OPP to provide update on nearly 50-year-old Canadian cold case

The Ontario Provincial Police will be providing an update on a nearly 50-year-old cold case that has been solved.

The victim has been identified as Lalla Jewell Parchman Langford.

OPP investigators identified her by sharing the victim’s DNA samples with the DNA Doe Project and genetic genealogy databases were searched.

“Once we got close, we uncovered newspaper articles specifically mentioning Jewell Langford’s disappearance. She was practically there waiting for us to find her,” C. Lauritsen, team leader at DNA Doe Project, said in a press release.

“The heartbreaking part is that Jewell’s mother clearly searched for her for years and unfortunately died not knowing what happened to her daughter,” added Lauritsen.

Langford was found on May 3, 1975 near the Highway 417 bridge south of Casselman, which is about 55 km east of Ottawa, by a local farmer.

Her hands and feet were bound with neckties and she had been strangled with a flat, plastic-coated TV cable.

Her body was wrapped with two pieces of green cloth and two towels — one depicting an Irish toast and the second displaying multiple flowers.

As well, a J-cloth, black coaxial cable and a curtain rod runner were with Langford’s corpse which was estimated to have been in the water for about a year.

She later became known as the “Nation River Lady.”

In 2017 the OPP reopened the case in attempt to identify her and figure out the details of her murder.

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