Shirley Ann Soosay, formerly known as Kern County Jane Doe, is a formerly unidentified decedent found in an almond orchard in Delano, California on 14 July 1980.

[3] For most of her adult life, Soosay lived in Edmonton and then later Vancouver, though she remained in regular contact with her family until 1979, when cards from her stopped coming.

[8] In 2018, investigators from Kern County reached out to the DNA Doe Project (DDP) for assistance identifying their victim.

[10] Soosay-Wolf submitted her DNA for comparison, and in February 2020 Kern County Jane Doe was confirmed as Shirley Soosay.

[2] Soosay's case is held up as one of the earliest examples of unidentified Indigenous North American remains to be identified through investigative genetic genealogy.

[16] Shirley's disappearance was greatly upsetting to Theresa Soosay, who Violet Soosay-Wolf says would lament every night.

[4] In 1980, 20 year old Soosay-Wolf began making regular 13-hour drives to British Columbia and Seattle,[5][4] where she would search morgues, hostels, hospitals, and cemeteries for Shirley.

[23] After the body remained unidentified for a significant period of time, she was buried in an anonymous grave in a California cemetery.

[6] Due to information provided by her killer after his sentencing,[4] investigators theorize that Soosay had been abducted from a pub named Ruby's in Lemoore, in neighboring Kings County,[9] an establishment which has been replaced by another bar known today as The Wrecking Ball.

[19] Shirley's case was featured in a crime show years later, which Violet Soosay-Wolf distinctly remembers seeing.

[2][11] In 2008, a DNA test identified 56 year old[24] Wilson Chouest as a suspect in the murder of the then-unidentified Soosay.

[4] At the time, Chouest was serving a life sentence in state prison[8] for several counts of kidnapping, robbery, and rape that occurred in August and September 1980, and was eligible for parole in 2017.

[4] In a news release, the DDP stated that the available DNA on the blouse was highly degraded, causing it to take nearly a year to fully reconstruct Soosay's genome.

[5] However, while tracing Soosay's lineage, the DDP encountered difficulties from a lack of relevant data and was eventually unable to continue.

[30] DDP volunteers had determined that Kern County Jane Doe's parents had likely both come from Maskwacis,[a][4] and other branches of her family had been traced to parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

[31] In February 2020, the DDP made a Facebook post about the Kern County Jane Doe case,[10] which included a facial reconstruction by Carl Koppelman and what the DDP had discovered so far about the woman's lineage,[11][29] and asked Indigenous people of the area to help by uploading their DNA to GEDmatch for comparison.

[10] Soosay-Wolf had uploaded her DNA to Ancestry.com in the past, during her search for Soosay's repossessed children, but Ancestry.com does not allow law enforcement to view their database.

[5] Shortly after Soosay-Wolf submitted her DNA to GEDmatch, Kern County Jane Doe was officially confirmed in February 2020 to be Shirley Ann Soosay.

[12] Before the exhumation, a small memorial service took place on 26 May 2022 at the California cemetery where Soosay had been interred anonymously.

[12][3] The memorial was attended largely by staff from the cemetery and the coroner's office, and also featured a traditional ceremony with smudging, songs, and blessings performed by the Tule River Tribe of California.

[25] Following the broadcast, Soosay-Wolf received correspondences from Indigenous families from Canada and the United States, who also had missing relatives they hoped to find.

[31] The notoriety surrounding Soosay's case has been used to call attention to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, especially in Canada.