PA PA - Economy Borough, Beaver Co, WhtFem 40-80, UP13338, embalmed head, gray hair, Dec'14

[Magnum P.E.]

BBM. This puzzles me even more. Also, not sure which articles, but other statements I've read were along the lines of: "No nearby graves had been disturbed," and "The head had not fallen off a truck since it was 30 feet off the road."

haroldchasen, :Welcome1:, and I love your avatar.

And I wonder how many trucks randomly pass that area while carrying heads? That is just a weird statement.

According to a medical person I spoke to, lidocaine and atropine could be administered by EMS in the field, so she did not necessarily pass in a hospital.
I read that her DNA was compromised by the embalming process. Hard to believe it did not survive in the molars.
This could be hard to solve. No prints, no good DNA, and probably no one missing her because they believe she is buried. Dentals are just about it but who do they try to match to?

 

[dotr]

Maybe i missed it, but are there any good close up pics. of the uid's teeth?
Are there any pics that we could see of the actual head?

If someone was to take body parts like eyes, would it not be preferable to remove them from a younger person?

If the person was already deceased and prepared for burial, eyes removed and replaced with red balls, mission accomplished- no one the wiser,why then, would the deceased not be buried after all?

Why would the perp. leave the head where it could be readily found?
imo.

 

[passionflower]

Probably not connected, but just want to document, that this very elderly woman with a heart condition, went missing from a Vancouver funeral home in 2013.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/fa...+over+mother+missing+body/10839796/story.html

WOW who steals an embalmed body? pervert? body snatchers!

 

[dotr]

WOW who steals an embalmed body? pervert? body snatchers!

People who stand to make lots of money.
Also answers my own earlier question about why they would not choose a younger person's eyeballs, because they probably did not care about the quality of the " merchandise".
imo, speculation.

http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/ne...cle_ea934b5d-3b5c-5482-93aa-b95c0d511363.html
rbbm.


"Investigators eye Manhattan funeral home in stolen body parts probe"
March 08, 2006 • TOM HAYS

Mastromarino, 42, and three other defendants pleaded not guilty last month to charges including body stealing, unlawful dissection and forgery. The Brooklyn District Attorney's office and the police have said more arrests are expected.

The ring allegedly removed parts from hundreds of bodies from funeral parlors in New York, Rochester, Philadelphia and New Jersey. Authorities said Mastromarino made millions selling the parts to biomedical supply companies.

Investigators unearthed evidence that death certificates and other paperwork were doctored. In Cooke's case, his age was put down as 85 rather than 95, and the cause of death was listed as a heart attack instead of lung cancer that had spread to his bones.

 

[haroldchasen]

PJFL , thank you for the welcome !
I'm glad that you like my avatar, best movie ever !

Anyway , I did some research on atropine and lidocaine.
My son in law is a physician and we were in a rushed conversation but he did say that they are only used in a clinical setting ( not prescription) ........apologies to those of you who knew that, I had no idea.

He also said that one or both are rarely used today. I can't remember exactly which he said, so I researched online.

I found that the American Heart Association discontinued recommendation of of Atropine in ACLS ( advanced cardiac life support) in 2010.
http://roguemedic.com/2013/10/why-did-we-remove-atropine-from-acls-part-ii/#comments

I also went to a trusted nursing message board that I've used before when my daughter was in nursing school. I don't know if I'm allowed to link to it or mention it so I won't unless told otherwise.
This site had nurses on various threads discussing these 2 drugs .
Most were in agreement that they don't use lidocaine for arrhythmias anymore , and one nurse stated that she'd only seen it used 2 times in 17 years in an arrest situation and doesn't even think that they keep it stocked on their crash carts anymore. Another nurse stated that she's only seen it used by " old time docs".

So I'm not sure what to make of that ??

2 things that I feel strongly about is :

1-that they need to saturate the area highlighted on the map of her last days. They need to saturate all hospitals , hospices and long term acute care facilities, EMTs, funeral homes, and medical schools in those areas. The actual photograph should be shown to these personnel if not released to the public . Fax the image to all managers to share with employees - Before it's too late and then years go by and nobody remembers anything.
If you wait too long, people move on, get new jobs and then it's simply too late.
I know it's a big job, but not impossible being that they do in fact have an area narrowed down.

2- there is still the issue of the body farm in Tyrone township ( 1 hour 15 minutes away from where the head was found).

I will be seeing my daughter who is a nurse and my son in law who is a physician this week. I will pick their brains some more about these 2 drugs and this case in general.

 

[Magnum P.E.]

PJFL , thank you for the welcome !
I'm glad that you like my avatar, best movie ever !

Anyway , I did some research on atropine and lidocaine.
My son in law is a physician and we were in a rushed conversation but he did say that they are only used in a clinical setting ( not prescription) ........apologies to those of you who knew that, I had no idea.

He also said that one or both are rarely used today. I can't remember exactly which he said, so I researched online.

I found that the American Heart Association discontinued recommendation of of Atropine in ACLS ( advanced cardiac life support) in 2010.
http://roguemedic.com/2013/10/why-did-we-remove-atropine-from-acls-part-ii/#comments

I also went to a trusted nursing message board that I've used before when my daughter was in nursing school. I don't know if I'm allowed to link to it or mention it so I won't unless told otherwise.
This site had nurses on various threads discussing these 2 drugs .
Most were in agreement that they don't use lidocaine for arrhythmias anymore , and one nurse stated that she'd only seen it used 2 times in 17 years in an arrest situation and doesn't even think that they keep it stocked on their crash carts anymore. Another nurse stated that she's only seen it used by " old time docs".

So I'm not sure what to make of that ??

2 things that I feel strongly about is :

1-that they need to saturate the area highlighted on the map of her last days. They need to saturate all hospitals , hospices and long term acute care facilities, EMTs, funeral homes, and medical schools in those areas. The actual photograph should be shown to these personnel if not released to the public . Fax the image to all managers to share with employees - Before it's too late and then years go by and nobody remembers anything.
If you wait too long, people move on, get new jobs and then it's simply too late.
I know it's a big job, but not impossible being that they do in fact have an area narrowed down.

2- there is still the issue of the body farm in Tyrone township ( 1 hour 15 minutes away from where the head was found).

I will be seeing my daughter who is a nurse and my son in law who is a physician this week. I will pick their brains some more about these 2 drugs and this case in general.

My source said that they still do use Atropine for cardiac reasons, but Lidocaine, while not used for cardiac events anymore, is used for other things (numbing agent).

 

[haroldchasen]

My source said that they still do use Atropine for cardiac reasons, but Lidocaine, while not used for cardiac events anymore, is used for other things (numbing agent).

Thank you, it did seem that most of the nurses on the message boards were discussing lidocaine in relation to arrhythmias / cardiac events.
As for atropine , I will have to dig a little deeper.
I am interested in learning as much as possible about these 2 meds because it could be very revealing .

 

[Magnum P.E.]

Thank you, it did seem that most of the nurses on the message boards were discussing lidocaine in relation to arrhythmias / cardiac events.
As for atropine , I will have to dig a little deeper.
I am interested in learning as much as possible about these 2 meds because it could be very revealing .

I remember many years ago being trained in the military to self inject with atropine if I was nerve gassed. There was a little kit for it. I doubt that is relevant in this case but I recall that it was out of the body after a short time. I have no idea how long after death it would still be detectable. I have been thinking we are dealing with someone who died not long before her head was found, weeks at the most (though this could be quite wrong). Might be helpful to go through obituaries in the area where it is assumed she died. This is an area that the Websleuths could help a great deal because of our numbers.

 

[sbrady8373]

I'm not sure how helpful this is but I didn't see it mentioned so...

Atropine is also used as an ophthalmic medication. Ointment or drops to the eye(s) helps to control pain due to glaucoma, ulcers, etc. It is absorbed into the bloodstream so I think it would still show up in autopsy even if eyes are removed??


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[haroldchasen]

I'm not sure how helpful this is but I didn't see it mentioned so...

Atropine is also used as an ophthalmic medication. Ointment or drops to the eye(s) helps to control pain due to glaucoma, ulcers, etc. It is absorbed into the bloodstream so I think it would still show up in autopsy even if eyes are removed??


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

:Welcome1:
From one newbie to another

You have a good point. I had read about the ophthalmic uses of these two meds but am not medically inclined and it gets to be a little over my head. It depends on the way they were administered and the amount. Too many variables that it starts to overwhelm me.

I suppose that the questions would be :

* how did they identify the medications ? Through hair , bone , teeth ? I think I read somewhere that embalming destroyed any DNA due to embalming. But that doesn't mean that meds can't be identified through hair, bone, or teeth.

*what is the half life of these medications ? Would they show up in hair ? I would say yes on the hair.

So is it remotely possible that this woman was in fact someone struggling with a serious eye problem ( glaucoma etc) and donated her body to science upon death ?

This does connect with the fact that her eyes were missing.

 

[LilacStar79]

Eye (corneal) donation is one of the most common types of organ donation that I see in the funeral home.

 

[dotr]

A recent investigation in stolen body parts is detailed in this lengthy article.

http://chronicleillinois.com/news/c...-plea-in-multi-state-illegal-body-parts-ring/

December 23 2015

Part one: Loved-ones speak out about treatment of human remains

In late 2013, Linda Hayes, of Rolling Meadows, shed tears in her parked car in a Rosemont parking garage. She clutched a wooden box containing human cremated remains — a vessel engraved with the name of her husband of 34 years.

After Tom Hayes’ death at age 56, Linda agreed to donate his body to Biological Resource Center of Illinois, a for-profit human tissue donation firm that promised her husband’s body would be used in scientific research.

“Tom had a lot of health issues, and he wasn’t able to work for [much of] his adult life,” Linda Hayes said. “He thought donating his body to science was a way he could make a contribution.”

But a letter last spring from the Detroit branch of the FBI makes her think the remains in the wooden box are likely not her husband’s. Investigators told her they found her husband’s body, partially dismembered, with pieces sold in a multi-state illegal body parts ring.

In a three-day raid in January 2015 agents wearing hazmat suits, from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, closed Cremation Services, Inc., a Schiller Park crematorium at 9329 W. Byron St. They confiscated body parts and human tissue. They also seized records and computers from BRC-Illinois’ Rosemont office on the fifth floor of Rosemont Village Hall at 9501 W. Devon Ave.

 

[JusticeWillBeServed]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/15/the-head-with-no-body-and-no-answers.html

Embalming and artificial eyes would seem to indicate the woman at least made it to a funeral home following her death. However, there’s no way to determine whether a professional or some sick amateur performed that macabre task. After consulting with area cemeteries, police have mostly ruled out the possibility that Jane Doe was taken from a grave or funeral home.

Police dismissed the theory that Jane Doe could have been a missing person early on. If a missing person ended up at a funeral home—where she could possibly have been embalmed—surely someone there would have recognized the fact that a body had arrived with no identification or known relatives. But considering there is no way to tell whether the embalming work performed on Jane Doe was done by a professional or an amateur, as O’Brien noted, perhaps missing persons cases should be considered in the investigation.

The same reason for ruling out a missing person was also apparently applied by police to hospitals from where the heart drugs found in the woman’s system likely came. How could a documented missing person be treated at a hospital without anyone catching on?

A missing person that is mentioned in the article as being a possible match is Tamara “Tammy” Porin.

Porin went missing from central Pennsylvania in 1986, and the photos of her on a national missing persons database bear a remarkable similarity to Jane Doe. Both have the same short, curly hair, circular tip of the nose, and round, soft jaws and chin.

Porin’s brother, Ernest Porin. Jr, agreed the renderings of Jane Doe look very much like his long lost sister.

“I can see a huge likeness of what Tammy would have looked like,” Ernest wrote in an email. “But I personally believe she was killed back in 1986.”

Still, Ernest and his sister told The Daily Beast they are more than willing to submit DNA to eliminate Tammy from the pool of possible matches for Jane Doe.

When I told O’Brien about Porin in mid-December, the police chief took down Ernest’s name and number—apparently interested in possibly putting an end to the mystery.

Weeks after leaving Pennsylvania I reached out to Ernest, who said law enforcement had not yet contacted him.

 

[dotr]

Any chance eyes might be stolen and transplanted for the purpose of identity fraud?
imo, speculation.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/f...ric-center-of-excellence/modalities/iris-scan

Iris recognition is the process of recognizing a person by analyzing the random pattern of the iris. The automated method of iris recognition is relatively young, existing in patent since only 1994. The iris is a muscle within the eye that regulates the size of the pupil, controlling the amount of light that enters the eye. It is the colored portion of the eye, and the coloring is based on the amount of melatonin pigment within the muscle. Although the coloration and structure of the iris are genetically linked, the pattern details are not. The iris develops during prenatal growth through a process of tight forming and folding of the tissue membrane. Prior to birth, degeneration occurs, resulting in the pupil opening and the iris forming random, unique patterns. Although genetically identical, an individual’s irides are unique and structurally distinct, which allows for them to be used for recognition purposes.

 

[LilacStar79]

As a funeral director, I'm going to say that I don't think her body was donated to science and these are my reasons:

1. The funeral home I worked for used to contract with the medical schools in my state and pick up remains of those individuals who wished to donate their bodies to science. We would go to the residence, hospital, hospice facility etc and pick up the remains and take them back to the funeral home to be embalmed PRIOR to bringing them to the medical schools. The bodies were not embalmed for viewing purposes but rather preservative purposes so students could work on a cadaver for the course of a semester or so without them decomposing. After the semester was over, we would go back to the medical schools to pick up the remains for cremation. By this point, the bodies were largely skeletonized and definitely not viewable.

2. I think eye/cornea donation is probably the reasons her eyes were removed. Many people who choose organ donation for their loved ones choose cornea donation and it can be done right in the hospital prior to a funeral home coming to pick up the remains. Through a few techniques I employ during the embalming process, a person can have a normal open casket viewing.

3. Given that her hair was styled and the body embalmed, I think the body was mutilated AFTER a viewing at a funeral home. Perhaps there was an employee who was a necrophile and defiled the corpse. Perhaps this woman was going to get cremated afterwards and the figured no one would find out they severed her head. Perhaps her head was severed in an accident. I conducted a funeral 2 years ago of someone whose head was cut off in an attempt to conceal their identity. If this woman was getting cremated, the person would have to then dispose of the head somehow. Perhaps they panicked and dumped it somewhere.

4. Body parts were stolen from individuals in the NY/NJ area as part of a big black market organ scheme. Using bodies that were selected for cremation was easier because the evidence was destroyed during the cremation process.

 

[dotr]

March 21 2016
http://cnews.canoe.com/CNEWS/World/2016/03/21/22615705.html
Michigan woman pleads guilty to trading diseased body parts

A Michigan woman pleaded guilty on Monday to a scheme in which she and her husband used their medical cadaver business to sell infected body parts to unwitting medical and dental students, prosecutors said.

snip>

The January indictment alleged that Arthur Rathburn would dismember the cadavers with chainsaws and other non-standard autopsy devices, and would stack human heads directly on top of each other.

In one instance, Rathburn was charged with shipping the head of a person who died from sepsis and pneumonia among seven other severed heads on a Delta Cargo flight. The heads were stuffed in trash bags inside coolers that also contained pools of human blood, according to the indictment.

 

[TooManyDogs]

This is my very first post here, and quite frankly, this case had completely slipped out of my mind. I grew up a street over from where the head was located. The local paper ran an update. Not much information, however, and certainly nothing new.http://www.timesonline.com/news/loc...cle_abe345fa-bd99-11e6-8f31-578ba85b3d6b.htmlVery sad case.

 

[dotr]

This is my very first post here, and quite frankly, this case had completely slipped out of my mind. I grew up a street over from where the head was located. The local paper ran an update. Not much information, however, and certainly nothing new.http://www.timesonline.com/news/loc...cle_abe345fa-bd99-11e6-8f31-578ba85b3d6b.htmlVery sad case.

Welcome to Ws TooManyDogs, thanks for the link!

The case is still on the mind of many people in the public, though the tips have stopped coming in.

“I get asked, regularly, still by citizens, ‘Whatever happened on the head case,’” Gall said.
“For myself, I’ve been doing this job for 41 years, and I’ve seen some strange things, but this is about the strangest case I’ve ever been involved in,” he said.
Anyone who recognizes the woman or who may have information related to the case is asked to call 724-876-0380 or email police@economyboropd.com.

 

[macrauchenia]

Any chance eyes might be stolen and transplanted for the purpose of identity fraud?
imo, speculation.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/f...ric-center-of-excellence/modalities/iris-scan

Wow, seems like that'd be a whole heck of a lot of trouble to go through just to get past retinal scanners. Especially considering that switching your eyes out surgically would almost certainly make you blind!

In "eye transplants," the whole eye is not transplanted, just the cornea. I seriously doubt they could take out a person's eye and hook up a new eye in a way that it works any time soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corneal_transplantation ***WARNING: PICTURES OF EYEBALL SURGERY***

EDIT: Also, even if someone DID steal this woman's eyeballs for identity-changing purposes, WHY would they then dump the head someplace where someone would find it?

I agree with most people on this thread in that the woman the head belonged to died of natural causes, her eyes were removed legitimately and donated (for corneal transplants) and THEN some rogue person (funeral home worker or whoever) cut off her head.

And I think that they disposed of her head the way they did to make a fuss, to upset people, to freak people out. They're the type of person who would have "dabbled" in "Satanism" as a teenager, to stir up that same variety of negative attention.

 

[TooManyDogs]

Just to give a clear picture, this road is not popularly used. The fact that someone was walking through the woods, along this road, really surprises me. I don't believe that whoever dumped the head thought that it would have been found. I lived in this area for the first 20 years of my life, and I think I may have gone on this road a handful of times and always as a cut-through to get to the highway. Further, when I lived in the area, the area was known as a sort of dumping ground - for old fridges, washers, junk. the most likely bet is that someone purposely drove down the road and chucked the head out of the window of the car. So disturbing, but quite likely.