Australia 'Bone lady' who helped find Daniel Morcombe still unearthing stories of the dead

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MSN

ABC News Australia

It was a grisly find, even for the most seasoned detectives.

Passers-by called it in. Firefighters arrived soon after.

From a distance, it was hard to make out what was burning on the verge of a rural road near Gympie, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

As they got closer, it became horrifyingly clear: a human torso was on fire.

Bodies of evidence​

A qualified forensic anthropologist, Senior Sergeant Donna MacGregor was lecturing at university and working part-time with the Queensland Police Service (QPS) in 2013 when she was asked to help identify the roadside remains.Known as the "bone lady", she has been investigating ways the dead can tell their tales for almost three decades, helping solve some of the state's most high-profile crimes.

Senior Sergeant MacGregor moved from academia to the QPS about 25 years ago. An army reservist, she also travels to battlefields to identify the remains of Diggers for the Australian Defence Force.

She is QPS's only forensic anthropologist and the officer in charge of the major crime forensic unit, which takes its expertise to the most serious crime scenes.

Like the grimly puzzling case of the burning torso.

With the head and hands missing, there were no fingerprints to match on a database and no dental records to search.

"In this day and age, everyone thinks DNA will solve everything — and it does in a lot of cases," Senior Sergeant MacGregor said.

"In this case, the body did not have a DNA profile on record … [and] because of what had happened to the body, there weren't a lot of those traditional areas you would use for identification."

Teeth and hair would have made it easier to determine that the torso belonged to 66-year-old George Gerbic, from the
Sunshine Coast.

These days, Senior Sergeant MacGregor spends less time at crime scenes and more time in the lab mentoring other officers and providing expert advice.

In her spare time, she is part of the Australian Defence Force's unrecovered war casualties team, which accounts for missing soldiers from past conflicts.

"Every set of human remains, every skeleton I look at is unique and every job teaches you something … it's an interesting process to go through to essentially read the skeleton," she said.

Sunshine Coast.