LONGVIEW, Texas — Family members of a woman known once only as Lavender Doe are planning a trip from Florida to Longview this week to finally put their long-lost sister to rest. They also want to thank a community that embraced Dana Lynn Dodd long before learning the murdered woman’s name.
Dodd was 21 when last seen on parking lot video selling magazine subscriptions at the Fourth Street Walmart in Longview. It took 13 years for that image to be confirmed as Dodd, whose identity was a mystery when her body was found in October 2006 by two men on an oil lease off Fritz Swanson Road, facedown on a burning woodpile.
“We had been looking for her for right around 13 years,” Dodd’s sister, Amanda Gadd, said Friday from Jacksonville, Florida, which Dodd left as a teen with a boyfriend in October 2000.
Read more from CBS19's newspaper partner, the Longview News-Journal.
