“I was a police officer for 32 years,” Chris McMullin told Dateline. “I went to the Bensalem Police Department, which is here in Bucks County, and I worked there from 1992 to 2022.”
McMullin retired from the Bensalem Police Department but later went to work with the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office. “I have been here for about two years now,” the lieutenant said.
In the spring of 2002, the detective had surgery on his knee, causing him to wear a cast and get around on crutches.
When he returned to work, his days looked a little different.
“I couldn’t drive a car. I couldn’t go out into the field. So I was just on the phone and, um, I could take reports and things like that,” McMullin said. “So it was during that time that I started looking into, uh, unsolved cases that we had, cold cases, if you will.”
McMullin told Dateline that a certain file caught his attention.
“One of the ones I found was a Jane Doe that had been discovered in January of 1988,” he explained. “She was discovered in an abandoned distillery down off of State Road, uh, right off the Delaware River.” She became known as the Bucks County Jane Doe or the “Publicker” Jane Doe, a reference to the name of the abandoned distillery where her skeletal remains were found.
“Interesting thing, she was also pregnant,” McMullin noted. “And, actually, fetal bones were found with her -- within her remains, as well.” McMullin told Dateline that in addition to finding the body, there were “several blouses, other pairs of shoes, and they were all just tossed randomly in the vicinity where the body was laid.”
When Dateline asked McMullin why this case in particular caught his eye, he simply responded, “It was unsolved.”
“I started looking through the files, and I found these photographs of this -- this -- literally a skeleton that was found,” he said. “I wanted to solve it.”
“The victim was a female, and she was estimated to be approximately 17 to 23 years of age,” McMullin said. “I just thought to myself, ‘Somebody’s got to be missing this girl.’ And I wanted to identify her. I wanted to find out who she was.” If he could figure out who the Jane Doe was, maybe he would be able to solve the mystery of what happened to her.
In 2002, McMullin was given approval to work on the case. “She had been discovered in ‘88,” he said. “It was determined that she had been deceased approximately three years before she was found, which would put her time of death in 1985.”
“It was now 2002. I wanted to see what -- what could be done investigative-wise that was not an option back in 1988,” McMullin said. “One of the things was we [now] had the internet.” He added that his next steps included listing the Jane Doe on NamUs and posting the case online to start spreading awareness.
He included some of the photos of her clothing and jewelry hoping someone would recognize it.
One of the rings, in particular, was unique. “I’d never seen anything like it,” McMullin told Dateline. “It had actually looked like a belt buckle, the ring."
The next step McMullin wanted to take was getting the Jane Doe’s DNA profile into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the national database of DNA profiles that includes evidence, convicted offenders, and missing persons cases.
In 2007, McMullin applied for a grant called the President’s DNA Initiative. Through that, he said, he was able to send the Jane Doe’s remains to the Center for Human Identification, which developed a DNA profile they were able to upload to CODIS.
“I was very excited about that, because, for me, that was -- that was a huge step, because now that --. My Jane Doe’s DNA profile is going to be tested against family reference samples from people that have a missing relative throughout the country,” McMullin said. “I was hoping that maybe I would eventually get a hit off of that.”
Unfortunately, the DNA profile didn’t lead to a match. So McMullin turned to the internet.
“Back in ‘88, there was a forensic sculpture done by Frank Bender, who was a very famous, uh, sculptor. He had helped solve a lot of cases in the past,” McMullin said. “I’d put that picture on -- on the internet, as well, hoping somebody would see it and see the likeness and say, ‘Hey, doesn’t that look like somebody that we used to know that we haven’t -- you know, that had gone missing?’”
McMullin also took to local media. “It was in the -- the Philadelphia area media for a long time,” he said. “Never developed any strong leads on it.”
McMullin told Dateline that he pursued what he hoped would be a promising lead — the disappearance of Jeanette Tambe. Jeanette was a Bensalem resident. She fit the age range of the Bucks County Jane Doe and had disappeared in the fall of 1985 — which aligned with when the Jane Doe had died. By the fall of 2009, McMullin found Jeanette’s brother, Joseph, and obtained a DNA sample from him.
A few months later, McMullin received a phone call and letter from the Center of Human Identification. Joseph Tambe’s family reference was a match — but for a different Jane Doe, one found in Buena, New Jersey in August of 1986.
Jeanette Tambe’s case remains open with the New Jersey State Police.
McMullin was back at square one, and incredibly frustrated. He had helped to identify another Jane Doe, but still couldn’t identify his Jane Doe.
By 2011, more than 25 missing women had been eliminated as being the Bucks County Jane Doe.
“In the meantime, you know, the case was out there and I was, you know, hoping that somebody would see it and, uh, you know, call me with some information,” McMullin told Dateline.
In 2014, that happened.
McMullin received a voicemail from a woman named Cathy DeBuono. She wanted to talk about the Bucks County Jane Doe. She said she felt that the Jane Doe may be connected to Victor Paleologus — a man McMullin had never heard of at the time.
“She told me that he was currently incarcerated in California for committing a homicide against a -- a young lady named Kristi Johnson and that, prior to his conviction, he had assaulted, uh, several other women,” McMullin said. “And, apparently, his M.O. would be that he would, uh, pose as a photographer or sometimes a casting agent. And he would, uh, approach a woman in public in -- in a shopping mall, for example, and tell her that she had a good look and that they were looking to cast another Bond girl, or, uh, you know, Disney’s looking for somebody, something like that.”
The story of the murder of Kristi Johnson is told in the Dateline episode “The Girl with the Hibiscus Tattoo.” You can also listen to the Dateline Original podcast, Murder in the Hollywood Hills, for more.
“Cathy’s theory was, you know, he had attacked all these other women, and then he killed Kristi Johnson. You know, maybe that’s not the first time he did this,” McMullin told Dateline. “And she did a very deep dive on him and found out that, um, back in 1985, he lived in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, uh, not far at all from where my Jane Doe had been discovered.”
“When I discovered that Victor had left Pennsylvania prior to when Jane Doe may have -- her estimated time of death was, then I started to question, ‘Well, maybe he’s not somebody we should be looking at,’” McMullin said. “However, um, additional information we received was that he did return to the area in 1985 to attend the wedding of his brother.”
McMullin told Dateline he spoke to Victor Paleologus’s brother, who confirmed that Victor did attend the wedding, but he could not remember if his brother had brought a guest.
“But the bottom line was, he was back in town in 1985, at least at one time,” McMullin said.
In July of 2017, Cathy DeBuono paid Paleologus a visit in prison and while there, she obtained a DNA sample.
“I believe she gave him a soft drink and a can that he drank, which, um, she took the can, I believe, and that was a source of DNA. And she also, uh, had a Band-Aid on her finger. And when they met, uh, he hugged her. And I think she ran her -- the back of her hand across the back of his head and got some hair that possibly was a -- a source of DNA,” McMullin said. “Ultimately, she did get his DNA during this visit. And that was checked against the fetal bones. And he was not the father.”
While Paleologus was not the father of the Jane Doe’s unborn child, to McMullin, that didn’t fully clear him from being a person of interest in the Bucks County Jane Doe case. “In my opinion, he’s still a viable candidate, but he’s not the only one,” McMullin said.
The efforts to identify the Bucks County Jane Doe using DNA continued. By the spring of 2020, more than 50 missing women had been eliminated as being her.
And then another path opened up. “I believe it was, uh, 2020, I once again had the opportunity to try investigative genetic genealogy,” McMullin said. His office began working with genealogist Yolanda McClary. “This time, we were able to develop a usable profile from Jane Doe’s remains, um, which was then uploaded into some of the public DNA databases.”
And then, a breakthrough.
“[McClary] started putting together the family tree for Jane Doe. And I -- I couldn’t keep up with her,” McMullin said. “She was, uh, giving me a lot of information.”
“I remember it was a Friday evening, and she sent me a text message saying, ‘Check your email,’” McMullin recalled. “And I checked my email, and she had sent me a message that stated -- she gave me a couple names: Joseph Todd and [Linda] Todd. She said, ‘Your Jane Doe is their sister.’”
“This potential family was just a short car right away,” McMullin remembered. “I’ve been working on the case for almost -- you know, uh, since 2002, uh, you know, so 18, 19 years at that point.”
McMullin was able to track down a phone number for Joseph Todd’s daughter. When he called her, he asked her if she knew if her father had a sister who disappeared.
“And she said, ‘Yes, he did. He had a sister that disappeared in 1985.’ And I said, ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I -- I think I -- I found your father’s sister,’” McMullin told Dateline. “I said, ‘What was her name?’ And she told me, ‘Lisa. Lisa Todd.’”
McMullin asked the daughter to have her father give him a call. According to McMullin, Joseph Todd was emotional when they spoke, knowing his sister may finally have been found. He agreed to meet with him and two other detectives.
When they met with Joseph they brought photographs of their Jane Doe’s clothing and jewelry.
“He recognized all of it,” McMullin said.
DNA samples were taken from Joseph and his sister Linda. They were a match — the DNA showed that they were direct relatives.
“We were able to positively identify Jane Doe as being Lisa Todd, who disappeared in October of 1985,” McMullin said. Authorities officially made the announcement in March of 2021.
McMullin told Dateline that both of Lisa’s siblings told him they loved her and looked up to their big sister. McMullin also learned that Lisa already had a child at the time of her disappearance.
“She had had a little boy who was about 2 or 3 years-old when she disappeared. So he was now, you know, a grown man in his 30s,” McMullin told Dateline. “He said, you know, he had spent basically almost his entire life thinking that, you know, ‘Did my mother abandon me? What happened to my mother?’ And now he knew that, you know, she didn’t abandon him, that something bad had happened, and that was why she never came home.”
“It was a huge relief, um, because, um, I had been saying all along, somebody’s got to be missing this girl,” McMullin told Dateline. “And despite that, you know, she had never been identified prior to this. Clearly, after meeting the family, she was missed.”
The Bensalem Police Department confirmed that Lisa Todd’s case is still open. Anyone with information on what may have happened to her is asked to contact Detective John Monaghan at (215) 633-3668.
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