By Felix Carroll,
Cape Cod Times
PROVINCETOWN -- An ominous, thick fog shrouded St. Peter's Cemetery around 6:30 a.m. Thursday, as fog would be expected to do when a casket holding the remains of a murder victim is being unearthed.
Gravedigger Maurice "Moe" Gonsalves, with gloved hands, had his shovel in the earth. Working alone, he piled dirt onto the bed of a truck. He then covered the hole with a wooden plank and waited for the unmarked sedans to arrive.
He said people sometimes lay flowers at the small, Bible-size headstone that reads only, "Unidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunes July 26, 1974." That gravestone lay to the side yesterday like a discarded mystery.
"I haven't seen flowers here for a while, though," Gonsalves said.
Nonetheless, the bones that lay beneath his feet -- zipped in a plastic body bag and set inside a cheap, steel casket -- are far from forgotten.
What has been known for 26 years simply -- and cryptically -- as the "Body in the Dunes" was exhumed for the purpose of taking genetic samples.
Law enforcement sources say they are trying to match the victim's DNA to a saliva sample given to investigators by a woman in Colorado who may be the mother.
The identity of the dead woman has confounded state and local police since the body was discovered by a 13-year-old girl walking her dog in the dunes about a mile east of the Race Point ranger station in the summer of 1974. The naked woman's hands had been severed and were not found at the scene. Her head was barely attached.
The unsolved murder, along with the mystery identity of the woman, is the oldest case in the state police Cold Case Unit.
Copies of the woman's dental records have been sent all over the country. Police once followed a lead into Canada and came up empty.
Investigators have suspected since the late 1980s that the unidentified woman was Rory Gene Kesinger, who ran away from home at 15, robbed banks, used five aliases, took hard drugs and escaped from prison in Plymouth. But until now, they have been unable to verify that.
One police source said the woman in Colorado is the mother of Rory Gene Kesinger, who has been missing since 1974, when she was 25 years old.
The body, between 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-8, matched Kesinger's height. The decomposed corpse was determined to be dead in the dunes anywhere from five days to three weeks. Forensic tests put her age between 25 and 35.
Although there is no direct evidence linking the dead woman to convicted killer Hadden Clark, investigators say he may have been on the Cape at the time she was killed.
Clark, 47, is serving time for killing a 6-year-old girl and a 23-year-old Maryland woman in 1992.
He told investigators that he killed at least 11 other women and buried some of them on the Cape -- in the National Seashore and near his grandparents' former home in Wellfleet. Investigators are expected to resume the search for these bodies sometime next month.
Clark and his brother Bradfield, now serving time in California for the dismemberment murder of a co-worker, both lived on the Cape as children.
Hadden Clark also lived and worked on the Lower Cape before joining the Navy. He was discharged in 1985.
Nine unmarked state and local police cars pulled into St. Peter's Cemetery around 10 a.m. yesterday.
Investigators held a tarp around the grave to block it from view as they lifted the remains from the casket and placed into a hearse owned by McHoul Funeral Home in Provincetown. The body was taken first to the funeral home on Harry Kemp Way, and later to the medical examiner's office in Pocasset.
David McHoul, director of the funeral home, said the body was not embalmed when it was first buried in the donated casket. He said the casket was made of light steel and suspected it might have taken in water over the years.
He said the body was dug up 20 years ago for blood samples. That was before DNA sampling became a key tool for crime investigators.
"Obviously," State Police Sgt. James Plath said at the cemetery, "respecting the privacy and
the sacredness of the deceased, this is not something we would do unless we thought it was necessary to do."
He said it could be months before investigators have any definitive answers regarding the identity of the dead woman. Though the case has remained open all these years, he said, investigators have been working "a little more intensely" in the past several months.
When asked whether Clark is being considered a suspect, he said, "We're not going to go into anything about the investigation at all."
