For more than three decades, Marina Ramos was known only as Jane Doe.
In 1989, the 28-year-old mother was found stabbed to death, her naked body discarded in the Arizona desert. With no name and no family to claim her, she was buried without identity.
Years passed with no new leads or answers in the case. Then, in February 2022, a breakthrough when investigators were able to uncover her identity using updated fingerprint technology.
But they were met with a shocking twist. Marina had two baby girls – 14-month-old Elizabeth and 2-month-old Jasmin – who went missing days after she was murdered.
And they were still alive.
Mohave County Sheriff’s Office Investigator Lori Miller, who never gave up on the case, began her search for the girls, never wavering on her belief that she would find them.
“I always believed they were alive,” Miller said.
“And to finally find them… it’s hard to describe the feeling. It’s relief. It’s joy. But there’s still a shadow over everything because their mother’s killer is out there.”
On December 12, 1989, Marina Ramos’ body was found on Old Temple Bar Road in Mohave County, about 50 miles south of Las Vegas.
Before she was buried, detectives were able to obtain a DNA profile, which was entered into CODIS, the FBI database.
In February 2022, Mohave County Sheriff’s Office Special Investigations Unit resubmitted fingerprints from the case file to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. They got a hit.
The prints matched a “Maria Ortiz” in Bakersfield, California. An investigation revealed that the woman had been arrested for shoplifting in June 1989.
A records check with the Kern County Sheriff’s Office and the Bakersfield Police Department showed that Ortiz had listed an address in Bakersfield along with the name of two friends.
When investigators contacted the friends of the woman, one of them said they did not know anyone by the name of Maria Ortiz — but that she had a cousin, Marina Ramos, who had been missing since 1989.
Maria Ortiz was an alias used by Marina Ramos — who also had two daughters, Elizabeth and Jasmin Ramos.
Investigators spoke to Marina’s cousin Esther, who cared for the children in August 1989 while Marina was in jail for shoplifting, according to National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
When Marina was released, she picked the girls up from Esther’s house, and with her was a man known only as “Fernando.” Marina told her cousin they were going to Ontario, California to start a new life. Four months later, her body was discovered in the desert. Her children and Fernando were nowhere to be found.
Since she was identified in 2022, law enforcement have issued press releases, shared social media posts and age-progressed images hoping to find the missing girls. Investigators worked with Ramos’ family, who provided DNA to search multiple genealogy databases.
This August, one analysis found a high probability of a match between a woman and Ramos.
Miller was able to track down the woman and her sister, who are now known as Tina and Melissa. The women, in their 30s, submitted DNA samples and those confirmed that they were Elizabeth and Jasmin Ramos.
The sisters told the investigator that when they were teenagers, they had been told they were adopted. But they never knew that they had been missing children, or that their mother was murdered.
Two days after their mother’s body had been found in Arizona, the baby girls were found 150 miles away, abandoned at a park in Oxnard, California.
According to a police report from the time, a passerby heard the children crying and found them lying on the wet floor of a public bathroom. They were taken to a local police station and placed in the custody of Child Protective Services before eventually being adopted by a couple in Ventura County.
The sisters grew up together in a loving home, unaware that they were ever missing, they said.
But Tina, who was born Jasmin, told ABC15 she had always wondered about her biological family. She was the one who uploaded her DNA years ago without knowing the family she was searching for.
“This is what I’ve been searching for and wanting for a very, very long time, to figure out where I came from and who my family was,” she said.
“I was sad to know that my mom is gone, and I will never be able to see her,” she added, her voice breaking.
“It still hits me a little bit because she was taken from me, you know, and, like, that’s not right. But at the same time, I was happy to know that she’s not suffering. She’s not in a bad situation. I was happy to know that all those abandonment issues that I dealt with when I was a kid was, like, automatically released for me.”
Both Tina and Melissa, who have families of their own, are still processing the news.
“I want everyone to know that I’m okay,” Melissa said. “I’ve lived a beautiful life, and I have a wonderful husband. But there are questions I still have, and feelings I’m still discovering.”
The sisters are slowly connecting with extended family.
“It felt good to know that I did have family out there that cared for me and had been looking for me even though I didn’t know this,” Tina said.
Melissa told ABC15 she hopes this will mark a new chapter for their family – and that now they’ve been found, she hopes investigators can focus on other missing person cases.
“May the search continue for the next missing person, and hopefully they find some more success stories,” she said.
As the sisters continue to piece together their past, the search for their mother’s killer is just beginning.
Investigators believe there are three suspects, who were allegedly seen with the children at that time, who are connected with Ramos’ death.
A witness who was in the park that day recalled seeing a woman in a long red skirt and white boots, accompanied by two men, carrying the babies.
“They actually had a witness come forward and say she saw a female Hispanic, about five feet tall, and two male Hispanics get out of a black mini pickup somewhere in the neighborhood alongside the park, and saw them in the park,” Miller said.
The FBI’s Phoenix field office, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are continuing their investigation.
Miller urged anyone with information to call the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office at 928-753-0753 ext. 4408.
