http://www.readingeagle.com/news/ar...hope-to-attach-names-to-bodies-left-unclaimed
Monday April 14, 2014 12:01 AM
Berks County investigators hope to attach names to bodies left unclaimed
WRITTEN BY STEVEN HENSHAW
Reading Eagle: Ryan McFadden | Dr. Neil A Hoffman, a semiretired pathologist who still does autopsies for Reading Hospital and has performed many of them in the past on John Does in Berks talks with Ddeputy Coroner Terri Straka in the Reading Hospital morgue.
On a summer evening nearly 17 years ago, Robeson Township Police Chief Mark T. Phillips took a call at home from one of his patrolmen after two fishermen discovered a body floating in the Schuylkill River.
The body was found snagged in some branches June 24, 1997, along the south bank near River Road, opposite an area known by locals as Robeson Crossing.
Due to the condition of the body and its foul odor, it was evident it had been in the river for weeks, Phillips said. The torso was severely decomposed, and the head was just a skull.
A pathologist determined the body was likely that of a black man, 20 to 30 years old, 6 feet tall and more than 200 pounds. No evidence of a homicide or anything suspicious was found.
Efforts by Phillips and the Berks County coroner's office to identify the body through fingerprints were futile, and there were no reports of a missing man matching the description.
The man's bones were stored in the Reading Hospital morgue under the name "John Doe."
To this day, no one has ever called to ask if the body belonged to a missing relative, Phillips said. He figures the man was homeless - perhaps a drifter who came through the area and died along the river and his body floated away when the water rose.
Chief never forgot
Over the years the case fell off the radar of the coroner' office. In fact, the current administration could find no record of the 1997 John Doe when it undertook a review of its John/Jane Doe cases.
That effort started soon after Coroner Dennis J. Hess began his first term in office in 2006. The goal of the review, which continues, is to collect DNA, fingerprints, dental records, and other information useful to police and relatives of the missing, to upload into a national database of the unidentified dead.
But the Robeson case was rarely out of Phillips' sight. The brown accordion file folder hasn't moved from atop Phillips' desk since 1997.
Phillips, who has been chief of the township force for 30 years, said: "It bothers me that there's somebody out there who might have a loved one, that hasn't been in contact with that person for years. It really bothers me we haven't been able to put a name to this person."
The database, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), went online in 2009 and offers a quick way to check with coroners and medical examiners across the country if a missing person might be among the 40,000 sets of unidentified remains at any given time.
With no record on file of the John Doe in Robeson, deputies at the coroner's office didn't know where to look for the remains so a sample could be sent to a lab for DNA testing.
As it turned out, the remains were practically under - or more accurately, over - their noses all these years.
They stumbled upon the remains in the morgue while looking for the bones from another case: an unidentified skeleton found by a farmer plowing a soybean field in Windsor Township, near Lenhartsville, on June 3, 1992.
Those remains, believed to be that of a white female, 40 to 45 years old, have also never been identified. Although no cause of death has been determined, she most likely was the victim of a homicide, investigators have said.
"The reason we were looking for Jane Doe '92 was because Ashtabula Police Department in Ohio contacted state police, and state police contacted us," said Terri L. Straka, one of two deputy coroners assigned to review unidentified body cases.
"They wanted to do a DNA match," she said. "They thought it was a possibility (a missing woman from Ohio) was our Jane Doe from '92. So that's what started the search."
Recent DNA analysis ruled out a link to the Ohio case, but it took a lot of digging to even get to the point where a specimen from the woman could be sent to a lab in Texas.
Unlike the 1997 John Doe, there was a file of the 1992 Jane Doe at the coroner's office. But Straka could find no documentation of what happened to the bones.
"I pulled the record ... and read the file," Straka said. "I read it six times and I said, 'I'm not finding out where the body is. There's no indication of a disposition. We have Jane Doe who was found in the field, and we have no record of where she went.'"
Straka emailed former Coroner William Fatora, who was in office when both sets of remains were found five years apart, but he had no recollection of where the remains ended up. Deputy Coroner Joel Bonilla, who is assigned to work with Straka on the Doe cases, contacted cemeteries to see if the remains were stored in a vault, but no one had any clues.
A few weeks of searching for information led nowhere.
Other case leads to find
A conversation with the pathologist during an unrelated autopsy last year provided the break they needed.
Straka asked Dr. Neil A. Hoffman if he had any idea what happened to the woman. Hoffman had performed the autopsy on Jane Doe in 1992.
Hoffman thought about it for a moment, then mentioned there was an unmarked box in the upper drawer of one of the morgue coolers.
They decided to have a look and found the cardboard box containing a set of bones in brown paper bags labeled by black marker according to body part. There was no indication anywhere to whom those sets of remains belonged.
"We got kind of excited," Hoffman recalled. "I then went to my file of 10,000 or so slides and sure enough, under the number Terri (Straka) gave me I found the slides' from the woman's case.
At the time of the discovery, other items buried in that drawer caught Straka's attention: items marked "coroner" and "John Doe."
"Following that autopsy ... I already knew I'm going to come back later because there are things indicating 'coroner,' " Straka said. "So Joel (Bonilla) and I come back on a separate day to log and see what else we have and we end up finding remains for a John Doe in 1997 for which we have no record at all."
Hoffman said the coroner's office at the time probably asked for the bones to be stored at the morgue while the investigation continued. But years went by and the pathology department was never given further instructions on what to do with them.
"We certainly do store things here," said Hoffman, who is semiretired but still performs autopsies at Reading Hospital. "This is one of the things we do for the county and have done for many, many years."
Hess said it's unknown what happened to the record for the '97 John Doe.
Today, all unidentified remains in Pennsylvania are required to be tested for DNA so the information can be uploaded into NamUS. Since the database didn't exist until a few years ago, older cases have languished.
Hess said the shoddy paperwork and labeling of evidence is reflective of the overall mismanagement of the coroner's office during that era. Fatora, the former coroner, and two of his deputies went to prison for falsifying records to inflate the number of bodies they transported in their personal vehicles in a scheme to collect fees they did not earn. Bodies are no longer transported in personal vehicles.
Straka had to reconstruct the John Doe '97 file for the coroner's office and NamUS.
Luckily, she only had to visit the Robeson Police Department.
"I called Robeson Township and the secretary said Chief Phillips had this file on his desk," Straka said. "I was so impressed with that. I said we need to come down and see what you have because we have nothing."
She sent a sample for DNA testing to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification on March 17. Even if no match is found, she said, the unidentified man's DNA profile will be available to police anywhere, as well as anyone looking for a long-missing relative.
