For 54 years, Sumter County sheriff’s investigators were baffled, frustrated, and haunted by a terrible mystery: Who was the murdered woman found under a bridge that they dubbed “Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee”?

The woman, between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-5 inches tall and 110 to 120 pounds, was wearing plaid green pants, a matching green shirt, and a green and yellow shawl. She also wore a Baylor wristwatch, a yellow gold ring with a clear stone on her left ring finger, and a small gold necklace.

She had been wrapped in a piece of carpet with a man’s 36-inch belt tied around her neck.

“There were no DNA comparisons in 1971,” said Capt. Jon Galvin. “Fingerprints were our bread and butter.”

Back then, fingerprints were filed away by hand, awaiting comparison by latent fingerprint experts to others found at crime scenes.

But it would take five and a half decades — until October of this year — before modern cloud-based computer technology could sharpen the image of her prints enough to identify her as 22-year-old Maureen “Cookie” L. Minor Rowan.

Her body, discovered by two hitchhikers on Interstate 75, had been submerged in water for about 30 days and was in an advanced state of decomposition.

“I couldn’t be more impressed that they were able to get fingerprints at all,” Galvin said.

Investigators never gave up — including Galvin’s father, Ed Galvin, who once held the same position Jon holds today, chief of investigations.

In 1992, Ed Galvin traveled to California with then-Sheriff Jamie Adams to appear on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, hoping for the public’s help. Fliers with composite sketches were distributed nationwide.

In 1986, spurred by new breakthroughs in forensic science, the Sheriff’s Office had her body exhumed from Oak Grove Cemetery in Wildwood for skeletal analysis to determine her age, ancestry, and trauma. An artist also created a facial reconstruction.

Scientists learned that she had undergone ankle surgery known as the Watson-Jones procedure, had given birth to at least two children, and had a crown on her front tooth.

Over the years, investigators pursued every new forensic tool available. In 2006, her fingerprints were sent to the FBI national database, and again in 2013 by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, which had her record from a 1970 arrest on a minor bad check charge.

“There was a lot of pressure in the state for agencies to update a backlog,” Galvin said. “Hillsborough did a good job of complying with the order.”

In 2015, Jon Galvin became chief of detectives and continued the search. When the Golden State Killer case broke in 2018, solved through ancestry DNA, Galvin hoped that the same technology could help identify “Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee.”

“It was so frustrating,” he said. “It’s not like fictional crime shows on TV. I joked, ‘We can have Jurassic Park, but we can’t get a genetic profile with this young lady.’”

Things finally changed this year. In February, the Sheriff’s Office acquired the STORM ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) — a system owned by IDEMIA that produces high-resolution fingerprint images through advanced algorithms. In October, it produced a match.

Now, investigators are learning more about Maureen “Cookie” Rowan’s life and death. She was married to Charles Emery Rowan Sr. of Tampa, who never reported her missing. “They had a tumultuous relationship,” Galvin said.

Charles Rowan died in 2015 at age 74. Cookie had two children, ages 1 and 3, when she died. They have since been notified of the discovery.

The couple’s last known address was 1206 Windermere Way in Tampa, and they also had ties to Jacksonville, Gainesville, and, fittingly, Enigma, Georgia.

Investigators believe there are still unanswered questions surrounding her death.

The Sumter County Sheriff’s Office urges anyone with information to call 352-569-1915, contact Crimeline anonymously at 1-800-423-TIPS (8477), or email sumtertips@sumtercountysheriff.org.