Cold case detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department say they questioned Charles Manson in October about the 1969 killing of a woman whose identity was only discovered last year.
Two Los Angeles police detectives went to Corcoran State Prison to interview Manson to find out whether he had any information about the death of the woman known as “Jane Doe No. 59,” whose body was discovered November 16, 1969 in brush just off Mulholland Drive. She had been stabbed a reported 150 times in the neck and upper body.
Making a connection
“Jane Doe’s” identity was discovered last year after a friend of Anne Jurvetson’s family notified her in June that someone on the NamUs website — the U.S. government’s online database of missing and unidentified people — looked like her missing sister, Reet, who hadn’t been heard from since she left Canada for California in the fall of 1969 at the age of 19.
Anne Jurvetson contacted police and provided a DNA sample. It matched.
Manson, who is serving life in prison for his role in the infamous August 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and seven others, was arrested in October of that year, before Reet Jurvetson was killed. But, like the killings of Tate and other victims of the August massacre, Jurvetson’s death was savage. Also, her body was discovered a few miles from where supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were murdered in their home by Manson Family members.
However, the detectives’ interview with Manson “did not produce anything fruitful,” according to an LAPD statement released Wednesday, and Det. Veronica Conrado said there are no plans to interview him again.
‘A lovely, free-spirited and happy girl’
Anne Jurvetson wrote on a memorial page that her sister Reet was “a lovely, free-spirited and happy girl.” She also was naive and trusting of others, Anne Jurvetson wrote, and the teenager loved adventures.
Soon after her departure for California, Reet sent a postcard from Los Angeles to her parents in Montreal, saying she was happy and had an apartment.
They had no more news after that, but the Jurvetsons never reported their daughter missing. They thought she would turn up one day or send word.
Then, Anne wrote on the memorial, it became difficult for them to figure out how to look for her.
“In hindsight, I realize that this is a lack of discernment,” Anne Jurvetson wrote. “But sadly, we did not know how to find someone on the other side of the continent, in another country, if that was even where she still was. North America is a big place! The fact remains, we were terribly perplexed and we grieved her disappearance for many long years.”
After the positive DNA match, Anne finally had an answer to her sister’s disappearance. It was a possibility she had come to accept in recent years, but one her now late parents didn’t mention.
Looking for John
Conrado said the investigation into Reet Jurvetson’s death continues.
She and Det. Luis Rivera are looking for a man named “John” or “Jean.” He knew Reet in Montreal before he moved to Los Angeles.
“We don’t know who he is. We’re still asking anyone that may have known a friend who was a friend of either or both of them that knew the reason why she may have come to the U.S. to visit him,” Conrado said.
