“MODERN” VICTIM FROM 19TH CENTURY

The Doe Network — the group of online, ama­teur sleuths who’ve helped track down dozens of cold cases — have con­tributed to the unrav­el­ling of another mys­tery. And this is one of their odder cases yet: a mur­der vic­tim, thought to have been killed in the 1970’s, turns out to have been dead for more than a cen­tury.
The skele­ton, found with a hole in the skull, “is not a ‘mod­ern’ homi­cide of a teenager,” Kentucky state foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gist Dr. Emily Craig wrote to local offi­cials in Jefferson County. “It is a dis­turbed grave, most likely from the mid or late 1800s.“
“Craig’s let­ter was for­warded from the coroner’s office to Louisville Metro Police,” the Courier-​​Journal notes, “where Lt. Mike Veto still had the packet on his desk yes­ter­day after­noon. ‘It was listed as an unsolved homi­cide, but it’ll be changed now,’ he said.“

The remains were found on Labor Day 1988.
Four boys dis­cov­ered them while dig­ging in a spot where they played behind their homes in the Villa Ana sub­di­vi­sion off Dixie Highway…
Ron Howard, then a sergeant with the Jefferson County Police, recalled that he and his detec­tives worked the case.
“There was a human being, and we didn’t know what cir­cum­stances led to the death and it could have been a homi­cide,” Howard said yes­ter­day. “You spend a lot of frus­trat­ing time because there’s no direc­tion to take so you go in all direc­tions.“
The case was cold when Craig pulled it; she wanted to review it after Todd Matthews, a vol­un­teer with the Doe Network, which tries to iden­tify remains, sent her a ques­tion about it. Matthews needed more infor­ma­tion other than age, race and gen­der…
“The bones were dis­col­ored and dete­ri­o­rated,” Craig said. “They were much more than they should have been for a recent death.“
The X-​​rays of hard­ware showed pins and nails. The nails did not look mod­ern, she said…
As for the body… it was posi­tioned as if it were in a cof­fin.
She explained the hole in the skull as typ­i­cal bone dete­ri­o­ra­tion. “The bones had sim­ply dete­ri­o­rated to the point the thin bones of the skull were gone,” Craig said. 

August 13th, 2004 | Cops and Robbers | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.