Blue Earth Jane Doe

Michelle Yvette Busha grew up in Bay City, Texas, in a household she had already run from once, and she left it for good after turning eighteen. Through the winter and spring of 1980 she called her family from Mississippi and Indiana as she traveled. When the calls stopped, her relatives reported her missing in May.

On May 26, 1980, Michelle was hitchhiking along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota when a marked state patrol car stopped for her. The trooper was Robert Leroy Nelson, and he was on duty. He raped her, pulled out her fingernails with pliers, shaved her head, and strangled her with the drawstring of her sweatshirt, then left her body in a drainage ditch outside Blue Earth. A farmer checking his fields after heavy rain found her on May 30. Nobody could say who she was. She was buried in Riverside Cemetery under a stone reading “Unknown.”

Nelson confessed in 1988 while in custody in Texas on unrelated sex offenses, and in 1989 he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in Minnesota. A Blue Earth woman named Deb Anderson spent more than a decade pressing to have the grave opened. It was exhumed in August 2014, and on March 13, 2015, a DNA match to samples Michelle’s family had given in 2007 finally returned her name. Her ashes went home to Texas that April.