Dawn Marie Birnbaum
(1976 - 1993)

This is from an article the webmaster purchased from Google news archives, from the Philadelphia Inquirer (5/16/93). See below:

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
May 16, 1993
Section: LOCAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: B01


ANONYMOUS DEAD GIRL CAPTURES TOWN'S HEART THEY ALL SAW IN HER 'SOMEBODY'S DAUGHTER.' NOW THEY KNOW WHOSE, AS THEY HUNT FOR HER KILLER.
Michael E. Ruane, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

With his big hands, Steve Mondock had gently washed her golden hair using conditioner from Conway's beauty salon. He applied some rose-colored lipstick, and carefully brushed her cheek with makeup from a daub he held in his palm.

How pretty she was, thought the strapping 6-foot, 2-inch mortician and volunteer firefighter, as he stood over the anonymous, murdered teenager preparing her face to be photographed by the state police.
And how familiar. Others said so, too, after the picture they took in the funeral home ran in the paper. It was as if people wanted to know her, wanted to be able to say: Yes, of course, she was so-and-so's daughter from over the mountain. Besides, she looked like she could have been anyone's, with her pierced ears, ponytail and the big, loud sweater she had on when they found her strangled just off the interstate, the rope still around her neck.

Yet for six weeks - from the cold, foggy morning the passerby had spotted her still wearing her wristwatch and bracelets, sprawled on the snowbank - nobody around here could quite place her. But as the time passed and police scoured the nation to learn who she was, she came, in a way, to belong here.

Near the end, Mondock had named her "Spring," for the township in which she had been found, and had bought a pink nightgown to bury her in.

Woodring's, the florists, had agreed to provide funeral flowers and Pastor Tim Sawyer of the Christian and Missionary Alliance would say the prayers. They planned to lay her to rest as one of their own in a hilltop cemetery fragrant with mowed grass and the warm wind off the farm fields, and watched over by Bald Eagle Mountain in the distance.

Then, on May 7, the state police announced that they had learned who she was, and the connection was broken.

Her name was Dawn Marie Birnbaum, and she hailed from the Midwest, where she'd had a short and turbulent life.

Her parents were long divorced and she had been a ward of the state of Indiana since 1989. But she had run away from each of the more than 10 foster homes, group homes and treatment centers in which she had been placed, except for one. And that facility had asked that she be taken away, because it could not handle her. Most recently she had run away - for at least the second time - from a school for troubled adolescents in Maine three days before her body turned up.

She was 17.

Her mother had traveled from Indiana on May 6 to identify the body. And the next day the people from Wetzler Funeral Service Inc., at Spring and Howard Streets here, drove Dawn to the airport in Harrisburg. From there she went home, and was buried Wednesday in a suburb of Chicago.

It was sad, but around here people felt they had done right by her - from Mondock, who had pondered her face; to hard-smoking State Trooper William F. Madden, who had tracked down her ID and had two girls just about her age; to County Coroner Kerry Benninghoff, who vowed to her mother that they would never stop looking for the killer.

And though her visit had been brief, had Dawn stayed it would have been like she had lived here all her life.

*

It was 6:20 a.m. on the cold and misty Wednesday of March 24 when the northbound motorist heading up the hill of the Route 26 bypass toward Interstate 80 spotted the figure lying across the mound of dingy snow on the shoulder.

There, face up and stark against the white, was the corpse of a girl. She was thin, about 5-foot-5, and had what would later be described as a "Nordic appearance."

Her eyes were blue. She had a light mole under her nose and shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that was tied in a ponytail with a black band. She wore a gold wristwatch, two thin gold bracelets and a colorful, oversized sweater. She was wearing undergarments but was missing pants and shoes.

The body had apparently been there only a few minutes, for another driver who had passed by a little while earlier had seen nothing.

Police were summoned and the area was cordoned off.

The victim had been dead roughly since the evening before. Tests were later done to check for sexual assault, but as of last week, the results still weren't in.

There wasn't much else to go on. She probably had been killed elsewhere. So, as State Police Sgt. Jeffrey S. Watson put it, the body became the crime scene.

Trooper Madden, a Brooklyn native and former high school history teacher, was called at home that morning and assigned the case. The sweater and the two pairs of socks on the victim's feet suggested she was from the Northeast or Midwest. He calculated how far someone might reasonably drive in about 12 hours, and focused his probe within a circle described by that range.

But it was slow going. There were hundreds of missing persons around the country, and many who fit the victim's general description. Police figured she was probably right-handed, in part Madden said, because she wore her watch on her left wrist. Her mother later said that was correct. Plus it looked as if her teeth had been well cared for. So she did not appear to be a vagabond.

Here, investigators believed, was somebody's daughter. But who was she?

*

Weeks went by with scant progress. There were leads near and far and likely prospects, but they all eventually dried up.

Along with other moves, it was decided to take a picture of her, put it on an information flier and see if anyone might recognize her.

But she had been through hell and it fell to Mondock, 31, the mortician at Wetzler's where her body was being kept, to try to re-create as best he could how she had looked in life.

It was hard on him. Mondock, who is the size of a linebacker and volunteers at three local fire companies, has kids of his own - girls, 1 and 3, and a boy, 7. This, too, was "somebody's child," he said.

But he had 10 years of experience, much of it gained in this small, picturesque Centre County seat where many people know him, and he took pride in his often difficult job.

He would do his best.

"When it's somebody's kid, you always try your hardest," he said. "You do for everybody. But this was a special situation. We felt that since she was brought to Centre County . . . we wanted to take care of her."

"Here, you take care of people," he said.

As he washed the girl's hair with antiseptic soap, then with the conditioner, and then dried, combed and brushed it, he kept thinking about her death.

"I just couldn't imagine," he said. "It's just like throwing somebody off on the side of the street like a piece of garbage. Especially somebody's child."

Plus, he said, "she's a pretty girl, a pretty girl."

He wondered constantly who she was.

"Everybody said, 'She looks like somebody around here.' Everybody had the idea that they knew her," he said. "To me she looks like she could be anybody's daughter, everybody's daughter."

"If it was my child," he said, "I'd want somebody to take as much care of her as I think we" did.

*

On Monday, May 3, the police finally got a break. They learned that a girl matching the victim's description had run away from the custody of the Elan School, a juvenile center in Poland Spring, Maine, on March 21.

Investigators asked for her dental records from the center, a 33-acre institution that has treatment and education programs for about 130 troubled
adolescents from around the country. The records were sent and on May 5 forensic dentists Richard Scanlon and Brian Christian compared them with X- rays they had taken of the body of the girl.

There, on the lower jaw, on the third molar from the back on the right side, was a shallow filling that was exactly the same in both sets of records.

The school's missing child was Dawn Marie Birnbaum.

She had been at the school for 18 months, said Sharon Terry, the assistant executive director, sent there by the state of Indiana.

She had "many, many difficulties," Terry said, but had participated in the programs, worked toward getting her high school degree, and had reached a point where she was permitted to go on outings. She was scheduled to depart the center in June, but authorities in Maine said she had been lobbying for an earlier home leave.

She had run away from the school before. Last year, she and another girl had been reported missing early on the morning of April 7. Dawn remained at large for 43 days. She was finally discovered the afternoon of May 20 in a mall in Auburn, Maine, about 10 miles east of the school.

On Sunday, March 21, Dawn and five or six other youngsters had been driven to the movies in South Portland, down on the coast, about 25 miles south of the school, Terry said.

The youngsters were dropped off and were to be picked up when the movie was over. Several films were being shown at the theater that night, among them one called Homeward Bound. Sometime after being dropped off, Terry said, Dawn ''made the choice of leaving."

She was not there when it was time to go back. A little after 9 p.m. police were called. Dawn's description was teletyped to other police: The brown suede jacket, light blue pants and black shoes she was said to be wearing would not be found with her body three days later.

A few miles from the theater, Interstate 95 runs south and north. And 300 miles south is the coast-to-coast ribbon of Interstate 80 that runs the width of Pennsylvania, passing a few miles north of here.

Somewhere between South Portland and here, bound for who knows where, Dawn met her death.

"She was a very likeable girl," Terry said, "a very likeable kid." Many children her age feel "invulnerable," Terry said, "and think that nothing will happen to them."

In Dawn's case, she said, "the percentages ran out on her."

"It's just a real tragedy."

Back in Pennsylvania, there was a sense of satisfaction - "relief," Mondock called it - that they finally knew who she was. "It felt good to find out who she was," Trooper Madden said. "I'll feel 100 percent better when I find out who the hell killed her."

The FBI was called into the case because of the victim's age and the possibility that her interstate journey might constitute kidnapping. The bureau already had been asked to help form a profile of her killer.

Now the question is, "What happened between the 21st and the 24th?" said State Police Sgt. Watson.

"When? Where? How? Who?" he said.

"Why?"



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1-2. Bellefonte, Pa. (The Philadelphia Inquirer / ROGER HASLER)