The Bone Reader - Snap Classic

Story. In order to prove that a crime occurred, something to someone. Today on Snap, a mystery like no other recalled. The Bone Reader.

My name was from Washington. Debutize. Because you're listening. To Snapchat. We begin with an unusual journey to discover And of course, there is a small town police chief. Doggedly searching far and wide for answers and since it was Note. Reference material. It also involves a forensic artist who believes the biggest clue is right in front of their face. Step judgment. I had rarely been in a courtroom before, and I had to set up I sort of Save two or three spotlights.

for myself in a very crowded courtroom so I had to fight people off for that a little bit. This was Michelle Vitali's very first day in court. And I just needed a place to lay everything down because I had a complete set of grayscale markers, some pencils. Some erasers. And the task before her was huge. To capture in drawings the trial of Marjorie Deal Armstrong. That's a very famous case. It's the Pizza Bomber case. If you just Google Pizza Bomber, you'll be all over it.

Bomber case an American pizza delivery man who was murdered during a complex plot involving a bank robbery, scavenger hunt, and homemade explosive device near his home. Town of Erie. Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the mastermind of this plot. This was easily one of the biggest To ever take place in Erie. It was also a big day for Michelle. She'd never worked as a courtroom sketch artist before.

She's an art professor at Edinburgh University who got thrust into this role. I can draw very well. And it's kind of thrilling to draw from life because you know it'll never exist again. The courtroom that day was packed. Michelle sat attentive with the grayscale marker and a drawing pad in hand, ready to go.

And I was directly behind her. Her focus entirely on the defendant, Marjorie Deal Armstrong. You know, I had to draw everybody else too, but she really was the most interesting person to draw. And she gave Michelle so much material to work with. She had a particularly fascinating face, which is literally what I'm very interested in all the time. If a thought crossed her mind you saw that Expression that crosses her eyes. She had bone structure and meatiness about her that was just just fun.

Then on day two of the trial, Michelle noticed a shift in Marjorie Deal Armstrong. because she turned around, she looked at everyone who was there and there was lots of press and so forth. But she she looks at me and then she sees that there's space around me. She looked over everything She realized that I was there drawing her and she gave me a look again of death, like she wanted to kill me then and there.

I gotta chill. I got a chill from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. It was a little unnerving. Um you know, this was a woman who had body parts in a freezer, so I acted like nothing it I acted like she was a T V screen, frankly, because I I just didn't want her to have the satisfaction of getting to me either,'cause she was clearly trying to intimidate me.

Throughout day two and day three of the trial, Marjorie Deal Armstrong kept shooting Michelle dirty looks. And I I sort of embraced it because in in a in a strange way it kind of caused an interaction between us. A moment that she cast Captured in one of her court drawings of Marjorie Deal Armstrong. It was such a special, special moment. But when Michelle got home later that day, I remember my daughter telling me that she was afraid. What if she doesn't get convicted?

I'm not a terribly fearful person, but I was a little bit Should I rethink this whole thing? On day four, I was just glad it was over in four days. The trial was over. Marjorie Deal Armstrong would be found guilty and ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole. And I was like, good. Done. But Michelle walked away from that courtroom, realizing something about herself.

As an art professor with a unique set of skills I teach regular illustration, scientific illustration and human anatomy, who can paint and sculpt and also happens to be married to a retired cop. I had, I think, essentially prepared for a life as a forensic artist my whole life, and I came out of it with a whole new direction. After the trial, Michelle kept her day job, but she signed up for a class on advanced osteology.

Which is a detailed study of bones. She already knew a lot about human anatomy. My expertise is in human bone structure. She could read bones. What they tell you about a person, the effect muscles have on human facial expression, for example. But this class, help to apply that knowledge to forensic reconstruction. This is a process of recreating the face of an individual, be it in a drawing or a 3D sculpture, in order to identify them.

Michelle went on to publish a big research paper about her findings. Then she was invited to present that research at the Academy of Forensic Sciences. I was surprisingly well received. I I had a crowd around me. People were taking all my cards and literature, and I've been busy ever since. Michelle started giving talks to various police departments and coroners associations. She could sketch crime suspects. She could build a sculpture of a face, simply based on the dimensions of the skull.

She was a bona fide forensic artist. And then one day in the winter of twenty fourteen.

December the twelfth, twenty fourteen, it was a Friday, around twelve thirty, and actually a couple of us were sitting here eating lunch. Authorities in the small town of Economy, about two hours south from where Michelle lives in Pennsylvania, got a call. And one of the officers answered it and he says, Okay, this is a strange one. He says, They said that somebody found a head in the woods. I said, Oh, this can't be good.

Michael O'Brien is a police chief with the Economy Borough Police Department. We're not busy busy. Uh we're busy enough is what I always say, you know. So I'm driving out to the scene which is probably about a five minute drive or so. And you know, of course I've got all kinds of things going through my mind. Just a Halloween mask or it's a a prop or something like that, you know. It's in a wooded area. There's probably I think Ten houses altogether.

Officers were already standing on the side of the road, looking down over the hillside. And I walk up and I said, Uh I don't see it. And they said, no, it's right there, it's right there. We go down the hillside and uh yeah, sure enough, it was it was a real head. And what I was looking at was the back of her head. This gray, furry lump, and it reminded me of like a possum or something like that had been laying there. And what immediately struck Chief O'Brien was a condition of the hair.

Like her hair had just been done. There's very little vegetation leaves mixed within her hair and stuff like that. Which he found odd, because it had rained the past couple of days. Her face and skin were fairly clean. I mean there were some dirt marks on it, but it was fairly clean, you know. certainly didn't appear that it had been in the ground or anything like that for for any amount of time.

And so really all we had and all we're looking at is this severed head that's laying in the middle of this bare area 30 feet from the roadway. This was the first time in his thirty plus year career that Chief O'Brien was confronted with the stray body part. a severed head at that There was just a lot of I think questions running through my mind like what am I supposed to do? You know where it had come from or who it belonged to. We knew we had a crime scene, let's put it this way.

and coming up empty. Chief O'Brien and his team. I could use the word eerie probably to say the least. The pathologist sets her on a table and starts to take a look at things. He had lifted the eyelids and pulled out those eye caps. It's almost like a a contact lens, but it's just a lot thicker. It has these little barbs on it that hold the skin down. So they remove those, and that's where we discover that her eyes are both missing, and there's two red rubber balls placed inside her eyesolk.

And I say a red rubber ball, it's like a toy ball that you would get out of a gumball machine. And in fact when he picked it up he had dropped it and it just bounced across the room. We didn't know why these balls are placed there. Was this some type of a ritual? Was this some type of a practical joke? So that was very, very strange. Also strange was the fact that the head was a little bit of a little bit of a little as if the body had been prepared for a funeral.

I think we were all kind of shocked and dumbfounded. So yes, the whole thing became quite bizarre. Chief O'Brien walked out of the morgue with more questions and answers, and that disturbed him. This isn't just a head. This is a woman. This is somebody's mother, somebody's daughter, somebody's a mother. It was more than just In fact, Economy hadn't reported any violent crime. wish to know who this is because she deserves to have her body together.

How are we going to do this? We can't take a photograph and put this out to the public. And the first thought was we need a forensic artist. I get an email from the corner of Erie and it really is just one line and it says, I think they're looking for you. I called Mike O'Brien, as requested, It's her. It's Michelle Vitelli. And she says, I hear you're looking for a forensic artist.

it was probably Monday or Tuesday, two, three days after the discovery here. I asked immediately whether this was the case from the news and he said yes, this is the severed head case. So I asked where they were with the case, what you know, w what did they think so far? At that point in the investigation, Chief O'Brien and his team were considering a couple of theories.

Could this be some crazy serial killer? They were saying serial killer. Can this be some weirdo that's in their basement chopping up bodies? Could this be somebody that's murdered somebody and involved them in their basement? They were saying grave robber. They were checking for disturbed graves.

Well in fact what we did immediately was we put out over our police networks emails to departments that have a a cemetery in their jurisdiction. Please go through there and check to make sure that none of the graves are disturbed. They were

checking anything that they could for missing people that fit her description. One of the thoughts in my mind was that this is a body that's been dismembered and possibly spread throughout the area. Chief O'Brien told Michelle how the day after discovering the head They returned to the scene of the crime to scour the woods. This time they brought in reinforcements, cadaver dogs to hunt for more body parts.

And what was really crazy was the one dog got the scent from the head. As soon as she sent the dog into the woods, it immediately went down this path. went directly to the spot where she had laid and sat down. That dog went directly to the spot that that head was found in. But the dog would not move from that spot. He stayed put and went nowhere else.

There were no other parts that were found to this woman. It was just a severed human head. That's about where we were at at that point. We were absolutely nowhere. And I said that's weird. And that's when Chief O'Brien asked Michelle. How soon could she draw a sketch of the woman's face?

one that they could present to the public. And I said, as soon as I have access to the head, I can have it to you within twenty four hours. And I'm thinking wow that's pretty quick. Okay, that's that's this is great. Chief O'Brien even offered And I said, And he said, Well I'll bring her up to your house. I said, No, no, no. Let me mention that there's a wet lab up in Erie that we Utilise She's a físical anthropologist.

I knew I was gonna have to take a lot of different photographs and there was no way to do The two women made the 30 minute drive north from Edinburgh to the lab at Mercyhurst University in Erie. I I was really curious to see the head because I have some experience with um human dissection and I just wasn't sure what on earth this could be. So th this is intriguing for sure.

When she walked through the doors of the wet lab. It was a tiny wet lab, basically stainless steel surfaces, one gurney, one sort of sink. In that sink, Michelle saw a stainless steel bucket, with a black plastic bag inside. And that plastic bag is what contains the head. Quietly, Michelle and her colleague got ready. We had brought a lot of our own materials. We had some calipers to take some measurements and obviously my camera and so forth. They suited up. We had our lab coats on, we had

We had our our gloves on. Michelle dabbed some VIX vapor rub under her nose. I wore a mask mainly just because I didn't know what smell was going to be happening. And then she reached for the black bag. which I opened up and inside that there was yet another bag, and in that one was the head. I gently lifted her out of the bag. Michelle carried the head to a gurney in the center of the room. I was really focused on the matter at hand, which is what can I do with this information?

Again, as a forensic artist, Michelle's job wasn't to simply draw a portrait. What are the most salient parts that she's presenting here that need to be in the drawing? But to recreate the woman's face in a way that highlights her most prominent features. that are very ID worthy. Not things like hair color or eye colour. Those features aren't reliable, they can change.

But more the shape of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, her nose, and where they all live on the face in relation to one another. Think of them almost as data points that taken together would make the face recognizable to anyone who personally knew her. So in other words, you can do a beautiful image that's really inaccurate and you can do a pretty weak image sometimes. that can be remarkably accurate. So I was trying to be as observant as I could, knowing I had to draw her.

as I'm holding her and I'm looking her face to face. Michelle had to sort of unmesh the skin in order to soften it. It was so rigid from the embalming. And for the most part, indeed, she was very recognizable. She was an older woman. But when Michelle fluffed up the hair, she noticed something that started telling her a different story than the one the police were running with.

Everyone was saying she had a hairdo, her hair had been styled, and that that indicated to people that she had had a wake. And I remember thinking, I don't think she had a wake for two reasons. Number one, her hair had not been styled, she just had a perm. It was a pretty standard older woman perm. And number two, the woman had no traces of makeup on her face.

No makeup, no lipstick, um not the hint of anything, and I swabbed for it. There was nothing on her. With the trained eye, Michelle continued working her way down the woman's face. I was already aware that the eyes had been removed. But only now could she fully appreciate what a challenge that presented. as human beings we're hardwired to recognize each other's eyes f very much first and and most powerfully. So

How exactly would her eye lids have formed around what, you know, were essentially a missing structure? Then I'm slowly turning her over in my hands. You know, she had two very subtle moles on one cheek. And then she settled her eyes on the woman's mouth. So we I don't really know what her lips looked like. They were disfigured because of the way the head had been laying on the ground.

If you could imagine, for example, uh falling asleep with your face sort of mushed into the pillow and then it freezing like that, right? That's what she looked like. So I turn her around further now shifted her attention away from the woman's face. I really needed to very carefully examine what happened underneath, you know, at the neck. When I'm holding the head in my hands and I'm literally looking at the underside and I'm and I'm manipulating some of the structures in the neck.

And that's when Michelle saw something else. Struck her as odd. Something that only a trained professional like her could see. So I'm looking at what's called the apron. which is the the bit of skin close to and around the collarbones where sh it would have been cut, there was no vertebrae present.

Every single vertebra of her back had been removed, so if I were just chopping off somebody's head like a crazed killer, there would be at least a couple of vertebrae up in there with the rest of the cranium. Not only was that not the case, but I could see the very tip top of her odontoid process. L let me explain.

The top vertebra is called the atlas and the second one is called the axis. And I liken it to a little bit like a hitch on your car, the people who pull boats on their car. It's like a ball that goes straight up and it goes into your top vertebra and then uh sort of engages with the head. Head. Whoever had cut this person's head off had cut directly through that. In other words, that is the absolute topmost point.

That you can cut a head off without damaging the head. This is something anybody who teaches gross anatomy can do. This is something I know how to do. A couple wheels started turning in my head, but I couldn't I I can honestly say I don't even think I formed the full thought at that point yet. But that was the beginning of me possibly thinking this is not in the direction that they're going and it's a different direction. On the return, how did a woman's head interact?

And where is the rest of her body? And Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode continues.

Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode. Sensitive listeners should note that this show does contain reference to graphic material. When last we left, forensic artist Michelle Vitali had just discovered a big clue about what might have happened. Snap judgment. She had not been decapitated, sort of serial killer hacker style, right? It really wasn't Michelle's job to figure out what happened to this woman.

neutral as possible. With the help of her colleague, Michelle began snapping picture after picture to capture the head from every possible angle. Respectfully I covered her face with a cloth and then I wrapped uh the first bag and then the second bag and then we washed up, cleaned all and disinfected all of our instruments, and then it was time to let them know that we were finished with our work and

But Michelle's thoughts stayed back. The woman's bones had spoken to her, loud and clear. So much so that during the drive home, Michelle felt she knew what had actually happened to her. L listen, as a as a person who's an artist in a in a law enforcement world, um, I don't want to say I know my place, but I kinda do. I know that there's a certain amount of slog that police just have to go through. So I could tell them whatever I want, but they still have to go through you know.

So I just figured no one's gonna listen to me. Let's just see. I mean a million things could have gone wrong here. When Michelle got home, the I basically cleared the decks and um I spent nothing but the next twenty four hours either drawing. But I also have to build in some what I tend to call cogitation time. Or resting. You know, I really need to just When it came time to draw the woman's missing eyes and disfigured mouth, the two most important features on a person's face

And I had to sort of uh anuter them a little bit and make them as neutral as possible. And then when I felt that it was ready, I sent the JPEG to Mike. I was, you know, really impressed with the drawing that she produced and especially in the amount of time she did it. So we were really excited about that. We scheduled a press conference with all of our local media. Chief O'Brien told the press almost everything he knew about the case.

which was still very little. Severed head, embalmed eyes are missing. But he was able to add that the head belonged to a Caucasian woman, and that they estimated her age to be anywhere between fifty and eighty years old. Мишель'з драйва. Овісні до скечварбіст після. Мишел had started sketching just the day before was now all over the news. We dedicated a phone number, you know, in hopes to generate leads. And over the next couple of days, leads started coming in.

People called and offered up names and photographs of someone they knew who had passed away and looked like the woman in Michelle's drawing. I think that just about every name that has been given us had some sort of resemblance to not only the picture. But there was something on that person's face that I would look at and say, well, it does look like the head. But just as quickly as those leads came in, they died out.

Yeah, this isn't panning out. She turned out to be alive. This woman with Alzheimer isn't actually gone. And then they would find out the person couldn't have possibly been this or they had the wrong d the dentals didn't match up. By now, Michelle felt she had to say something about what she'd discovered back at the wet lab. She was convinced she knew why the police weren't finding any answers, why these initial leads were going nowhere. So within days, Michelle decided to do something.

Hold the keeper. She called Chief O'Brien, asked him if he had a minute. Then she went on to describe how the woman's head had been surgically severed from the water. While I'm talking to her on the phone, she's on a computer Googling or whatever on eBay. And why she believed that this

And that that was a really interesting idea. So I sort of stepped back at that point and just let them do their thing. The head, now living in a refrigerator in the evidence room of the Economy Borough Police Department, would get regular visitors who would take this sample to run that test. You know, we tried DNA testing with the teeth, we've tried DNA testing with with a bone. Um, we did this isotope testing.

So there was an awful lot of that going on in order to identify her. And we actually went as far as subpoenaed cremation records from several funeral homes. And we ran down every single one of those names, women that had passed in these certain years to check to see if there was a likeness on that photograph compared to that of the drawing.

I was definitely frustrated and y you know, I was in a difficult position because I I thought all those theories were wrong. It became even more difficult when Chief O'Brien started to consult with Michelle. She became a very huge integral part of the case. A couple of weeks into the investigation, he got a tip. where a woman's head was removed from her body while it was in the casket. They brought me one picture of a of a woman who died in the nineteen eighties.

Chief O'Brien asked Michelle her opinion on whether there was in fact a real resemblance between the person in question and the severed head. So I'm looking at her going, No, her eyes are half an inch higher than this woman's eyes. There's no way. The bones The bones speak to you and the bones are telling me they're not the same person. So there's only so much you can stretch it. So that was ruled out so we were able to, you know, move away from that.

And now, just a month into their investigation, they were running out of leads. So I had this big fear that people were gonna forget, walk away. And every so often I sit back and I say, you know, mean what can I put out there? What can I go back to the media with?

So Chief O'Brien reached out to Michelle again. Chief O'Brien had asked me for a 3D reconstruction, which is a sculpture. He was asking for a full-scale clay replica of the woman's Maybe a three-dimensional image of what she may have looked like alive. would jog the public's memory and ultimately lead to a positive ID of their woman.

Oh geez, how am I gonna do this? I don't have a skull. I actually have a human head this time. She was used to using the metrics of an actual skull to then build a face from. A skull influences what our face looks like on the surface. So much more than people realize. I had a skull technically, I mean, but it was inside of her head and I wasn't working for A skull with depth markers attached to it. Sure, Michelle had studied the severed head up close, and she'd taken several photographs of it.

But the woman's main features were also the most compromised. Again, the eyes were missing, the nose was pushed up, the mouth was disfigured. Not to mention, the head was so heavily embalmed. That the texture of the skin was off. It had puffed up, hardened, and essentially frozen everything into place. I just wanted to work on her fairly nonstop. Michelle had a work studio that she would normally use, but for this special project, she decided to work on it from home.

I just wanted her to be around. I wanted her to be in my peripheral vision, even when I wasn't working on her. So she cleared the coffee table in her living room and laid out her sculpting and dental tools. And instead of building the face from the inside out, she'd have to work backwards.

At first I got a um a head armature. It's a wooden armature with some wire at the top. I just filled that with tinfoil. And then she grabbed six pounds of plastilina oil clay. And I just started adding it and adding it and adding it and turning it into a conceptual model. But then I started shaving it down and turning it into her conceptual model. And that had to be spot on accurate, or else nothing else would matter.

Michelle started carving out the foundational elements that would make this woman's face recognizable. I knew exactly where her eyes were. She knew the distance between her eyes. I know what the shape of her bridge and her nasal bones was like. She knew where the nose was. I knew where her mouth and teeth were. I knew uh where her ears were, I knew where her hairline was.

I knew the very specific dimensions of, for example, the width of her cheekbones, her zygomatic arches. I knew her frontal eminences. I knew where all that stuff was. I built all of that. And after the hard part was done, Michelle began sculpting and carving out the more superficial details of the woman's face. Just hoped that That every little minute decision that I made that was based on, you know, a few decades of anatomical knowledge yielded something close to the truth.

And as a woman's head began to take shape on the coffee table in the middle of Michelle's living room, she really became part of our family. It was kind of weird. Her two kids, who were teenagers at the time, would walk past the head. You could see her from the dinner table and this my kids would sometimes ask me questions about something that had occurred to them about the case. But they knew the story.

But they were not really privy to the pictures. My goal as a mother is really just to protect them from the worst of it, but not to pretend that these terrible sides of life don't exist. So she kind of was a springboard for different kinds of conversations along those lines. Conversations that got Michelle thinking deeply about what this woman's face could tell her as she continued to mold and bring her features into focus.

I didn't have bones to read, but I had fa I had facial tissue to read. She had a bit of a recessed chin. When she began forming her mouth, I sense that she might have been a smoker just because of the the spokes of the wheel around the mouth. Maybe that just means she pursed her lips a lot, but it also could have meant that she dragged off a cigarette a lot, too.

When she finished working on the woman's eyebrows, another mannerism popped out at her. Well, she had two very sparse eyebrows, and I want to say it was her right eyebrow, perhaps. I think that was the right one. Uh she had one or two very pronounced um arching lines up in her forehead that were completely indicative of her raising that eyebrow an awful lot. So for whatever reason, she raised one eyebrow a lot. And then Michelle finally started working out the woman's eyes.

Do I know her eye color? Absolutely not. Do I know if I was a hundred percent right? No, and in fact I'm probably close to I'm I I would say it's at best I'm like eighty percent right about her eyes. I just felt like I was looking into her eyes for the first time, which is sounds like bizarre, but it was a moment for me. Satisfied with the feeling that I'd gotten reasonably fine. close and given her something back that was out there in the world somewhere.

Now after manipulating her face for two weeks, Michelle took a step back and took it all in. I mean I couldn't help it. to piece together what this woman's life would have been like. locked eyebrow. Spokes around her mouth, her eyes. I started to picture her as uh you know kind of sassy side. I also started to think about some of the sadder aspects that This wasn't necessarily her choice. Michelle still held on to her theory about how the woman's head and hand. of a two lane road.

How the few choices she might have had in life. it possible for someone else to decide what happened to her in death. A couple of days later, Michelle tucked the sculpted head in her trunk. So I ha kinda had it surrounded by boxes that were heavy as heavy as it. So I couldn't really topple in any way. And she drove two hours south to Chief O'Brien's office in Economy, Pennsylvania.

I was very um impatient probably, like, okay, when's she gonna be done? When's she gonna be done? I wanna get this done. So Chief O'Brien was thrilled when Michelle walked into his office with the finished sculpture in arm.

I was kind of in awe that the model looked identical to her drawing. I knew that I wanted to get it on television. You know, I was really, really excited about that. He went public with hopefully prompting somebody somewhere out there to recognize a woman and come forward. One day a call came in. Concerning a woman who was missing from Ohio. Was missing on mysterious circumstances. She lived across the street from a river. She walked out of her room.

Yeah. If you take the glasses away, she looks just like her. I did a younger version, I did a different hairdo, I did a different mouth shape, I believe. Her mouth was such an unknown. So Michelle produces this drawing with these glasses on, changes the hairstyle a little bit, and it looks just like Boy oh boy, this woman's photo looked a lot like the drawing with a different hairdo. You know, moles on her face, just the the her face, her nose, the position and and the size of some of her teeth.

We're actually looking at her teeth now and we're measuring and and drawing lines and all these different things going, Wow, these teeth even look like her. It took a couple of months to determine whether there was a match between the missing Ohio woman and the severed head. And I can tell you that I can remember emailing those dental records to our odontologist thinking, this is gonna be her. It's gonna be her. It's gonna be her.

When we return, is the Ohio woman who went missing from her home a The Bone Reader Episode. My name is Glenn Washington, and sensitive listeners should note. Does contain mention of great Chief O'Brien had just been a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little Exciting tip, a photograph of a missing Ohio woman looks just like Michelle's drawing. Snap judgment. But apparently the dentals don't line up enough, so it can't be her. And this definitely isn't her.

I I was just like it was like all the wind went out of me. It was like oh man From an investigative standpoint, we know that we could move on now. But the downside to that is here's this woman who's still missing from the place she belongs. We probably looked at about sixty different leads. As they neared the one-year anniversary of discovering the head, we know exactly what you know right now, which was the fact that we had.

A severed head found in the woods that Embalmed, whose eyes are now missing, who's been replaced with red rubber balls, and we have no idea who this person is. I think it's time we bring everybody together. to me it was a big deal O'Brien called up every person that had been involved in the attention. You know, I want a conference to sit down and say, all right, here's what we've done. Chief O'Brien and a couple of his officers.

CA, the coroner, the county detective, they all met up at the Economy Borough Police Department in the large conference room. And he very kindly invited me as well. Then I just sort of sat quietly. So let's brainstorm, you know, let's throw some ideas out here. What can we do? What what can't we do? And then maybe an hour into the meeting

They said, Okay, so where are we? We're nowhere. We have absolutely nothing. Should we look at something else, you know, and and And that's when Chief O'Brien said, you know, a year ago Michelle told me that she had this idea. And he said, Why don't you tell them? And then they all looked at me and and I remember giving Chief O'Brien sort of a quick look like, Are can I really speak?

You know, I'm going, okay, I can't rule out anything here, you know? And he gave me a look, like, now's your chance. And I said, none of this says grave robber, crazed killer, serial killer, any of that stuff to me. It all says the body train. Michelle explained how every year thousands of people across the country donate their bodies to

And I said, as soon as I saw this head, I knew exactly what I was looking at, which is professional anatomical cuts for very particular reasons. And they said, well, what reasons are those? She explained how these bodies are carefully divided into their respective parts. Usually they're used for scientific research.

But there's also a gray market. And I talked about how the different parts of the body have different price amounts. If you are going to sell a head to a research institute and then you want to sell the spine to another entity, You've got to maintain the integrity of both. She explained, for instance, how the severed head had been. From the rest of the body. The cuts had been precise and clean. Every single vertebra had been expert. Cut to keep the head and the spine intact.

And thus you have a cut right through the again the odontoid process, right at the very base of the skull, so that you maintain both areas in the most sellable form. And they said, Sellable and I said, Yeah, sellable. We're not allowed to sell human parts, except guess what? It happens every single day. Listen, you can buy a a human head for eight hundred bucks.

And then they asked me more about the trade and how I knew about the trade. Well, it's because I'm an anatomy professor and I gave them references. She told them about that one time a company reached out to her via email. asking her if she was interested in purchasing body parts for her anatomy class. I really honestly think that based on what I've seen That this woman's head was

came from this trade, you know? Part of her is in California, part of her is here, part of her is there. You know, she probably has nerve tissue here and this there. You know. This is the way the trade works. It splits you up into, you know, you're essentially strip mine for all your parts, and then you they they go everywhere. Finally, Michelle explained that this is the reason why they hadn't been able to do that.

She might never be found because no one's looking for her. If she's part of the body trade, no one's even looking for her, right? She's not a missing person in any way. And a lot of people were floored by this. And I said, Well, please don't be number one and number two, it's happening all the time, and it's especially happening to the poorest among us. Michelle's Gas. Woman or her family probably didn't have the means to be able to

funeral service. So they opted to donate her body. In order to get a free funeral or a very much reduced in price funeral. This was an alternative way to give her a send off, I suppose. that didn't incur a lot of debt in the family. Of course, I mean

Donate their body to sciences for all the right reasons, not just because they're too poor for a funeral. So it was one of those two things. And I always at this point want to have a very strong disclaimer that donating your body to science is distinctly different. different than donating your organs. Organ donation is a totally different thing and it's highly regulated. So for me, the case wasn't closed, but it was definitely sort of decided or narrowed to a degree.

that they could limit what they were doing. And it became the new theory that day. Let's go for it. You know nothing else has worked. Let's go for it. An investigative team from Reuters would have been a very good thing. finally step in to help. to see how easy it is to purchase a body part, and to see whether the anatomical cuts of the severed head. Few emails later, they were able to secure two heads. six hundred dollars. Plus three hundred dollars in shipping. The parts arrived vastly.

and covered in dry ice. At the neck. Very similar to the case. smoker's mouth. While this may confirm that she come from the body trade, there's still no way of knowing. As to Michelle's point, no one has stepped up to say they know her.

By the time December rolled around again, the police investigation was as cold as ever, and the severed head had been sitting in a refrigerator in the evidence room of the examination. We felt that she deserved better than that. We decided that we wanted to have her buried. This isn't something that police departments do for the unidentified. Usually the county morgue will dispose of an unclaimed body, but in this case, Chief O'Brien decided to plan a funeral.

Over the next two weeks, the coroner's office helped him secure a donated cemetery plot, a donated placard, a pastor. I didn't expect to be invited, let alone It was beautiful weather, I remember that. I don't know what I was wearing, right? It's like the least important thing that day. I showed up at this point. Beautiful chapel inside a cemetery that was a little bit more than a little Everybody who was arrested. It was it was actually a fairly well. more populated funerals than this woman's.

I was really overjoyed at the time. I walk in and I will say Position themselves around the casket. They squatted down to grab a hold of it, and when they lifted it up even though I should have expected this. I was very surprised at how light it was. There's nothing there, you know, there there is very little weight. It took almost no effort. I could see where that could, you know, say, Hey, we're missing something, you know. And then we carried her very light casket and

into the hearse, which then travelled just a little way down the hill. It was extremely somber and I there most of us felt exactly the same way. This was our life for a year. So it was almost as if it was a a loved one of our own, you know what I mean? We watched her. Get laid into the ground and then we all were handed flowers which we all dropped into her grave. Before heading out to the funeral, Michelle had gone out to her garden.

And I cut a bunch of rosemary sprigs because they're for remembrance of course. So I tied them with a ribbon, I made a beautiful little like a nosegay of rosemary, and I left both of them on her grave. There's a part of me that was hesitant about walking away from her at this point. I don't want this to be the final thing. I didn't want closure because this isn't the right way to close this case. The placard that now sits on her grave says Jane Doe, found on December twelfth, twenty fourteen.

It does really get under your skin and I lived with that story for so long. daily connection to thinking about a that I and many others wanted to solve. A very very big thank you to Michelle Vitali and Chief Michael Bryan for sharing this story with Snap. More recently, Michelle worked on the Frontier Park Skeleton case.

A human skull turned up in Erie, and as soon as Michelle saw it, she drew a number of forensic sketches showing a white male with strong features. When the man's identity was ultimately discovered, He looked a lot like one of Michelle's drawings. Meanwhile, back in economy, Chief O'Brien still waits for a new lead to pop up. So and let me try to get out of the way a little bit Behind his desk sits a clay sculpture of Jane Doe. Looking at him.

He placed it inside a fish tank that he bought at a local store. I get people that come in my office and they say that's a little creepy, but I look at it as this is my She's giving me the feeling she's watching over what I'm doing. Maybe toss me in the right direction, I don't know. The original score for this story was by Renzo Gorio. It was produced by By Nancy Lopez. It happened. It happened.

Consider that was just one episode, just one magic bean, and understand there's a whole tree full the snap judgment. to you with a team that has a place for everything. Except for the Uber producer. On Team Stamp. Communications workers America and the first time. Till the cot flow wiring. him both This is not the new