Body in morgue for a year proves to be missing woman

Carmelita Johnson went missing Jan. 5, 2010. For most of the time since then her body was in the Cook County morgue, but no one knew it.
"I'm very upset and angry that it took this long to identify my mother's body," one of her four daughters, Leslie Jackson, said this morning.
Chicago police first issued a missing persons alert for theEnglewood neighborhood woman on Feb. 16, 2010. By that time, she already had been missing six weeks. Relatives told police they last saw her the previous Jan. 5 and that she had been involved in a turbulent relationship with a man.
The following April 10, the body of an unidentified woman was found by a man walking his dog along the beach in the 8500 block of South Green Bay Avenue in the South Chicago neighborhood. Police surmised the body had washed ashore and opened a death investigation.
But no one connected Johnson and the Jane Doe body at the morgue, April 2010 Case No. 146.
Jackson said the first detective assigned to the case promised the family for months that he would collect DNA samples and have them compared to unknown women at the morgue. That never happened, Jackson said.
Police classified the case as suspended. Family members said they pressed to have the case reopened.
Once a second detective, Det. Pamela Childs, took over the case, things started to happen, Jackson said. Childs gathered DNA immediately from Jackson, one of her sisters and her grandmother, Jackson said.
But the body in the morgue was so badly decomposed it couldn't be identified through DNA, Jackson said. So Jackson told Childs where she could locate her mother's dental records. Last week, the detective gathered Carmelita Johnson's dental records and on Friday was able to get them matched to the unknown woman at the Cook County medical examiner's office.
Johnson's family plans to have her remains cremated and to hold a memorial service, Jackson said.
She said she has not been told how her mother died, but they have been told she was not shot or stabbed to death. And she added the family has an idea about who might have killed her. "My mother was in a very abusive relationship," Jackson said. "He would make threats that he was going to kill her."
Jackson said the family has no idea how long her mother's body was in the water. Jackson said she's horrified at the thought that drowning might be the manner in which her mother died.  "She was terrified of the water. She never took us to the beach," Jackson said.
Jackson said Det. Childs promised her from day one that she would find her mother. "I want to thank her for keeping her promise and bringing us closure," she said.