The Seattle Times made a deliberate decision to publish the handwritten notes found in the box, posting them on the paper’s website, along with photographs that had been approved for release by the family. The decision was journalistic: the hope was that someone might recognize the handwriting, the notations, the names in the notes. The paper used its comments section, a private forum, and social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to solicit leads, while also monitoring those channels carefully to avoid the kind of misidentification and mob speculation that had caused serious harm in other high-profile online identification efforts.
The article was widely republished and shared. It drew the attention that the paper had hoped for, producing a large volume of leads. Some of the leads pointed to specific women whose names would later circulate in online discussions of the case: Christie Lynn Farni, a young woman who had disappeared under troubled circumstances; Cynthia Perry; Jennifer Wictor. These were possibilities that emerged from the coverage, based on perceived similarities or partial coincidences of detail. None of them could be confirmed.
The article also reached Colleen Fitzpatrick.
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## Colleen Fitzpatrick and the DNA Path
Colleen Fitzpatrick was not, in her first career, a genealogist. She had been a nuclear physicist: a BA from Rice University in physics, followed by an MA and PhD from Duke University. She had worked on laser radar systems, founded an optics company that operated for nearly two decades, and then, around 2005, shifted into a field that combined the analytical discipline of her scientific background with a different kind of detective work.