DA, sheriff vie over burying 'Mr. Bones'
Evidence or remains is key question on unidentified man who died mysteriously during 1950s
Sunday, December 09, 2001
By Tom Gibb, Pittsburg Post-Gazette Staff Writer BEDFORD, Pa.
-- A few decades back, some local wag christened him Mr. Bones. The nickname stuck, and for 43 years, that's been the closest thing to an identity that anyone could fix to the man found long dead in the woods near here.
He took a bullet through the head -- a suspicious death, the deputy coroner decided. Investigators guessed that he was in his 30s, about 6 feet tall, maybe a man of means. He had camping gear, $23, poetry books and a couple of changes of clothes with him.And he had no identification.
So he sits -- bones, mostly -- packed with his belongings inside a 3-foot-tall cardboard drum, locked away in the county sheriff's cramped evidence room, sharing quarters with confiscated marijuana plants and seized weaponry. Or he does for now.
Next week, the Bedford County district attorney goes up against the solicitor for the county sheriff's office. They'll argue in Common Pleas Court whether it's time to bury the remains or cart Mr. Bones' drum off to the local state police barracks for more safekeeping."This poor guy has been sitting around this long," said Sheriff Gordon Diehl. "Let's finally treat his remains properly. He's a human being.
"But he's also live evidence in an unsolved homicide investigation, District Attorney Dwight Diehl, no relation to the sheriff, argues in court papers."The odds might be against us," said state Trooper Joseph Kovel, the investigator who three months ago inherited the case and its attendant binder of reports typed during the Eisenhower administration.
"The way we approach it is that we have a chance. And the case is alive until there's no reasonable expectation we could make headway." Use 21st century science on a case from the 1950s, and it might unravel one clue that leads to another, Kovel said.
Some good breaks could lead to a killer, a prospect that tantalizes investigators because there's no statute of limitations on murder, or at least determine the man's identity, the trooper said."It's the end of the investigation when the evidence is completely gone, when there are no leads, the case is cold and there's nothing to work on," Kovel said.
Court papers call the mystery man "unknown decedent," not Mr. Bones. And the suggestion that he might be buried has brewed the closest thing to fervor that this case has seen since the weeks after a brush-cutting crew happened upon the remains two hours after sunup Oct. 8, 1958. The five brush cutters were working for a pipeline company, clearing a piece of farmland a half-mile behind the Pennsylvania Turnpike's northern Midway Plaza. What the crew found, the next day's Bedford Gazette reported, was "a collection of bare, weather-beaten bones and clothing."
Investigators figured the remains had been there at least six months; it might have been as long as two years, Kovel said."It wasn't a suicide, from what everybody was thinking then," Gordon Diehl said. "They suspect there might have been some sort of foul play."Beyond that, the case remained a dead-end whodunit and a wide open how-was-it-done. Did he kill himself, or stumble with his loaded rifle? Did somebody else shoot him? A .30-06 Springfield rifle lay nearby, missing one bullet -- the one that went through the victim's head, police theorized -- but still was loaded with another two. Three boxes of shells lay nearby.It was the unhappy end to a camping trip, it seemed.
The man, brown-haired and 30 to 35, investigators figured, wore jeans and a leather jacket, carried a bed roll, a four-quart canteen and a canvas backpack that had a few changes of clothes, towels and two poetry books. A portable cook stove and utensils sat nearby.
He had copious dental work, done with gold fillings, and needed more. And, maybe of significance, he was packing contact lenses."Not a lot of people had them in 1958," Kovel said. "You might be a person with means to have had contact lenses then."
Most of the skeleton remained, according to Kovel. A few bones might have been carried off by animals, the sheriff said. A few more might have been rearranged when the ravine in which the body lay flooded during rainstorms.Investigators started off optimistic that they could match the man with an identity.
But a month later, they were pretty much out of both leads and hope.A car found abandoned on the turnpike turned out to have no connection. No missing-person reports fit the puzzle. The serial number from the gun, the prescription for the contact lenses and descriptions of the dental work all were dead ends.
It seemed that ever after, the man wouldn't be known as much more than "the luckless hunter," as the Bedford Gazette described him.Now the deputy coroner who handled the case is dead. So are the key investigators. Even the victim, had he lived, would be in his mid- to late 70s."I'd be surprised if they ever solve it," said Jack Geisel, once a deputy coroner.
Six months after they were found, the remains were packed off to the FBI for an examination. They wound up back in the sheriff's evidence room in the county's ancient jail and were toted along six years ago when the sheriff got new quarters in a new county prison. Heretofore, that was the last change of address for Mr. Bones. But two years after he took office, the sheriff wants the remains to have a final address.He lined up space in the 75-foot-square cemetery where the county once buried indigent county nursing home residents, many in unmarked graves. He recruited a clergyman to officiate. And a monument maker offered a headstone for $100."Let's face it, it's time he has a decent burial," Gordon Diehl said.
Or maybe it's not quite time. A last once-over isn't going to hurt things, according to Dennis Dirkmaat, director of the forensic anthropology department at Mercyhurst College in Erie. And Dirkmaat, the go-to guy for a lot of Pennsylvania coroners with nettlesome cases, is willing to pitch in his services gratis."I'd like to take a look," he said. "Maybe we can find something that was missed."Come up with a list of people who are missing kin. Then take DNA culled from the victim's hair and compare it with samples from the maternal lineage of the likely candidates, and it could make a match, Dirkmaat and other experts said.
Piece together the skull, and computer imaging could guess at the look of the face, according to Marcella Sorg, a director with the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists."It won't always work," she cautioned. "It won't give you things like the tip of the nose, the shape of the ears, how fat the person was -- things we use in the mind as cues to who the person was."
Beyond science, though, the Bedford County case could get a payoff from increased expertise from the investigators who handle these kinds of things, Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht said."People have simply become better and sharper," he said....
Link:
http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20011209mrbones1209p4.asp