Police link the Reba and Jane Doe cases through a van

The link between Reba Cordova’s disappearance and the Jane Doe murder investigation emerges from a white van whose identity shifts as investigators follow its plates from a shopping-center report to surveillance footage and then to a possible purchase. The connection is built not from a single decisive witness, but from details that initially seemed ordinary: a car left in a hotel lot, a report filed by a mall visitor, and a van on a tape Loren Muse had nearly dismissed as useless.

The Search Turns Backward

When Reba’s Acura MDX remained in the hotel lot and local officers could not find her by knocking on nearby doors, investigators returned to the last place where they knew she had been: the Palisades Mall. Its extensive security operation offered another way to reconstruct her movements. A mall security office had retained a report that its guards had not considered urgent when it was first made, but the information acquired new significance once investigators asked for it.

The report described a woman in a green Acura MDX loading items into her car and then walking to a man’s white van parked beside it. She entered the van without an apparent struggle, and its door closed. A second woman then got into the Acura, after which the van and Acura left together. The account did not explain who either woman was, why the first had entered the van, or where the vehicles went. Its importance lay in the combination of a missing woman, her car, and a second vehicle departing alongside it.

A Report with Times and Purchases

The witness account could be checked against the mall’s records. The reported encounter took place outside Target. Reba’s receipt showed that she had made a purchase there at 4:52 p.m.; the witness came to report what he had seen at 5:15 p.m. The narrow interval placed the account close in time to a documented stop by Reba, making the report more useful than a vague recollection from elsewhere in the mall.

The contents of the purchase also complicated the possibility that Reba had simply chosen to leave with someone. The items included children’s DVDs, underwear, and clothing. Those purchases did not prove what she intended to do, but they sat uneasily with the idea that she had planned to run away with a lover. Loren Muse recognized that the report should be tested against independent evidence and proposed checking Target’s surveillance cameras. Investigators were already coordinating with Target’s home office, though the footage was expected to take time to obtain.

License Plates and the Jane Doe Footage

The witness, Errico, had a reputation that gave investigators reason to assess his account carefully. He was described as a conspiracy enthusiast who liked to insert himself into stories and appeared to visit the mall hoping to witness wrongdoing. Yet his tendency to record details made his report unusually specific: he had written down the white van’s license plate. Checking it showed that the plate belonged to Helen Kasner of Scarsdale, who owned a white van and had been at the Palisades Mall that day. Investigators suspected that someone had switched plates, a familiar tactic that could obscure a vehicle’s identity.

That possibility connected the mall report to evidence from the Jane Doe murder investigation. Muse showed Paul Copeland a security recording from a building near the murder scene. The footage showed a white Chevrolet van. Its plate was different from the one in Errico’s report, but Muse traced the plate visible on the recording, JYL-419, to David Pulkingham of Armonk, who also owned a white van. The changed numbers did not immediately identify a driver or prove who had altered the plates; instead, they suggested that plate-switching might account for the discrepancy between the two locations.

A call to Kasner supplied the confirming detail in the investigators’ chain of reasoning. After Muse asked her to check her van’s plate, Kasner confirmed that the plate had been switched without her noticing. The plate then on the van belonged to Pulkingham—the same plate Muse had identified on the white van recorded near the Jane Doe murder scene. The investigators treated that match as a sufficient link between the van reported at the mall and the van on the murder-scene footage. The vehicle’s registration trail, rather than a witness identifying a person, joined the two inquiries.

Tracing How the Van Was Acquired

The investigation later pursued the possibility that the van had been acquired in a way that left little conventional record. Frank Tremont said that searches had not turned up a matching vehicle reported stolen, unless it had been taken from outside the area. He therefore checked rental companies, then broadened the search to online used-car sales, where person-to-person transactions could leave less reliable paperwork than a dealership purchase.

By contacting two major online companies and looking back over white Chevrolet vans sold in the area during the previous month, Tremont found six possible sales. Four had been paid for by check, providing addresses; two had been paid for in cash. The cash transactions presented a less direct trail. Investigators considered a scenario in which a buyer used cash, supplied a false name or none at all, obtained a title, left the vehicle unregistered and uninsured, and used a plate taken from a similar vehicle. This was an investigative explanation for how a van might evade routine tracking, not proof that every part of the scenario had occurred in this case.

One seller, Scott Parsons of Kasselton, offered a further lead. He recalled selling the van to a man and a woman, both apparently in their mid-thirties, and was being asked for a fuller description. Parsons worked at Best Buy, whose digital security system might have retained time-delayed footage of the pair. Tremont arranged for an officer to bring him in to review mug shots, while a sketch artist was also made available. These steps could help turn the vehicle trail into identifying evidence, but the account does not establish the buyers’ identities or report a final identification.

What the Connection Establishes

The case link rests on an accumulation of independently checkable particulars: Reba’s timed Target purchase, Errico’s report and recorded plate, the white Chevrolet van on footage near the Jane Doe murder scene, and Kasner’s confirmation that her van’s plate had been switched to Pulkingham’s. Each detail gains meaning from the one beside it. The apparently routine mall report becomes consequential because it can be compared with a receipt and surveillance; the plates become consequential because their owners and the switch can be checked.

The discovery narrows the investigative gap between Reba’s last known movements and the Jane Doe case, while leaving essential questions open. The available account does not identify the women in the mall report, name the person who switched the plates, establish who drove the van at either scene, or disclose the outcome of the search for the buyers. Its decisive result is narrower but important: investigators now have a concrete vehicle connection to pursue across both cases, and a possible route from that vehicle to the people who acquired it.