An 18 year old woman's remains are found over 6 years after she was last seen
In the late summer of 2003, 18-year-old Jennifer 'Moonbeam' Hammond, a white female originally from Littleton, Colorado, was working a temporary job selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door for a traveling sales company. This work brought her to the town of Milton in Saratoga County, New York. On an August day, her employer, Atlantic Circulation Inc., dropped her off at the Creek and Pines mobile home park on Middleline Road to solicit residents. She was scheduled to be picked up by her co-workers a couple of hours later, but when they returned to the designated spot, Hammond was nowhere to be found. Her belongings, including a pre-arranged bus ticket back to Colorado, were later discovered untouched in the Albany hotel where she and her colleagues had been staying. Jennifer Hammond had vanished without a trace.
For years, her disappearance remained a frustrating mystery for investigators and a source of unending anguish for her family. There were no immediate signs of foul play, no witnesses to her abduction, and no communication from Hammond after the day she was last seen. The case grew cold, one of many unsolved missing person files that accumulate over time. It wasn't until October 25, 2009, six years after she was last seen, that a significant break in the case occurred. Hunters walking through a remote, wooded area off Lake Desolation Road in the nearby town of Greenfield stumbled upon human remains. The discovery consisted of a human skull and three teeth, which were later positively identified through forensic analysis as belonging to Jennifer Hammond. Following this grim discovery, her case was officially classified as a homicide.
Despite the confirmation that Hammond had been a victim of foul play, her murder remains unsolved to this day, and no arrests have been made in connection with her death. The Saratoga County Sheriff's Office continues to investigate the case, which has been linked to another unsolved homicide in the same area. In 2005, another young woman, 19-year-old Christina White, disappeared from a mobile home park just a few miles from where Hammond was last seen. White's skeletal remains were discovered in the Daketown State Forest in Greenfield in March 2006, and it was determined that she had been stabbed to death. The striking similarities between the two cases, including the victims' ages, physical appearances the locations of their disappearances, and the proximity of where their remains were found, have led investigators to believe that the two homicides are likely related. Authorities have publicly stated that there is a strong possibility that the same individual is responsible for both murders. As of late 2023, law enforcement officials were reportedly looking into a possible connection between these cold cases and a suspect arrested in a separate kidnapping case in the region, but no definitive links have been announced. The investigation into who killed Jennifer Hammond is ongoing.
