A young, petite, pregnant woman found dead with beating and strangulation injuries 33 years ago in a borrow ditch 15 miles north of Sheridan has been identified using DNA from her mother, Wyoming police say.
Named “I-90 Jane Doe” for the past three decades, the woman is one of two Wyoming victims in the case of alleged serial killer Clark Perry Baldwin.
The Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation publicly identified her as Cindi Arleen Estrada in a Thursday morning statement.
That confirmation came via DNA matching with her biological mother, the agency reports.
Prior to the publication of this news story, there was essentially no publicly available information on Estrada online as she died before the internet age.
She was 21 years old. She was born in Torrance, California, and may have also lived in Long Beach, DCI Commander Ryan Cox told Cowboy State Daily in a follow-up email.
Though long a mystery, Estrada is a key part of a trucker serial-killer investigation that is still awaiting adjudication in Wyoming.
Baldwin was convicted May 5 in the 1991 murder of Pamela McCall, whom he killed in Tennessee around the same time another woman narrowly escaped his commercial truck.
He is expected to be extradited to Wyoming to face prosecution in the killings of Irene Vasquez, whom investigators long called “Bitter Creek Betty,” and I-90 Jane Doe.
Betty
On March 1, 1992, a female truck driver stopped her rig at the Bitter Creek truck turnout on Interstate 80 about 40 miles east of Rock Springs, says an evidentiary affidavit Sweetwater County Attorney Danny Erramouspe compiled in 2020 from the investigative reports of Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Loy Young, who has since retired.
The trucker found the nude body of a Hispanic female lying face-down, partially covered in snow. She called the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff’s deputies and a coroner’s deputy converged on the scene to find the body completely frozen on top of about 9 inches of snow. She had a gold, wedding-style band on her left ring finger and wore a solid gold necklace; her right breast bore a tattoo of a rose with a stem and leaves.
An autopsy in Colorado by forensic pathologist Dr. Patrick Allen revealed that the woman was between 24 and 32 years old, stood 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weighed about 125 pounds and had suffered neck and facial trauma consistent with manual strangulation.
A scar on her abdomen indicated she’d had a cesarian section at some point in her life, the affidavit says.
The 9 inches of snow under her body indicated she was dumped “several weeks” prior to her discovery, possibly in late fall or winter.
Investigators didn’t know who she was, and a 50-state distribution of her fingerprints to other agencies didn’t help, so they called her Bitter Creek Betty.
But on May 17, 2022, Erramouspe filed a new affidavit in the case, with one extra paragraph.
Bitter Creek Betty had been identified.
Using family tree DNA companies, Young had found Bitter Creek Betty’s half-sister, who confirmed that her name was Irene Vasquez. The half-sister hadn’t heard from Vasquez since 1990.
Jane
Wyoming Department of Transportation crews were checking the right of way fence off Interstate 90 about 15 miles north of Sheridan on April 13, 1992, when they found a dead pregnant female in the borrow ditch.
That was one month after Vasquez’s body was found in Sweetwater County.
The female wore a midriff-bearing blouse, a belt with a gold-colored buckle and blue jeans. But her socks and shoes were missing.
An autopsy two days later determined this woman stood about 5-foot-5 and weighed about 110 pounds.
She’d suffered bleeding in her head, indicating someone had struck her.
She also was about two-and-a-half months pregnant at the time of her death and had likely given birth at least once before, the affidavit says.
Investigators had found a paper towel in her crotch area. They also took swabs from her genital area. The Wyoming State Crime Lab later determined those pieces of evidence contained semen.
But the DNA profile taken from those weren’t sufficient to enter into the Wyoming or national DNA database at that time, says the affidavit.
Investigators named her I-90 Jane Doe.
Now they’ve identified her as Estrada.
Breakthrough
Estrada and the evidence found on her body produced a “significant breakthrough” in the case in 2012 when a male DNA profile found at that scene was matched to the male DNA found in the Bitter Creek Betty investigation.
The discovery “conclusively (linked) the two Wyoming homicides to the same DNA contributor,” says DCI’s statement.
Then in 2019, another breakthrough emerged when investigators linked that same male DNA profile to one found in the 1991 killing of McCall.
“Subsequent investigations, including the use of publicly accessible DNA databases and investigative genetic genealogy, provided leads that ultimately identified Clark Perry Baldwin as the unknown DNA contributor,” the statement says.
Baldwin was arrested May 6, 2020, in Iowa, on warrants for murder in Tennessee and Wyoming.
Wyoming Agent Goes To The Home
But first, FBI personnel shadowed Baldwin around his then-hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, so they could pull DNA swabs from his shopping cart handle at Walmart, and his home garbage.
The Wyoming State Crime Lab received those swabs in April 2020, pulled the DNA and found a match with DNA from McCall’s case and both Wyoming cases, the affidavit says.
Strapped with recording devices, Wyoming DCI investigator Loy Young and Tennessee’s 22nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office criminal investigator Tommy Goetz approached Baldwin’s tiny, sixth-floor apartment in Waterloo the morning of May 6, 2020.
They rode the elevator in silence, Goetz told Cowboy State Daily in a May interview. They knocked, and after four minutes, Baldwin answered the door.
After 44 years of interviewing “every criminal element out there,” Goetz wasn’t nervous, he said. He was just eager to find the truth.
Baldwin wasn’t working at that time. He allowed the investigators into his living room, but he had just one couch and no other furniture, Goetz recalled.
Baldwin sat while both investigators stood throughout the hour-long interview.
They asked general questions about trucking. Baldwin wore a blank expression.
Then Goetz got specific, delivered Baldwin’s Miranda rights and asked questions about McCall, he said.
Baldwin conceded that he may have had sex with McCall, who was a prostitute, but he said he didn’t remember her at all, Goetz related.
“He never asked why we were there. He knew he was talking to cold-case investigators — but he never asked why the entire time we were there,” said Goetz. “I think he was expecting that knock to come at some point in his life.”
After that interview, FBI investigators served a search warrant for more DNA, and law enforcement arrested Baldwin.
Goetz tried to interview Baldwin again at the jail, but by then the man had asked for a lawyer.
The One Who Got Away
At Baldwin’s trial in May, a woman who escaped his truck after he raped her in February 1991 testified against him.
Mary Ann Newton was 21 when she hitched a ride in Baldwin’s truck in Oklahoma, she told Cowboy State Daily in May.
They stopped at a truck stop in Oklahoma City overnight and left there on Interstate 40 on Feb. 18, 1991, arriving at a Texas restaurant at 11:30 p.m.
Baldwin bought her dinner.
Back on the road, Newton decided she wanted to go back home. She asked if she could use Baldwin’s CB radio to find a different trucker headed back toward Kansas. He allowed it, and she got a ride lined up, she recalled.
The bag in which she’d kept her clothes for several days on the road was ripped, and she asked Baldwin if he had a plastic bag she could use.
“He said, ‘Come back here, to the bed area,’” Newton said. “I went back there — and that’s all I remember.”
She woke in the truck’s sleeping quarters naked from the waist down with Baldwin raping her and choking her nearly to the point of death, Newton said.
Her wrists were taped; a sock had been stuffed into her mouth. Her lips were duct-taped shut. She kicked and fought for breath.
“I’m gonna let you go,” Baldwin said, according to Newton’s account. “Or are you gonna scream?”
Baldwin untaped her and let her put her clothes back on. Then he handed her a handgun, said Newton.
“If I were you I would shoot me,” Baldwin said, according to Newton’s account.
But all she wanted was to get out of the truck.
“I held the gun on him and said, ‘You’re gonna drive ’til I tell you to stop, and I’m getting out of here,’” she recalled. It was dark. Her eyes searched the road for any sanctuary. She spotted a gas station beyond an off-ramp and told Baldwin to pull over.
“You throw that gun back up in the seat,” Baldwin said.
Without thinking about where the gun would land or what would happen to it, she threw it as hard as she could, then took off in a full sprint — wondering if Baldwin would shoot her, she said.
At the gas station she called police.
Newton doesn’t remember the ride to the hospital where medical personnel conducted a rape examination on her. She vaguely remembers speaking with a prosecutor in Texas.
She spent days on a Greyhound bus headed back for Kansas, then went two weeks without leaving her home. She tried seeing a therapist for a while, but the therapist wanted to unpack Newton’s childhood as well, and she wasn’t up for that, she said.
Baldwin was interviewed by police at the time, released pending indictment. He was never convicted on the rape charge, which was dismissed for failure to prosecute.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
