Woman IDed 27 Years After Being Hit by 2 Cars, Killed

Andrea Kuiper's family finally has answers
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted May 12, 2017 4:59 PM CDT

On the night of April 1, 1990, a woman crossing the street in Huntington Beach was hit by one car, then a second, and died at the scene. For 27 years, police have tried to figure out who she was—and now she's finally been identified. Andrea Kuiper of Fairfax, Va., an artist who suffered from manic depression, started using drugs, and moved to California. Two months before her death at age 26 that night in 1990, a friend called her family to say she was safe, and they never heard news of her again. They never filed a missing persons report. Now they have answers, and in a statement, her father says they "are thankful to know what happened to our daughter after all these years. Andrea was loved and respected. She was beautiful. But she was manic depressive, and therefore we had been through quite an adventure."

Authorities, thinking she could be a teenager, submitted her data to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and her story was featured on TV's Unsolved Mysteries. In 2010, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) was created, and authorities added her information to that. But none of those measures led to an identification. Then, this year, the FBI worked with NamUs to closely examine fingerprints, and found a match for the unidentified victim: fingerprints given by Andrea Kuiper when she applied for a job with the Department of Agriculture three years before her death, ABC 7 reports. Authorities are happy to have given the former Jane Doe her identity back, but it's a tragic end for her family; per the Los Angeles Times, Kuiper's dad says they always hoped she'd drive up in a "car full of beautiful children and say, ‘Hi, it’s me.'" (More missing person stories.)

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