Beaver County investigators exhume remains in effort to solve 4 cold cases
Beaver County investigators are turning to decades-old graves in a new push to solve four cold cases, including the mystery of a woman's severed, embalmed head that was found in the woods in Economy Borough and made national headlines in 2014.
On Monday, the remains of two men buried at Oak Grove Cemetery who have gone unidentified for more than half a century were exhumed as part of an ongoing effort to give four people their names back and help determine how they died, hoping modern science can uncover what decades of investigation could not.
Those two men were found in the water in separate cases in the 1960s. Both were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery. Neither man was ever identified. In one of those cases, barge workers found a man in the Ohio River in May 1960, entangled in driftwood. His autopsy was inconclusive.
"The biggest thing is just identifying who these people are. They've been at a John Doe grave for 60 years. And to be able to, one, give them the respect of knowing who they were and to notify their family. I can't imagine what these families have been thinking over the last 60 years," said Beaver County District Attorney Nate Bible.
The third case: A full-term baby boy weighing 6 pounds and 13 ounces was found at a dump in Raccoon Township in October 1968. His remains were also exhumed on Monday at Sylvania Hills Memorial Park.
The original autopsy report listed exposure as his cause of death. But the new court filing says his cause of death remains unknown, and investigators want to determine whether it was a homicide.
"There's certainly the potential that there's a homicide investigation on all of these cases, the baby even more so because it was a baby that was just left in a garbage dump," Bible said.
On Tuesday, the work will move to Beaver Cemetery, where a woman's severed head was buried after its discovery nearly 12 years ago. A 15-year-old boy found it in the woods off Mason Road in Economy in December 2014.
The head had already been embalmed. Who she was, where the rest of her body is and how her head ended up there remain a mystery.
Initially, it was documented that embalming fluid damaged DNA in previously tested tissue. Now, experts believe a dense part of the skull could provide a usable sample.
"There is some additional testing that they're able to do that just didn't exist 12 years ago," Bible said.
The four cases are part of a federally funded effort involving forensic experts at the University of South Florida.
Testing could include genetic genealogy, tracing relatives through DNA connections. The hope is that those connections will lead to names and finally, to families.
Bible says the remains will be reburied immediately after the examinations, adding that results from the testing could take six to nine months.
