But the location and timing of her killing, just a few kilometres from several Manson family murders, has long fuelled speculation that Jurvetson’s case was connected.
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In October 2015, two Los Angeles police detectives went to Corcoran State Prison to interview Manson. Det.
He says the Manson interview turned up no new information.
A caretaker at Spahn Ranch, the notorious Manson Family hangout, told police that the young woman looked like a hippie named Sherry from Simi Valley who spent time at the ranch. She had been stabbed a reported 150 times in the neck and upper body.
Authorities had been unable to identify the body for almost 50 years, but they got a break last June when a friend of Jurvetson’s saw a post-mortem photograph of the stabbing victim on the Internet and reached out to the woman’s sister. Luis Rivera told People Magazine, which broke the story, investigators can’t rule out the Manson family’s involvement in the killing.
The family made their way to Montreal in 1951 when Reet was a year old. “We’re still asking anyone that may have known a friend who was a friend of either or both of them that knew the reason why she may have come to the U.S.to visit him”, Conrado said.
Jurvetson’s body was discovered by a birdwatcher on the afternoon of November 16, 1969, in dense brush off of Mulholland Drive, a scenic 21-mile road the cuts through the Hollywood Hills.
Tate was killed in her home, along with four other people three months before Jurvetson’s death.
Eventually, she said she came to realize that her sister was probably dead.
In the fall of 1969, Reet went to California and apparently chose to stay there as her sister explained Reet sent her parents a postcard saying she was happy, found a nice apartment in Los Angeles and for them not to worry.
Investigators said Jervensen was stabbed 157 times.
Anne, now 73, says they grieved her disappearance for many years but never filed a report.
After being unable to ID the woman, police labeled her as Jane Doe #59 and never solved the case.
Los Angeles police revealed Wednesday that they had at last identified the young woman as Reet Jurvetson of Montreal, described by her sister and a friend as full of life and longing for adventure.
“After all these years, we are faced with hard facts”, Jurvetson’s sister, Anne Jurvetson, said in a statement released through police.
Anne explained her sister was the youngest in the family, and Reet was born in Sweden after the family fled Estonia as refugees in 1944 during the Second World War.
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“As incredible as it seems, my parents never thought to report Reet missing to the police”, Anne said in a statement to People Magazine. She had gone to Los Angeles, she said, after becoming infatuated with John. He knew Reet in Montreal before he moved to Los Angeles. But sadly, we did not know how to find someone on the other side of the continent, in another country, if that was even where she still was.
