Cindi Arleen Estrada was a 21-year-old Caucasian woman whose life ended far from where it began, on a lonely stretch of Interstate 90 in northern Wyoming. Born in Torrance, California, she is believed to have spent time in Long Beach before vanishing from her family's view, drifting into the wide, transient world that clings to America's highways. For decades, no one who loved her knew where she had gone.
And in Sheridan County, no one knew the name of the young woman who lay in a roadside ditch, her story reduced to a case number and a nickname.
On April 13, 1992, highway workers and a local sheriff following the right-of-way fence along Interstate 90, about fifteen miles north of Sheridan and roughly five miles south of the Montana border, came upon a decomposing body in a borrow ditch near milepost 5. The woman was lying just off the southbound side of the interstate, a place cars only passed at speed, never stopping long enough to see the details that now confronted investigators. She was fully clothed in a checked midriff blouse, jeans, and a wide belt, but her socks and shoes were missing. The remains showed signs that she had been there for some time, exposed to the elements in the narrow strip of forgotten land between pavement and prairie.
An autopsy revealed that the young woman was about 5-foot-5 and lightly built, approximately two and a half months pregnant and, heartbreakingly, that she had already given birth at least once before. There were indications of sexual assault, and internal findings pointed to beating and strangulation as the likely cause of death. The exact place where she was killed could not be determined, but evidence suggested she had been murdered elsewhere and then dumped along the interstate, discarded in the dark where the roar of passing trucks would drown out any echoes of what had happened to her. With no identification on the body and no one immediately coming forward to claim her, investigators recorded the case under a dry number and began referring to her as “I-90 Jane Doe” or “Sheridan County Jane Doe,” a nameless victim whose identity seemed to recede further with every passing year.
For a long time, the investigation could move only in small, painful steps. Investigators preserved a paper towel found in her crotch area and took swabs from her body, both of which contained semen. At the time, DNA technology was still in its relative infancy, and the profile developed from the evidence was too limited to enter into national databases. The case, like so many others, depended on memories, scattered tips, and the hope that someone, somewhere, might notice a resemblance between the reconstructed face of I-90 Jane Doe and a missing loved one. Her composite image appeared in case files and on early web archives, but no one recognized her, and the file sank deeper into the cold-case shelves as years rolled past.
A major breakthrough finally came in 2012, when advances in forensic science allowed investigators to extract a clearer male DNA profile from the preserved evidence. That profile matched DNA from another Wyoming cold case: an unidentified woman long known as “Bitter Creek Betty,” found nude and frozen near Interstate 80 in Sweetwater County in March 1992. The match conclusively tied the two murders together, indicating that the same man had killed both women in the span of weeks and abandoned their bodies along isolated stretches of highway. Suddenly, I-90 Jane Doe was no longer an isolated mystery; she was one of at least two victims in what appeared to be a truck-route series of killings across the West.
In 2019, another connection emerged when that same male DNA profile was linked to evidence from a 1991 Tennessee homicide: the murder of Pamela “Rose” Aldridge McCall, a pregnant woman who had been hitchhiking and traveling with truckers before her body was found near an interstate off-ramp. The pattern—young women, pregnancy, highway locations, sexual violence, and strangulation—began to form a grim constellation around a single, unidentified man. Working with publicly accessible DNA databases and investigative genetic genealogy, authorities followed the trail of relatives and genetic matches until it narrowed onto one name: Clark Perry Baldwin, a former long-haul truck driver from Iowa.
In May 2020, investigators in coordination with the FBI shadowed Baldwin around his home in Waterloo, Iowa. They collected abandoned items—swabs from a shopping-cart handle, trash from his residence—and sent the material to the Wyoming State Crime Lab. The resulting DNA profile matched the DNA from McCall's murder scene in Tennessee and from both Wyoming cases, tying Baldwin directly to the killings of the woman once called Bitter Creek Betty and the unknown victim left near I-90. Baldwin was arrested on May 6, 2020, on warrants related to the Tennessee and Wyoming homicides and charged with first-degree murder, making him the prime suspect in Cindi Estrada's death even before her identity was publicly known.
While the criminal case moved forward, the victim in Sheridan County still had no name. That changed in 2025, when forensic genetic genealogy and renewed testing of her remains allowed the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation to match her DNA to that of her biological mother. On July 17, 2025, officials announced that I-90 Jane Doe was, in fact, Cindi Arleen Estrada, a 21-year-old originally from Torrance who had gone missing from California years earlier. After more than three decades as a faceless entry in the Doe Network and other databases, she was finally reclaimed by her own name. The revelation not only restored her identity but also deepened the human tragedy at the heart of the case: a young mother, pregnant again, whose journey had carried her onto the long-haul routes where predators could hunt under cover of distance and anonymity.
Even with her name restored, justice in the legal sense has remained incomplete. Baldwin, the former trucker whose DNA investigators say links him to Estrada, to Bitter Creek Betty—later identified as Irene Vasquez—and to Pamela McCall in Tennessee, was tried first for the McCall homicide. In May 2025, he was convicted of McCall's murder and sentenced to life in prison, clearing the way for his extradition to Wyoming to stand trial for the deaths of Estrada and Vasquez. Before that could happen, however, Baldwin died of a heart attack in July 2025, leaving the Wyoming cases formally charged but never adjudicated in court.
As a result, the story of Cindi Arleen Estrada sits in a painful space between resolution and unfinished business. The evidence has pointed firmly to a single suspect, whose alleged pattern of violence fits the contours of her final hours: a trucker on the interstates, a young pregnant woman far from home, a sudden eruption of brutality followed by a body left in the thin, wind-swept strip of land beside the highway. Yet no jury will ever weigh that evidence in her case, no judge will speak her name at sentencing. What remains is the fragile but important restoration of identity and narrative—after thirty-three years, she is no longer just I-90 Jane Doe, but a daughter and mother with a history, a name carved into public memory, and a place in the broader reckoning with a suspected serial killer who hunted along America's roads.
