James Richard Curry

In 2019, investigators finally said they knew who she was—and who they believed pulled the trigger. ^[1]
The story of Mary Edith Silvani and the man authorities named as her killer, James Richard Curry, is really the story of how a cold case can be rebuilt from a few degraded cells and a handful of old family trees.

A Body Above Incline Village

On July 17, 1982, someone noticed a young woman lying near a hiking trail in the Sheep’s Flat area off Mount Rose Highway, a few miles above Incline Village on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. ^[1]
She had been shot to death. ^[1]

The Woman No One Could Name

From the start, the case hinged on a simple question: how do you investigate a murder when you don’t even know who died?

Detectives tried to work backwards from her remains. They collected fingerprints and dental records and extracted what biological material they could. Those identifiers were then compared against reports of hundreds of missing persons whose descriptions matched the woman found above Incline Village. ^[2]

Nothing matched. No family stepped forward to ask about a missing daughter or sister who might have ended up in the high Sierra. ^[2]

Years would pass with the case file shuttling between investigators. In 2015, Detective Dave Jenkins publicly floated a theory that the woman might never have been reported missing at all—perhaps she had cut ties with her family and friends before she was killed, leaving no paper trail of concern for police to connect to the body on the mountain. ^[2]

It was a plausible answer, but it didn’t get them any closer to her name.

When Traditional Forensics Ran Out

By the 2000s, the lab work looked more promising. DNA evidence from the Sheep’s Flat crime scene was entered into the FBI’s national CODIS database, designed to flag matches to known offenders and other crime scenes. ^[1]

Again, nothing. ^[1]

For decades, investigators had relied on fingerprint cards, dental charts, and CODIS searches. In this case, each tool came up empty. ^[1] The woman above Lake Tahoe remained an anonymous victim of a single gunshot, frozen in time as Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe. ^[1][2]

A New Kind of Detective Work

In early 2018, criminalists with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Forensic Science Division attended a lecture on forensic genealogy by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a physicist and pioneering genealogist who had begun applying family‑tree techniques to old cases. ^[1]

The approach was the same one gaining national attention for helping identify the man accused as the Golden State Killer: instead of waiting for a direct DNA hit to a known offender, investigators uploaded unknown crime‑scene DNA to a public genealogy database—GEDMatch—and looked for distant relatives. ^[1][2]

In April 2018, detectives and criminalists in Washoe County formally partnered with Identifinders International and the nonprofit DNA Doe Project to try exactly that with the Sheep’s Flat case. ^[1] Sheriff’s detectives sent samples of the victim’s DNA to a private lab, with the DNA Doe Project helping to facilitate the testing. ^[2] Over the summer, they shipped additional samples from the unidentified woman to be processed. ^[1]

Once the lab had built a usable DNA profile, it was uploaded to GEDMatch. ^[1][2] The result was not a name, but a list of genetic matches—relatives who shared enough DNA with the victim to be somewhere on her family tree. From there, the tedious work of building that tree by hand began. ^[1]

According to Fitzpatrick, she and her colleagues logged more than 2,000 hours of research to track down the woman’s relatives. ^[2]

Giving Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe Her Name Back

The genetic clues pointed east, to Detroit.

Based on the GEDMatch results, investigators determined that the Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe was the biological daughter of a couple from Detroit, John and Blanche Silvani. ^[1][2] Records showed that John and Blanche had one daughter, Mary Edith Silvani, born in Pontiac, Michigan, on September 29, 1948. ^[1]

There was still one more hurdle: confirming that Mary Edith and the anonymous woman in Nevada were the same person.

Building a Killer From a Family Tree

Even before the victim was identified, investigators had recovered DNA they believed belonged to her killer from the Sheep’s Flat crime scene and submitted it to CODIS. ^[1] That search, like the search for her identity, had produced no match. ^[1]

In 2018, as the victim’s DNA was being analyzed, the suspect’s DNA was also sent to a private lab and uploaded to GEDMatch. ^[1] Again, the profile did not match anyone directly, but it did produce a web of relatives. ^[1]

Fitzpatrick’s team used those distant connections to build out the suspect’s family tree, working forward in time to find out who, among all the descendants, could fit the profile of a man tied to a 1982 murder in Nevada. ^[1][2]

The genetic breadcrumbs led to a couple who had once lived in the Dallas area. ^[1] Investigators concluded that the unknown suspect was the grandson of this pair. ^[1] According to the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, their reconstruction indicated that the suspect “was an illegitimate child” fathered by one of the Dallas couple’s sons and that his mother had raised him under a different family name. ^[1]

From there, detectives learned that the man they were circling—now believed to be the Sheep’s Flat murder suspect—had been born in Texas in 1946. ^[1] His name was James Richard Curry. ^[1]

Curry’s history was not clean. While in Texas, he had been arrested for robbery and sentenced to prison in Huntsville. ^[1] He was released from prison in 1977 and moved to Waukena, a small community in Tulare County, California, where he was reported to have worked at J & M Locksmith. ^[1]

To lock him to the crime genetically, Washoe County detectives approached Curry’s two children. Both agreed to provide DNA samples voluntarily. ^[1] Forensic scientists compared their DNA to the unknown suspect profile from the Sheep’s Flat scene and determined that the children’s DNA was consistent with the suspect being their biological father. ^[1]

With that, investigators said they could finally name the man they believed shot and killed Mary Silvani near the Mount Rose Highway in 1982: James Richard Curry. ^[1]

A Violent Pattern Emerges

Once Curry’s name surfaced in Nevada, it intersected with an older file in California.

Curry had been jailed in San Jose in January 1983. ^[2] Months earlier, on January 2, 1983, 39‑year‑old Gerald Novoselatz had been found shot to death at his home in San Jose. ^[1] Investigators later linked Curry—then 36 years old—to the murders of Gerald and his wife, Sharon Novoselatz, in connection with that case. ^[1]

Police at the time said Curry was acquainted with Gerald, Sharon, and another man, Bakersfield resident Richard Lemmon. ^[1] While Curry was in custody in San Jose, police said he confessed to Lemmon’s murder as well. ^[1]

The Coworker Who Never Came Home

Curry’s years in Waukena before his San Jose arrest raised another, murkier possibility.

After his 1977 release from the Huntsville prison, Curry moved to Waukena in Tulare County and was reported to have worked at J & M Locksmith. ^[1] Washoe County investigators later said they believed that Curry may have killed a coworker at that locksmith shop. ^[1][2]

According to both Bay Area and San Francisco reporting, authorities alleged that this coworker never resurfaced and that his remains have never been found. ^[1][2]

There are no details in the record here about who that coworker was, what evidence led authorities to suspect Curry, or whether any charges were pursued. It remains an allegation hanging at the edges of an already grim pattern: a man with documented violence in his background, linked by investigators to multiple deaths across two states.

The Last Push to Close the File

By the time genealogists had tied Curry to the Sheep’s Flat crime scene through his children’s DNA, he was beyond the reach of any new prosecution. The available material does not spell out his ultimate fate; what it does show is how investigators in Nevada used his known history to stitch together a broader narrative of violence. ^[1][2]

Sheriff Darin Balaam publicly credited the work that went into that reconstruction. He praised the efforts of people who had worked on the case for more than three decades, highlighting the way local investigators, forensic scientists, genealogists, and outside agencies pulled on the same threads. ^[1]

Detectives in Washoe County reached out to officials from the San Jose and Santa Clara police departments, as well as the San Mateo and Santa Clara County sheriff’s offices, seeking historical information on their murder investigations to help connect those California homicides to the Sheep’s Flat case. ^[2]

What Remains Unknown

The case that began on a trail above Lake Tahoe now has names where it once had none: Mary Edith Silvani in place of Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe, and James Richard Curry as the man authorities say killed her. ^[1]

Yet there is still a great deal that no record here fills in.

There is no public explanation of how or why Mary ended up in Nevada in the summer of 1982, or how she crossed paths with Curry. There is no detailed account of the hours or days before she was shot, and no clear legal record in these materials of how the California murder cases tied to Curry were resolved. ^[1][2]

Also unresolved is the allegation that Curry “likely” killed a coworker in Waukena whose body has never been recovered—a suspected victim who, decades later, still has no identified remains or confirmed case outcome. ^[1][2]

What the file does show is the power of new forensic tools to restore something basic that was taken from Mary Silvani in 1982: her name. It took a 1974 fingerprint card from Detroit, a 1966 high school yearbook photo, tens of thousands of lines on a genetic spreadsheet, and the persistence of detectives who refused to let go of a woman everyone else had lost. ^[1][2]

In the end, the view from that trail near Sheep’s Flat is unchanged. But the woman who died there is no longer a Jane Doe.