The Pima County Jane Doe has a name.

Arizona police have confirmed that the unidenti­fied woman found in the desert near Tucson in 1981 is Brenda Gerow, a Nash­ua woman who left town with a convicted murderer the year before, and her family hopes police are close to finally charg­ing her killer with murder.

A photograph found in possession of former Tyngs­borough, Mass., resident John Kalhauser – who fled the area while on bail for a Tyngsborough shooting in 1979 – helped connect the dots for a Pima County Sher­iff’s Department detective.

Arizona investigators had dubbed the unidentified woman in the photo­graph the "Flower Girl," and it proved a crucial link to solving the suspected homicide.

Making the match

In 2012, Detective Mark O’Dell had a hunch.

"(Detectives) go through (cold cases) peri­odically. They may find something new and put more information to the public," said Deputy Tracy Suitt of the Pima County Sheriff’s Depart­ment. Social media proved helpful, he said, to "flood the market and see if anyone had any information."

The "Flower Girl" pho­tograph that police distrib­uted, Suitt said, came from Kalhauser’s property when he was arrested; Kalhauser has refused to identify the woman in the photo.

As for O’Dell, "Once he got a nibble, he didn’t give up," Suitt said.

Eventually, O’Dell was able to get support from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Chil­dren, based on the probable age of the woman found back in 1981. They paid to have Jane Doe exhumed and facial reconstruction work done.

The photo was distrib­uted around the country through social media. "People started recognizing that photo," said Suitt.

The Gerow family was contacted, and DNA samples were taken. Once compared, a match was confirmed.

Starting all over

Bill Gerow Jr., Brenda’s younger brother, said he was 16 when his sister left home with Kalhauser. She had met Kalhauser when she was working as a part-time bartender at a bar called OJ’s in Dracut, Mass. The couple visited the Gerow home one day, Bill Gerow Jr. said, and his sister told him she was leaving with Kalhauser for a while but would be com­ing home again.

"She was only dating him five or six months – if that – off and on. (John) had given me a $20 bill. He told me to go to Nashua court­house the next day to pay restitution on something he owed," Gerow said.

He went the next day and recalled that the court clerk asked him if he knew where Kelhauser was and she informed him there was a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of at­tempted murder.

"He knew he was wanted and he decided to take off," Gerow Jr. said. "Whether my sister knew or not, I never got the chance to ask her."

Gerow, who now lives in New York, heard from her twice while she was living in New Mexico and Ari­zona. The second call came about two months after her departure.

"She said she was com­ing home. That’s the last we heard from her," Gerow said.

Gerow said he later tried unsuccessfully to locate her, but had no idea where she could be.

Two days before Christ­mas last year, he got a call from the Arizona county sheriff’s office telling him they had some amount of certainty that a body found in the desert in 1981 was his sister. He said it was like starting the whole thing over.

He provided a DNA sample in January trying to confirm the identity. The photograph of her holding the flowers, he told police, was taken at their grand­parents’ 75th wedding an­niversary. "I’ve had a copy of that picture for years," he said.

Homicide in Tyngsborough

Kalhauser’s killings stretch back to the early 1970s and connect directly to Nashua.

He was convicted for the 1971 shooting and killing Paul W. Chapman, of Nashua. Chapman, who worked for Johns Manville in Billerica, Mass., as direc­tor of industrial relations, was found in a wooded area of Tyngsborough on May 4, shot several times.

According to a Lowell Sun account at the time, Kalhauser, then 17, told the court that Chapman had occasionally bought beer for him and his underage friends. When they were together in Chapman’s car the night he was killed, Kalhauser said Chapman made advances toward the teen. Kalhauser said he used a .25-caliber handgun and shot Chapman.

He served one year of a seven-year prison sen­tence.

The attempted murder charge that prompted him to leave the area took place in 1979, when he followed the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend and shot at the man’s car, hitting him three times. Kalhauser was charged with that shooting in 1980 and was free on $1,200 bail when he fled Nashua with Brenda Gerow.

A pair of murders

On April 8, 1981, ATV riders found a woman’s body in a gully near the Pima County, Ariz., fair­grounds. Evidence was collected, but there was no identification of the body, which was buried in the county cemetery. The police investigation was shelved but not closed.

Meanwhile, a man named Donald J. Stecchi met Diane Van Reeth, 35, at a restaurant in Tuscon and, five years later, the couple married. In July 1995, Van Reeth filed for divorce, but went missing a month later on her way to work at the Tuscon Electric Power Company.

That fall, Stecchi was arrested as a fugitive in the 1979 attempted murder of a man in Tyngsborough. Po­lice discovered Stecchi had signed his and Van Reeth’s marriage certificate in Nevada with his real name – John Kalhauser – and as­sumed the name of a high school friend.

Kalhauser was found guilty in 1996 of attempted murder for the 1979 shoot­ing and sentenced to 26 years in prison. Though Van Reeth’s body was never found, Kalhauser, 44, pleaded no contest to her death in 1999 and was sentenced to another 20 years in prison, served con­currently with the 26-year attempted murder term.

His attorney at the time, Greg Kuykendall, was quoted in a Tuscon Citizen newspaper story as saying, "He’s never admitted his guilt, so consequently he’s never admitted knowing about any body, or if there is a body."

He reportedly told a jail inmate he beat and stabbed Van Reeth before burying her body in the desert near Tuscon.

Brenda comes home

Gerow Jr. described his sister as an "outgoing girl" in the 1970s. "Very flowerchildish, always smiling with lots of friends. I was really close to her and up until she left – pretty inseparable," he said.

Brenda Gerow liked the park, outdoor concerts and motorcycle rallies.

"She was a really nice person, but a little too trusting. She’d say there’s a little good in everybody," Bill Gerow Jr. said.

Brenda’s remains have recently come back to the family. Bill Gerow Jr. bought two urns – one for his parents and one for himself. Her ashes have a home in both Nashua and New York. He described his parents’ urn as "really beautiful." His own has a motorcycle on it, a nod to the bike rallies he and his sister attended when they were younger.

The journey to this point, he said, is "beyond incred­ible. It’s devastating. We had always hoped she was married and had kids. I held out hope one day we could hang out. That’s just gone. The way it happened was just mind-boggling," Gerow said.

He said the police told him the investigation would continue, and the goal now is to tie Kelhauser to Brenda in the Southwest.

"The push is on," he said.

Kalhauser remains in prison in Buckeye, Ariz. Suitt said Kalhauser is eli­gible for parole in 2019. He has not been charged with Brenda Gerow’s death.

Don Himsel can be reached at 594- 6590, dhimsel@nashuatelegraph. com or @Telegraph_DonH.