The Fond du Lac County Jane Doe: the Tragic Story of Amy Yeary
On November 23, 2008, a group of deer hunters were travelling past an abandoned farm, when they made a horrifying discovery. There was a body frozen in the shallow creek. Her legs and torso were sticking up out of the water, and her upper body was encased in the ice. It was an isolated location, on Skyline Drive, in Ashford, Wisconsin. The creek was about 500 feet from the road. The abandoned farm was near Campbellsport, in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin.
When police arrived on the scene, they realized that the woman’s body would have to be removed by chiseling away at the ice. It was extremely difficult work, as the weather was frigid, and it had started snowing. As they cut the woman’s remains out of the ice, the water was already refreezing around her. They had to work well into the night, to get the unidentified body out of the ice.
The Jane Doe’s body was brought to the Fond du Lac County Medical Examiner’s Office. The body had been greatly decomposed. A lot of the soft tissue had been changed into adipocere, during a process called saponification. This means that the body fat of a corpse gets turned into a thick substance also known as corpse wax, or grave wax. Depending on if it is formed from white or brown body fat, adipocere can be either tan, or grayish white in colour. Because of the adipocere, and the…
