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Hunt goes to Vancouver
A fisherman found the woman’s torso in the Lewis River south of Kelso, Washington State on Sept. 11, 1987. A few days later, her legs were found in the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon.
The following week another fisherman found a toddler’s body -- clothed in a striped pink playsuit and cotton diaper -- floating in the Cowlitz River near the confluence with the Columbia River.
For the past 20 years, the Jane Doe and the Baby Jane Doe have been lying side by side in unmarked graves at the Mount Solo Road cemetery in Kelso.
This month, the identities of the mother and baby were returned to them thanks to a police sketch, a newspaper article and a determined brother who never gave up the search for his sister.
In a single coffin, Raj Narain returned home to Fiji with baby Kamnee Koushal Narain in her arms for a Hindu burial ceremony.
Jai Prasad who searched for his sister and niece for over two decades did not want them separated again.
Jai and his sister Raj were married one day apart in the small Fijian village of Baulevu 24 years . Raj, wed family friend Ashok Kumar Naraian - a man her brothers thought would make a good husband.
Raj, then aged 20, the “pet” and youngest in a family of 11, had her family’s blessing to join Naraian in the United States. Her brother, Jai, hoped the couple would make their fortune there.
He did not know then that from faraway Sydney he would have to turn detective to give his sister and her baby back their lost identities, or that he would spend the last months of 2007 putting them to rest in their homeland, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Back then, the siblings’ lives seemed to run on parallel tracks. Caroline and Jai had their first child, Rodney, in Fiji while Raj gave birth to a girl, Kamnee, in Oregon, US, six weeks later.
Then came a military coup in Fiji. The loving letters Raj wrote to her family, with baby photos and the audio tapes she made for her illiterate mother, stopped. Jai and his brothers were reassured by reports from Fijians living in the US that Raj and her husband had been seen in the street and at a Hindu prayer ceremony, although they had fallen on hard times. Jai told himself that Raj knew the coup had brought tough times to her family but was ashamed she could not help them.
But three years ago, after having a daughter of his own - Janet - and migrating to Sydney, he became more determined to find his sister. His children taught him about computers. Working as a forklift driver by day, he surfed the internet at night.
Emails to fellow Fijians in the US came to nothing, as did phone calls and faxes to police departments and the FBI.
In April last year, Jai found a story by an investigative reporter, Lise Olsen, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about the bodies of a woman and a toddler found dumped in two separate rivers 20 years previously and never identified. There was a drawing of the little dead girl’s face, made using a morgue photo.
Jai went numb. He was 99 per cent certain that “Baby Jane Doe” was Kamnee, her nappy fastened with pink safety pins in the Fijian way, while the silver bangles on the woman’s decapitated body were the type Raj would wear.
“All this time we had hoped my sister was alive and this thing just put a huge rock on my heart,” he told the Herald newspaper.
He travelled to Kelso police station in Washington State, clutching saliva swabs containing DNA from five of Raj’s siblings. He laid two bunches of red roses on the unmarked graves of the woman and child, buried side by side.
“While I was praying, in a beautiful day, it started to rain all of a sudden. This is where I felt that my contact with my sister was made. I cried and she cried and we both cried together,” he said. “I was feeling how alone was my sister all this time. She must be looking at the stars and saying: ‘Where are my brothers - I’m waiting for you.’ … I promised her in the graveyard, no matter what happens … I will take you home.”
Two months later, it was confirmed. The DNA matched the bodies that had been found by fishermen trapped in nets laid during salmon season. Raj had been 24 and was two months pregnant. Kamnee had been 15 months old.
Three weeks ago, Jai arrived in Fiji with the two bodies in a single coffin, the child in the mother’s arms. He did not want them separated again.
In a Hindu ceremony in Baulevu attended by about 500 people, the pair were cremated on a wooden pyre. The next day their ashes were scattered in the sea.
“While the priest was performing his services, he pointed out that human beings have three methods of last rites. One is that bodies are buried in water. The other is they are buried [in soil] and the third is they are cremated - and how lucky is Raj that she has been through all three,” he said.
Jai now wants the murderer brought to justice. He and the police want to talk to Raj’s missing husband, who was still working in the US in 1988, a year after his wife and child had disappeared without him reporting it.
The family has put up posters bearing the husband’s photos in Fiji. Jai has also established a fund to assist young Fijian village women to get an education, in memory of Raj. “That is what my sister would want,” he said.
Detectives have been following potential leads in Washington, Oregon and California, said Chief Criminal Deputy Charlie Rosenzweig, one of the deputies who retrieved the bodies from the water. Investigators are uncertain if Narain is a victim or if he has knowledge of the slayings.
“We’re hoping to locate him, and we’re hoping when we do, it will help us answer more questions that we have,” he said.
Detectives found several people named Ashok Narain during their search through three states, but none was the person detectives are looking for. They’ve interviewed friends and co-workers, looking for him, Rosenzweig said. He is now listed in the National Crime Information Center database as a missing person.
“We track him in the Eugene area through the spring of 1988, a few months after the murders. Then, all indications are that he disappeared and we really don’t know why,” Rosenzweig
said.
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