Mysterious Jane Doe case in Southern California finally solved after 27 years

A mysterious Jane Doe case in Southern California has been solved after 27 years thanks to a fingerprint match, officials said today.

Andrea Kuiper has been identified as the 26-year-old woman who was struck and killed by two cars while crossing the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, California, on April 1, 1990, the Orange County Sheriff's Department said in a news release today.

The Orange County Sheriff's Department's Coroner Division worked on the case for years.

“We never forgot her and would regularly pull out her file to see if we could think of anything new to try,” Supervising Deputy Coroner Kelly Keyes said in the sheriff's department's statement. “The investigators at the Coroner’s Office never stopped trying to figure out who she was."

Then this year, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System partnered with the FBI to more closely examine fingerprints of unidentified people, and on May 4, the FBI told the Orange County Sheriff's Department's Coroner Division that it had a hit, the sheriff's office said.

Kuiper of Fairfax, Virginia, had gone to California when she was 26. According to the sheriff's department, Kuiper's parents said she suffered from manic depressive disorder and used drugs.

The last time the Kuipers heard of their daughter's well-being was a few months before her death, when a friend of hers called her parents to say she was OK, the sheriff's department said.

Now, the family is grateful to have closure.

“We are thankful to know what happened to our daughter after all these years,” her father, Richard Kuiper, said, according to the sheriff's department.