NYPD detectives have finally ID’d the remains of a woman found mysteriously entombed in cement at a former famed Hell’s Kitchen hot spot 20 years ago — and they were eerily helped along by a 9/11 victim.
Cops believe that the woman — who had only been known as “Midtown Jane Doe” after her skeleton was found by construction workers at 301 W. 46th St. in Manhattan in February 2003 — is Patricia Kathleen McGlone, a teen girl from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who was last seen in the late 1960s.
Detective Ryan Glas of the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad finally got a positive ID on McGlone after years of exhaustive, old-school gumshoe detective work coupled with the high-tech forensic and genealogical investigative toiling of the Police Department’s Crime Lab, including some involving the DNA of a woman killed on Sept. 11, 2001 — and whose first name also was Patricia.
“Now we can start the next phase of the investigation — finding the killer,” Glas recently told The Post of the case, which had once shaken the city, frustrated stymied investigators and grabbed tabloid headlines across the Big Apple.
“The work is incredibly rewarding,” added the cop, who spent seven years as a detective in the Sixth Precinct before being transferred to the Cold Case Squad, where he said he always wanted to be.
“Everyone is someone’s child. We have to bring closure,” he said.
McGlone was between 17 and 19 years old when investigators believe she was strangled, bound with electrical wire, wrapped in a carpet and cemented into the building’s basement, which was once home to the mob-tied rock ‘n’ roll club The Scene, a joint that hosted the likes of Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground before closing in 1969.
McGlone’s body was discovered when construction workers broke up a slab of cement in the building’s basement and her skull rolled out onto the floor.
Inside the makeshift tomb was a wristwatch, some children’s toys and a signet ring bearing the initials PMcG.
But the department’s investigation into the macabre find — which was splashed across the pages of The Post in 2003 — soon ran aground given the limited forensic technology of the day, an ongoing soaring city homicide rate and a myriad of dead ends in the case.
Then eventually, as technology related to DNA sampling advanced — along with the increased popularity of familial and genealogical tracking that came with it — cops were able to use a bit of genetic material pulled from the woman’s skeleton to get a possible hit on her family tree.
“We used forensic investigative genealogy to produce that family tree under the Forensics Investigations Divisions at the NYPD Crime Lab,” Glas said. “That hit came back in early 2023.”
Glas and his team then set to work interviewing people in the family tree. All leads on the paternal side came up dry, but after turning to the maternal side, investigators found a 90-year-old woman in Florida who turned out to be a distant cousin of Midtown Jane Doe.
The woman recalled her sister babysitting some young cousins back when she lived in Brooklyn — and DNA testing suggested that one of them was Midtown Jane.
Glas said he was able to help confirm the identification using DNA samples from a woman who died on 9/11.
DNA submitted by family members hoping to find the female 9/11 victim’s remains in the Manhattan rubble turned out to be related to Midtown Jane Doe.
“The investigative genetic genealogy used [from her skeleton] is only a lead — Jane Doe was identified through her distant genetic relatives,” Glas said.
Another DNA-driven lead turned up who investigators believed were Midtown Jane Doe’s parents, and armed with that information, they identified the body as McGlone.
Glas set to work combing through public and Brooklyn church records to piece together the short life of McGlone, who grew up in a house on Third Avenue in Sunset Park, attended Catholic school and then public high school for a mere eight days before marrying a man in his early 30s around 1968 or ’69 and disappearing.
Now that detectives have a name, they’ve gotten to work trying to identify McGlone’s killer.
Glas said the teen’s mystery husband was linked to the Hell’s Kitchen building where her body was found.
“We’re still working on getting information on him, trying to verify what his situation was with her,” Glas said. “At this point in the investigation, what I can say is, he does have a connection to where she was found.”
Glas said investigators instrumental to the tragic woman’s identification included Lt. Michael Saccone, commanding officer of the Cold Case Squad; retired Detectives Gerard Gardiner and Robert Hahn; the NYPD Police Laboratory’s Forensic Investigations Division genealogist, Linda Doyle; Detective Joey Rodriguez and criminalist Sarah Sciortino, as well as city Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s Dr. Angela Soler and the assistant director of the Anthropology Unit Dr. Bradley Adams.
The investigation continues under the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s Siobahn Berry of its Investigations Bureau and Forensic Sciences Cold Case Unit chief Coleen Balbert.
