Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is about a gruesome discovery in a New York City basement, one that set off an investigation weaving together threads that you would never expect to find in a single case. A shadowy suspect, a tangled family tree filled with deception, an iconic rock club,

the September 11 attacks mob shakedowns tied to a gangster

who would later find fame on the sopranos.

Like you name it, it is in this case.

And at the heart of it all is a teenage girl

and the decades-long mission to restore her identity.

But even though she finally has her name back,

justice still remains out of reach,

and police need your help to find out what really happened to her.

This is the story of a woman who for more than two decades

was known only as the Midtown Jane Doe.

Music known only as the Midtown Jane Doe. It's Monday afternoon February 10, 2003, and construction workers are clearing debris from a basement of a rundown five-story building on West 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan, a neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen.

Now, this place is in pretty bad shape, and the only reason the workers are even down there is because the restaurant next door arranged to rent part of the basement just for storage. So they're doing their thing when one of them notices

something weird in the corner behind this old boiler. It's this big rectangular concrete slab,

like six feet wide, five feet long, taller than your standard cinder block.

And it looks just all kinds of wrongly. It definitely doesn't belong here. And in a place like

New York where lifers have seen it all, that is saying something. So a worker takes a sledgehammer

to this thing. And instead of the solid thud that you would expect to hear when you like hit concrete, there is this echoing sound that tells them it's hollow inside.

And with the blow, the cement starts breaking apart until they see brown fabric poking through.

And when they pull on it, a human skull starts popping out.

Now, the worker notifies the NYPD and Detective Gerard Gardner,

who just started his shift and is next up in rotation to catch a case,

...