Case to be reopened after two decades

Technological advances may help to solve the case.

SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. (AP) — Seventh-grader David Wellington Reed left home on his bicycle one summer day in 1985 and never came back. Four months later, his badly decomposed remains were found in a wooded area across town.

A clear case of homicide? His family believed so — but the condition of the body left investigators unable to determine how he died, let alone who might have been responsible.

Now, thanks to advances in technology, police believe they will finally be able to call David’s death what it almost certainly is: A homicide.

Authorities plan to exhume his body as early as Thursday in the expectation that modern forensic science will yield a cause and manner of death, the starting point of any eventual prosecution.

A Schuylkill County judge ordered the exhumation after state police investigators said they recently turned up evidence leading them to conclude the brown-haired, blue-eyed boy of 13 was the victim of foul play.

Police are mum about what they have found, not wanting to jeopardize the investigation. But the lead investigator, Trooper Robert S. Betnar, said he is confident that a fresh examination by forensic experts will confirm police suspicions about David’s death more than two decades ago.

The reinvigorated probe is welcome news to David’s family, who have long believed that police in this largely blue-collar town 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia failed to do an adequate investigation.

“My family and I have never received a satisfactory answer from the police or medical personnel indicating how or why my brother died,” David’s brother, Joseph Reed, wrote recently in an affidavit in support of the exhumation.

He was even more blunt in an interview last week with The Associated Press: “They just pushed it aside. That’s a small town and if you’re not rich, they don’t care.”

David’s remains were found in December 1985 in a remote thicket on the edge of town, by a man who had been looking for his cat. The boy’s bike turned up along railroad tracks a half-mile away.

Police labeled the death suspicious, but their investigation stalled after an inconclusive autopsy.

“You would have thought somebody would have come forward — when they last saw him, where he was, what he was doing,” said David’s aunt, Judy Adams. “But nothing.”

One early theory held that David died of natural causes.

University of Pennsylvania physical anthropologist Alan Mann, who studied the remains in 1986, said the teenager might have succumbed to complications from an undiagnosed case of juvenile diabetes.

But Anthony Falsetti, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida, reviewed Mann’s findings in 2006 at the request of state police and concluded that “there appears to be an overstating of the possible role that diabetes played in this case.”

Joseph Reed, 45, of Fort Myers, Fla., said there is little doubt in his mind that his brother was killed.

“You just don’t walk in the woods and drop over dead, not at age 13,” he said.

Police have come to the same conclusion. After David’s remains are examined, Betnar expects the manner of death to shift from “undetermined” — the label it has carried all these years — to “homicide.”

“We caught a lot of good breaks,” Betnar said. “We’re looking at it from a much different perspective than they did 23 years ago.”