Students study remains from unmarked graves

September 23, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

ERIE, Pa.

The brittle, chalky bones coated in dried mud held lots of clues: A large leg bone had been amputated with a clean cut, the wide pelvis was likely a female, the teeth on one skull had clearly come out after death, not before.

The skeletal remains, buried in plain pine boxes, were discovered earlier this year when crews began excavating land near a state prison in Somerset County.

Now, bones that could be a century old are laid out on tables covered in blue tarps at Mercyhurst College, where forensics students are examining them piece by meticulous piece.

The students’ goal isn’t to figure out the identity of the remains — 23 sets in all, including an infant — or how they died, said Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist and director of Mercyhurst’s Department of Applied Forensic Sciences.

Instead, the students will try to determine whether each set is male or female, how tall the person was and, more importantly, document any signs of trauma.

“You definitely don’t get to see forensics cases this old. This isn’t that common,” said Sara Getz, 23, a second-year graduate student from McMurray.

Prison officials at SCI-Laurel Highlands said they knew about an old cemetery on the property, but they didn’t realize how close it was to the area where excavation for a new modular housing unit was taking place. Crews discovered the first of the coffins in April.

The area had previously been the site of a hospital and a poorhouse.

“We have no records here. No headstones or markings of any kind. So there is no way to know who these people were,” said Betsy Nightingale, a prison spokeswoman.

The prison stopped work after the discovery and contacted Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller, who referred them to Dirkmaat.

He and his students made six trips to the site to recover the remains. The work wasn’t pretty — water and dirt had seeped into the coffins, creating a soupy, muddy mess. And since the remains were so old and fragile, students had to do most of the work by hand.

They were well-prepared, though, since they are taught in class to identify bones by touch.

They also documented how the bones were oriented in the coffins and looked for discolorations in the mud and soil for clues about how old they were.

“This was for me a good test in identification,” said Kalan Lynn, 23, a third-year graduate student from Ontario, Canada. “Sometimes you don’t have the whole bone. It challenges us a bit more that way.”

In the basement classroom at Mercyhurst, the students wear gloves as they carefully lay out the bones as they would appear in the body. One wall of the room is lined with drawers with labels that include “human remains” and “vertebrates.”

The students measure the bones to estimate how tall a person might have been and look at the size of the bones to determine the person’s sex.

A small bullet was found with the bones of one man, but there was no visible injury to his bones, so it’s impossible to say if that could have caused his death, Dirkmaat said.

In other coffins, students recovered threads, parts of shoes, metal from a change purse and coins from the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Getz said one of the more interesting finds was a blue stain on what is believed to be a female skull. Dirkmaat said he’s consulted with other experts about what it could be but hasn’t figured it out yet.

“You go out on a case and realize things that aren’t in the literature,” Getz said.

Dirkmaat said the students plan to finish their work in the next couple of weeks.

The remains will be returned to the prison, where Nightingale said some kind of service will be held and the remains reburied on a different plot of land.

Excavation at the original site is complete, and construction on the prison expansion is under way.

“We want to do the proper thing,” she said.