Police identify remains of three skeletons found buried in southeast Washington

DC Police chief Peter Newsham, right, visits a property in Washington where human remains were found in April. Photo / The Washington Post

Police today announced that three sets of skeletal remains found buried in southeast Washington in April are of women who disappeared in 2006, a crucial step towards resolving a gruesome and puzzling discovery.

They were identified as Jewel Marquita King, 48, Verdell Jefferson, 41, and Dorothy Jean Butts, 43. Authorities said all disappeared from their District homes and were killed. Two were shot; one was beaten. Jefferson had lived on the same street where the bodies were found.

Detectives now turn to finding who killed the women, whose deaths have been ruled homicides. At a news conference, police said it does not appear the women were killed at the same time, but it is possible they were killed by the same person.

Construction workers enlarging a crawl space in the basement of an apartment building on Wayne Place in Congress Heights found the first set of remains on April 25. Two other sets were found a short time later, sharing a single, shallow grave in woods behind the building.

Police said at the news conference it was unclear if there was one killer or multiple killers. Detectives are researching the women's pasts to see if anything links some or all of them, and to try to learn why they were buried on a hilly street lined with boxy red brick apartment buildings.

The macabre discovery had unnerved residents who watched for days as police, forensic experts and cadaver dogs combed through the basement of the building and in the expansive woods nearby, where many neighbourhood children play.

Adan Escobar, a 42-year-old construction worker who uncovered the remains and took photographs, said at the time that "there were no clothes, no hair, no weapons. Nothing but bones."

Police recovered the remains and then began their more extensive search.