.S. 94 from first through fourth grades, but switched to Catholic school in the fall of 1963. She attended Our Lady of Perpetual Help Academy through early 1966, and was confirmed at the basilica around the corner that March. But by the fall, Patricia was repeating sixth grade at St. Michael’s, her attendance growing more sporadic.

Patricia never appeared by name in any of her school yearbooks, conveniently absent whenever it was time for picture day.

She’d also become truant. She switched schools one last time at the end of 1968, attending P.S. 136 for a mere eight days before dropping out for good. Her mother later said the girl had become “an addict.” Whatever crowd teenage Patricia had fallen in with wasn’t good. But it also seems her mother, Pat, knew a lot more than she let on.

After Bernard Sr. died, Pat spent the last few years of her life, until her untimely death in 1972, at age 40, with another married man, George Layburn. She told family members she had remarried and that Layburn was her husband. (He stayed married to his legal wife until her death in 1996; Layburn would follow suit three years later.)

In his timeline, Patricia’s half brother wrote that his stepmother and her live-in boyfriend were “very bad people”; he didn’t elaborate. By the mid-1960s, Bernard had already experienced significant calamity. He dropped out of high school, lying about his age to get a job. A month before his actual 18th birthday, an accident at work led to the loss of a thumb and part of a forefinger. His weight ballooned to 305 pounds, though a year and change working at a Berkshires dairy farm in Massachusetts shed the weight in half.

By the fall of 1969, Bernard, then in his early twenties, was living in Jersey City, New Jersey. He’d been hired as a bookkeeper for First National Stores in nearby Kearny. He used a different name, Leonard Diamond, and also falsified his credentials, claiming a degree he didn’t have from Ithaca College. (Diamond, whose identity he stole, however, did.)

Over the next eight months, according to legal records and The Jersey Journal, Bernard allegedly skimmed more than $62,000 (roughly $502,000 today) from his employer before skipping town. Bernard was arrested on July 11, 1970. (The case was later dismissed, though civil suits allowed the company to recover some of the stolen money.) He would later claim his arrest came about because of his “stepparents’ schemes,” but it’s unclear what he meant.

Bernard left town and changed his name again, cribbing it from a cousin who died in 1973. He bought a bachelor’s degree in engineering from a known diploma mill. He moved around the country, getting jobs in Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas, marrying a single mother he met through a classified ad.

Though Bernard came clean to his family about some parts of his life before his death in 2012, he never mentioned having a half sister — nor did he reveal his birth name.

Shortly before her stepson’s arrest, Pat was interviewed by an insurance investigator, and she mentioned she hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter since 1969, around the time of the girl’s marriage. Which makes what happened next stand out: On May 15, 1971, Pat made one last plea for Patricia’s money. The girl was 18, Pat wrote in her application to the Surrogate’s Court in Brooklyn, her Social Security payments were set to stop, and she needed this to survive. Patricia’s signature didn’t match her handwriting. It looked an awful lot like her mother’s, though.

The last days of the Scene weren’t much fun for Steve Paul. The vibes had soured. Young mooks from Brooklyn were trying to start trouble, demanding protection money. As the Velvet Underground’s Sterling Morrison recalled in a 1970 interview, “The liquor laws work in such a way that if you have a trouble spot your liquor license can be revoked. So, organized crime comes in and says, ‘I want a piece of the action,’ and they say, ‘No, you can’t have it.’ So they just start these giant fights there. And the clubs lose their license.”

Paul didn’t want to deal with these guys anymore, one of whom, improbably, became a star in his own right.

In the late 1960s, everybody called him Junior. Genaro Anthony “Tony” Sirico Jr. — the actor who played Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos — attracted trouble in his youth, but things really didn’t get out of hand until after he married and had children. A few years into his marriage, he would say in later interviews, he met another girl for whom he was ready and eager to ruin his life. He started committing petty crimes and moving in a tougher crowd to curry her favor.

Whatever the case, Sirico was knee-deep in organized crime by his late twenties, though according to his younger brother, Robert, a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based priest, Sirico was never a made man. Robberies and shakedowns were his thing, usually in the company of neighborhood pals. (“He was a knife guy, not a gun guy,” according to former drug smuggler Jon Roberts, who gained fame thanks to the documentary Cocaine Cowboys.) By the summer of 1969, Sirico had made a regular art of forcing his way into nightclubs, refusing to pay for admission or drinks, and threatening the owners with guns or baseball bats if asked to leave. On at least one occasion, he threw a bouncer out a window to make his point. “I’m Junior Sirico,” he’d say, “you better learn how to give me the respect I deserve.” (Sirico died in 2022.)

Paul had known the party couldn’t last forever. He’d predicted it in 1967 to Hullaballoo, when the Scene was starting its second act: “This time, we’ll try and make it last. But it won’t. Nothing great lasts all the time.”

Two years later, Sirico was breathing down his neck. Paul wouldn’t capitulate. He’d rather close down the Scene than hand it over to the Mob. After it closed around August 1969, Paul fled to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he owned a home, and hid out there for a few years. He had plenty to do otherwise, pivoting to manage the careers of people like Johnny Winter, the albino blues guitarist whose write-up in Rolling Stone had wowed Paul so much he’d flown down to Texas, signed Winter as his first client, and flown back to New York to start cajoling labels to take Winter on. (Clive Davis would do so for Columbia Records, in what was then the most lucrative contract in rock music.)

By 1973, Paul owned a record label, Blue Sky Records, signing David Johansen and Muddy Waters, among others. He produced cabaret shows and haunted art galleries looking for new talent. He settled into a relationship with the artist Robert Kitchen, one that curdled a few years before Kitchen’s death in 2009 and Paul’s in 2012, at 71 years old.

If Paul knew anything about a teenage girl buried in the basement of his former club, he never shared the information with anyone I spoke with. Not Susan Blond, the longtime music publicist (and former Andy Warhol disciple) who met Paul at Max’s Kansas City and called him one of her “three best friends.” Not Tariq Abdus-Sabur, whom Paul befriended late in life and hired to run his last venture, the arts and culture website downtowntv.com.

And if Sirico knew anything, he didn’t share it with those closest to him. He’d been convicted in 1971 for felony weapons possession after being caught shaking down a different nightclub, serving 20 months in prison. When he got out, he caught the acting bug and moved to L.A. (According to Abdus-Sabur, Paul was “shocked when he actually saw [Sirico] on The Sopranos.”)

Many years later, Robert Sirico remembered discussing a later murder case in which his older brother was a person of interest (“He was very dismissive — ‘They’re just doing it because I’m famous now’”), but nothing about a girl. Robert could see his older brother being “very violent in a confrontation with a man if there was some kind of insult or threat. I don’t see him plotting the murder of a girl.”

In December 1968, Patricia McGlone switched schools for the final time. A record indicates she left St. Michael’s because of a “medical event.” Patricia dropped out in May 1969. Like for so many girls, then and now, the cause was a pregnancy.

The school records that listed her dropout date also indicated that she was about to marry a 32-year-old man named Donald Grant, the unborn child’s presumed father.

Those records were true, to a degree. A wedding ceremony took place on May 7, 1969, at the Church of All Nations on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Patricia’s mother was one of the witnesses — and according to her, the baby was born around August 1969.

But there was almost nothing true about Donald Grant. His name was fake. His birthdate was fake. The names of his parents, listed on the marriage certificate? There was no James Edward Grant or Carrie Elizabeth Johnson with a son named Donald born in Pittsburgh.

There was, however, a Donald Grant born on Feb. 28, 1937 — a day after Patricia’s mystery husband — who died in infancy in Ohio, not far from Pittsburgh. It’s harder to do now, but stealing a dead person’s identity and making it your own was a common trick for those looking to shed their names for all sorts of reasons — especially criminal ones.

One detail on the marriage certificate, however, could be verified. Grant listed his address at the time as 301 W. 46th St. A telephone directory from 1969 also listed a Donald Grant at this address. He wasn’t listed there the year before, or the year after. Grant also noted his occupation as “musician,” which was an interesting choice for someone who lived in the very same building as the Scene in its last year and who would vanish from the public record after the club closed. Burying a body in the wake of the club’s closure would be ample reason to flee as soon as possible.

Needless to say, the NYPD is very interested in learning more information about Donald Grant, and hearing from anyone who knows him. Grant — whoever he might be — is a person of interest in Patricia’s death. “With any homicide, you always look to the person closest, right? And especially if it’s a domestic,” Detective Glas tells me. “It’s unfortunate that it’s such a common name.”

They also want to know more about Bernard McGlone Jr.’s whereabouts around the time, what with his penchant for fraud schemes and shifting backstories. Glas says Bernard hadn’t been ruled out as a person of interest, either. And the NYPD certainly wants to know more about the whereabouts of Patricia’s baby, whom they believe was given up for adoption right before her murder. But they can’t discount more morbid possibilities for what happened to the child.

Glas acknowledges that the case is “a puzzle,” one with so many pieces that don’t quite fit together yet to form a cohesive whole. But if that DNA profile from an unknown white male produces a possible match, more information emerges about Patricia’s child, and someone — anyone — comes forward with information about the girl so long known as Midtown Jane Doe, then the pieces can add up to a more realized portrait of Patricia McGlone, and why she ended up murdered and buried in the basement of the Scene.

“I just want someone to acknowledge her existence other than us,” says Doyle, the NYPD genealogist. “It breaks my heart that she could go through her short life and be erased. I cannot come to terms with no one knowing who she is.”

If you have any information regarding the death of Patricia McGlone, or the real identity of her husband, please contact NYPD Crime Stoppers at 800-577-8477 (TIPS)