Chesterfield County police this morning said skeletal remains found Aug. 18 are those of a woman missing more than eight years.
Police said it was uncertain what killed Pamela Sue Dodson and that they are continuing to investigate the circumstances of her death.
Dodson, 32, was last seen May 4, 2001, after a family member dropped her off at House of Dave’s, 7501 Jefferson Davis Highway at about 10 p.m.
Dodson’s brother dropped her off at the restaurant, but when he returned to pick her up about an hour later, she was gone.
Dodson’s family reported the blond-haired, blue-eyed woman missing 10 days later.
She was identified based on skeletal remains that were found Aug. 18 by maintenance workers near the Falling Creek Apartments in the 2500 block of Marina Drive. Authorities originally said they did not know the person’s gender or exactly how long the remains had been there.
Dodson’s disappearance came about three weeks after she had testified in the case of one of her cousins, Daniel Curtis Burkhardt. A handyman, Burkhardt was convicted of second-degree murder for an August 1997 attack that resulted in the death of an 89-year-old man for whom he had occasionally cut the grass.
Dodson testified during the trial that she had two telephone conversations in late 1997 with Burkhardt and that he told her he had been in a scuffle with a man, had struck him with a wine bottle and needed to leave Virginia.
The North American Missing Persons Network has a case profile on its Web site that said Dodson “may have had a substance abuse problem at the time of her 2001 disappearance,“ and she “often wore a belly-button ring, two heart-shaped rings with diamonds and two necklaces.“
—Joe Macenka
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