Who is she — and why hasn’t someone been looking for her?
More than two weeks after the body of an unidentified white woman was found dead on the grounds of the historic Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York State Police released a photo to help solve the mystery of what they described as a “suspicious” death.
A hiker discovered the dead woman, believed to be in her 50s or 60s, “lying face down” on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just south of Bard Rock on the sprawling estate roughly 90 miles north of Manhattan on Dec. 6, the Dutchess County Medical Examiner said, according to the National Park Service.
“The body was not situated on National Park Service land, and the state investigators do not believe the death occurred on park land,” the agency added.
She was 5 feet, 5 inches tall, weighed about 112 pounds and had brown eyes and gray hair. No scars or tattoos were visible on the woman’s body, state police said.
Both the state police in Rhinebeck and the Hyde Park Police Department are investigating.
Anyone with information regarding a missing older woman in the Hyde Park area is asked to contact Investigator Filippini at 845-677-7300 and refer to case #NY2400970235.
The lush 211-acre historic site features gardens, greenhouses, farms, sporting pavilions and guest cottages and a 54-room Beaux Arts home. It was one of several properties owned by Frederic William Vanderbilt, a scion of the prominent Vanderbilt family, and his wife Louise Holmes Anthony, according to the NPS.
Vanderbilt Mansion is one of the region’s oldest Hudson River estates.
For nearly two centuries, the Vanderbilt Mansion — which was designed and built between 1896 and 1899 — was home to the creme de la creme of New Yorkers.
The home and grounds represent “the domestic ideal of the elite class in the late nineteenth-century America. It provides a glimpse of estate life, the social stratification of the period, and the world of the American millionaire during the era historians refer to as the Gilded Age,” its website states.
