Elite NYC forensic team using science to solve decades-old mysteries and get justice for the dead
Dead men do tell tales.
When skeletal remains washed up near the Brooklyn Bridge in August — a skull; arm bones; partial ribs and vertebrae; pelvic, leg and foot bones — the Medical Examiner’s Office called in its Forensic Anthropology Unit to investigate.
The elite team, which handles about 150 cases per year, collected and cataloged the bones found on the rocky shoreline on three different days, before beginning the task of determining the person’s age, sex and ethnicity.
“This one was a tricky scene,” said Dr. Angela Soler, an anthropologist on the ME’s team. “It’s a very rocky area with lots of crevices.”
The shape and size of the bones — particularly pelvic bones, which are smaller in men than in women — told the unit’s four specialists the victim was male.
The experts found no indications of foul play.
They believe bone fragments found nearby at Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Thursday are from the same man.
Now, they’re relying on his bones and clothes — a pair of Calvin Klein jogging pants, Five Star work boots and a red anklet — to find out who the John Doe was and figure out his cause of death.
The unit, which does most of its work out of a nondescript 1960s government building on First Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, represents the final chance for many families to solve the excruciating mystery of what happened to their loved ones, some of whom have been missing for decades.
The forensic investigators have been quietly working their way through 1,250 cold cases, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s.
“We didn’t have the same technology back then,” Soler said. “We didn’t even have the Internet.”
One of the cold cases the team recently helped solve was that of a 16-year-old known as “Midtown Jane Doe,” whose remains were found in 2003.
The girl had been bound with electrical wire and buried under the concrete basement floor of a building that once housed the club The Scene, where Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground appeared.
A ring with the initials “PMcG” was also found.
“You had a teenage girl wrapped in a carpet and buried under concrete in Hell’s Kitchen,” said Dr. Bradley Adams, the unit’s head. “That was one we would periodically pull back out.
“Different types of testing would come up, and we would try that.”
The team extracts DNA from bones to aid in identification but the method only works if the person’s DNA is already on file in CODIS, a national database that stores and compares DNA profiles from crime scenes and convicted offenders.
Jane Doe was potentially identified as Patricia McGlone in April by experts using genetic genealogy.
Genetic genealogy uses a different, longer genetic profile called whole genome sequencing, Soler explained.
That profile can then be uploaded to public databases like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, where family members might have DNA on file. The researchers don’t use commercial sites like 23andMe.
“Basically, because it’s a longer profile you’re able to find potential relatives at a further distance,” Soler said. “We can go to a first cousin, second cousin, third cousin, aunts and uncles.”
“But the genealogy leads are leads,” her coworker Adams said. “They’re not confirmatory.”
His team looked for close relatives who could provide a DNA sample, but all of McGlone’s were dead.
They had been planning to disinter her parents to get the sample they needed, when the genealogist found that Jane Doe’s second maternal cousin was a victim of the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center.
The 9/11 victim’s mother had supplied a DNA sample to the medical examiner’s office, which was then able to determine that McGlone — who lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, before she vanished in the late 1960s — was a match.
“We went crazy,” said Adams, who had worked the case throughout his more than two decades with the office. “It was like, ‘Now I can retire.’ This was one of those bucket-list cases.”
The unit is also looking into the mystery of a woman whose remains were found wrapped in plastic and buried in concrete under a Tribeca nightclub in 2008.
The skeleton was found with heart-shaped earrings wrapped in a bubble gum wrapper, and a make-up bag containing lipstick, mascara, a key and a lighter, according to the case file at Namus.gov, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a free online database.
She also had several coins on her dated 1983 and 1984, which made investigators believe she disappeared around that time.
The office is now running the case through genetic genealogy.
But some cases still remain elusive because of a lack of evidence.
The discovery of a partial skull found in a Bronx parking lot in 2004, soon after Adams started with the office, has so far stumped the team.
“It looks like part of a female, but there’s cut marks on the cranium almost like scalping marks,” Adams said.
In April, the office identified a young woman whose remains were found floating in the East River on May 5, 2000, as Alexa Skolnitsky.
“We had absolutely no leads about her whatsoever,” Soler said. “She was wearing a ska-punk band’s T-shirt called Perfect Thyroid.”
The team got a boost from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to fund the genetic genealogy test, which can cost about $5K each.
A match was made, and Soler notified family members who had been looking for answers about Alexa’s whereabouts since 1999.
“You want to find your loved one alive, so it’s kind of complicated, because in one way, you’re happy that you’re able to provide an answer, but in another way, it’s a really unfortunate answer,” Soler said.
“It’s horrible news to find out that the person you’ve been searching for for decades is deceased,” she said. “But there’s also that gratitude of now you know.”
