James Richard Curry

James Richard Curry (November 16, 1946 – January 7, 1983) was an American serial killer and rapist who killed between four and five people in California and Nevada from 1982 to 1983. A few days after his arrest, Curry hanged himself in his cell. He was posthumously determined to be the killer of the Sheep's Flat Jane Doe, who was identified alongside him as Mary Silvani.

Early life and crimes Little is known about Curry's early life. Born in Bexar, Texas on November 16, 1946, he was the illegitimate son of a man and woman from Dallas who had an affair, with only his mother deciding to raise him under a different name. Sometime during the late 1960s to early 1970s, he was arrested for robbery and assault and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at the Huntsville Unit, where he remained until his release in 1977. Curry then decided to leave Texas and move to California, settling in the small community of Waukena, where he soon found employment in a locksmithing company.

Murders While working in Waukena, Curry became acquainted with a 40-year-old fellow locksmith named James DeWitt Robinson. He learned that Robinson had received $10,000 as settlement from a 1976 personal injury lawsuit and had done property dealings in Tulare, leading some to speculate that Curry wanted to steal his money. The men had a cordial relationship, but sometime around early 1982, Curry had a falling out with him and decided to kill him. On February 17, he lured Lemmon to the storage locker and shot him once in the head with a .38 revolver. After killing him, he stuffed his body in a wooden crate, sealed it, and left it in the storage locker. Curry would later give Lemmon's motorcycle to one of his sons. When queried, he confessed to the three murders to Det. Sgt. Robert Morse, after which he asked Morse to shoot him. A prison volunteer distributing books to the inmates found him and quickly reported it to the commanding officer, who attempted to resuscitate him without success. Curry was then taken to the San Jose Hospital and placed in the intensive care unit, where he was kept on life support and under constant surveillance. During one of these searches they discovered a handgun, IDs and old checkbooks belonging to James Robinson, but as they were unable to find his remains, they were unable to conclusively determine whether they were just stolen from Robinson or that he was killed and then robbed by Curry.

On January 7, doctors at the San Jose Hospital decided to disconnect Curry's life support after determining that his vital signs were too faint for any sort of recovery. He was pronounced dead at 7:30 PM, with his cause of death ruled as suicide by hanging.

Identification and closure of the Silvani case

While his crimes were quickly forgotten after his suicide, the case of the Sheep's Flat Jane Doe became a primary focus of local and regional law enforcement, who attempted to uncover the victim's identity for decades. Sometime in the mid-2010s, criminalists from the Washoe County Sheriff's Forensic Science Division attended a lecture on genetic genealogy hosted by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a geneticist known for her work with the DNA Doe Project and Identifinders International. Following this, detectives and criminalists started working with the organizations in an attempt to identify the Sheep's Flat Jane Doe.