Las Vegas police identify homicide victim in 44-year-old cold case

A female victim has been identified in a 1979 homicide cold case, the Las Vegas Metro Police Department announced Tuesday.

Gwenn Marie Story was killed in the summer of 1979, police said. Her body was found on the night of Aug. 14, 1979 when a man walking through an open field near Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard found a woman’s body lying in the dirt.

When police responded to the scene, they found the woman was dead.

An autopsy ruled the death to be a homicide, police said, but investigators were unable to identify the woman, who they called Sahara Sue Doe.

The case remained unsolved and was assigned to the LVMPD Homicide Cold Case Section, police said, until September 2022, when investigators requested a forensic genetic genealogy investigation.

Breaks in the case led investigators to possible family members who provided DNA samples for comparison to the woman’s, police said.

Over a year later, on Nov. 15, “Sahara Sue Doe had been positively identified through DNA as Gwenn Marie Story,” police said.

Story’s family members helped detectives piece the story together.

Story, who was 19 when she was killed, left the Cincinnati, Ohio area in the summer of 1979 with two male friends. Police said she was traveling to California to try to locate her biological father.

The friends returned to Ohio in August 1979 and told Story’s family that they had left her in Las Vegas, police said.

Family members told police that they never heard from Story again after she left Ohio that summer.

The LVMPD Homicide Cold Case Section is continuing to investigate Story’s case and encouraged anyone with information on Story or the two male friends to contact them.