"Once a month it's no big deal to go up there and clean it up," said Keith Porty, the Acton man who for years has been tending to a memorial at a roadside picnic area just outside Rockwood on Highway 7, the place where the woman's remains were found 20 years ago.
For those 20 years no one knew who she was, but her memorial was kept in pristine condition by someone that just wanted to make sure she wasn't forgotten: Keith Porty.
"After the snow melted, (the memorial) was just really sad to look at," said Porty, who started maintaining the site in 2019.
"Somebody had put out these little branches, sort of like a shield to protect the stone from the lawnmower and I think they meant well by putting out the sticks but they were white and looked like bones."
For Porty, finding the perpetrator is less important than keeping Jane Doe’s memory alive long enough for someone to identify her finally.
And they did.
Shortly after this story ran, police reported they had identified the remains as those of Tammy Penner, a 41-year-old woman who went missing from British Columbia all those years ago.
