Almost 24 years have passed since a woman’s skeleton was found in a wooded area off Interstate 16 in Bloomingdale.
About two years ago, a man’s bones were found at a lake near Tremont Road in Savannah.
The woman’s death was declared a homicide. Twenty-two .38-caliber rounds were later dug from the ground in a circular pattern around where her skeleton once lay. In the man’s case, investigators have no reason to suspect foul play.
The cases aren’t related, but they share a grim connection. They’re two of several unidentified remains cases in Chatham County.
SLIDESHOW: Past stories and photos of unidentified remains
Hard to solve
In both the Bloomingdale and Tremont Road cases, forensic anthropologists performed facial reconstructions around the skulls, creating clay busts investigators can show to the public in hope of getting tips that lead to identities.
Information made public through the GBI and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), as well as inquiries to the county’s police departments, points to 10 bodies or skeletal remains found over the last three decades that are still unidentified.
In 2001, a middle-aged black man jumped from the Talmadge Bridge right in front of police. His body was found in the Savannah River two days later, but his identity continues to elude investigators.
A GBI portrait of the man is still pinned to a cork bulletin board in Savannah-Chatham police Lt. David Gay’s office, even though he hasn’t worked for the violent crimes unit in years.
“It’s really the only case that I was never able to identify the person and put him in touch with the family, so that they could at least know that this family member is dead,” Gay said. “It sounds corny, but I mean, he’s somebody’s son or brother or uncle or father.”
Detectives exhausted leads in the case long ago. Fingerprints were obtained from the body, but no match came up. The missing persons reports Gay pulled didn’t match, either.
“If you don’t have DNA on file or dental records, or if you don’t have fingerprints, it’s kind of like a needle in a haystack,” Gay said. “It’s very difficult to make that connection. And you factor in how mobile today’s society is — people getting around a lot easier than they once did. Some guy comes from another state, we’ve got no clue where he’s from. We don’t necessarily know where we should be looking.”
Putting the pieces together can be even more difficult if the remains belong to a homeless person. Sometimes, said metro police detective Marty Whitcomb, homeless people who travel to new areas are estranged from their families. That means family members might not even know where to begin looking for them after long periods without contact.
“Their families have no idea where they are. They haven’t heard from them in 10 years,” Whitcomb said. “They don’t exactly check in with the police as soon as they … get here. We don’t know who they are, in many cases.”
A wide range
Determining the cause of death isn’t always easy. The more decomposed a body, the harder it is to discern such information.
In January 2005, for example, two beachcombers found a skull washed up on Long Island, immediately west of Cockspur Island in the Savannah River. But a skull alone can only tell investigators so much. According to information from NamUs, the cranium is that of a white man, 25-50 years old, who died between 1950-2005.
“For a while, we thought that may be the skull of a missing person that we’d been looking for for a few years here in Savannah,” Whitcomb said. “We had the skull sent off and we checked the mother’s DNA of the missing person against the skull to see if it could be a match, and it’s not.”
Based on dental work, Whitcomb said, autopsy results led investigators to believe the man may have come from Europe. Whitcomb acknowledged the chances of making a positive ID are slim.
“It’s very possible somebody went overboard on one of these ships that come into town,” he said. “Thrown overboard or fell overboard, or we don’t know. No idea on how he died, whether he drowned; we just don’t know. There’s not enough there for us to determine that, and we probably never will.”
In a few of the cases, the causes of death were easier to discern. The death of an elderly black woman found floating in the Wilmington River at the edge of a marsh near Bonaventure Cemetery in June 1988 was ruled a drowning, according to Savannah Morning News reports.
Green sunglasses and a small mirror were found in her pocket, but she wasn’t carrying identification. She had a long, thin scar from her left ear down to her chin, and she had permanent upper and lower metallic bridge work. A sketch was made, but she remains a Jane Doe. About a month after her body was discovered, the woman was interred nameless at Laurel Grove Cemetery.
‘Torment’
The mystery surrounding the woman’s skeleton found in Bloomingdale all those years ago is a constant focus of detective Sgt. Alan Elliott. The only investigator in the small city’s police department, Elliott has plenty on his plate. Since the case was re-opened in 2005, however, the detective has found time to pursue leads related to the death.
In his office recently, Elliott unloaded binders, folders and notebooks from a box full of materials related to the case. He flipped through notes and reports ranging from 1989 to the 2000s.
“Every bit of this is related to that case,” he said. “And over the years, you get more and more.”
A utility worker discovered the woman’s remains March 7, 1989, in a wooded area just southeast of the intersection of I-16 and Bloomingdale Road. The skeleton, Elliott said, was amazingly intact for having been in that area for more than a year.
GBI information indicates she was a white woman in her 40s or 50s. A front tooth was chipped at both corners, and she had a congenital anomaly of her lower back that probably wouldn’t have affected her mobility. An autopsy showed she had brown hair that was dyed from a lighter color.
No clothing was found, leading investigators to believe she died naked. The only personal item at the scene was a size 6, 10-karat gold ring with a diamond and the inscribed initials “KES.” The ring was still around a finger bone on her left hand.
In 1991, an analysis done by a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville narrowed the woman’s time of death to Sept. 25-Oct. 5, 1988. In December 1990, an archaeological dig by an Armstrong professor uncovered the .38-caliber rounds in a circular pattern around where the remains were found.
Elliott said the only wound to the remains was a kneecap shattered by a bullet.
He thinks it was a revenge killing and has no doubt it was personal.
“There’s only one reason behind shooting at somebody 22 times with a .38, which means they had to reload that gun three times,” he said. “That’s just to torment the person or extract information. … You’re getting a sick satisfaction out of doing that.”
Elliott said he does not suspect the victim was a local woman. Despite police not having enough evidence to determine exactly how she died, the case is still being investigated as a homicide.
Savannah murder
A second homicide involving unidentified remains belongs to Savannah, according to NamUs records.
In March 1994, a rail worker taking a restroom break in the woods about 1,000 yards north of CSX Transportation Center at 1401 Staley Ave. discovered skeletal remains. The body was about 150 feet into the woods.
The remains were sent to the state crime lab in Atlanta, where it was determined the skeleton was that of a man in his late teens or early 20s who probably walked with a limp. The bones had been in the woods for more than one year.
Savannah police at the time told the Morning News the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head and the man may have been shot while kneeling.
Information from NamUs indicates the victim was black. He was found wearing Nike athletic shorts and size 10, low-top Nike Air shoes colored white, red and blue.
Clues don’t add up
Some cases, such as the Long Island skull, obviously leave investigators little to work with in terms of making an identification. And as Elliott put it when talking about the Bloomingdale case, information just didn’t spread as easily in the late 1980s as it does today. Yet even in some of the more modern unidentified remains cases in Chatham County, finding answers has been difficult.
In October 2010, a middle-aged white man was seen stepping or falling from a dock into the water near the Savannah Marriott Riverfront.
“To the two witnesses, it looked like he intentionally stepped in and was trying to drown himself — wasn’t even trying to make his way to shore or anything like that,” Whitcomb said.
“Now to them, it may have looked that way. Maybe he accidentally fell in and couldn’t swim; we don’t know.”
Emergency responders weren’t able to immediately locate the man. His body was found three days later in the water near the 500 block of East River Street.
Because of the amount of time he spent in the water, Whitcomb said, fingerprinting wasn’t possible. Nonetheless, police were able to give a clear description of the man. He was well dressed, wearing a button-up, long-sleeved shirt and tan pants. He was well-groomed, too, with gray hair and a mustache.
He was wearing white athletic shoes with “H. Wright” written on them. Even that didn’t generate any leads.
“The name doesn’t necessarily mean much because he could very well be homeless, and there are all kinds of places around here that give out clothing to the homeless,” Whitcomb said. “(The detective) who had this case at that time did everything he could to track down whether that’s the person’s name. Whether these shoes are donated to the Salvation Army and this guy ended up with them, we don’t know. But it’s believed this fellow was most likely homeless.”
Though appeals to the public for information were made, a sketch of the man’s face was not created until this year.
Running out of leads
Whitcomb no longer works in the violent crimes unit, but one unsolved case is still in the back of his mind: those skeletal remains found near Tremont Road in 2010.
Two days after Christmas that year, investigators were called to the edge of a lake next to railroad tracks near Tremont Road at the I-16 overpass after two fishermen spotted the skeleton.
“We didn’t know if this person had fallen into the water and drowned or if this person had jumped off the train in the middle of the night and just happened to be unlucky enough to be near the water,” Whitcomb said. “We weren’t sure, but there’s a steep embankment next to the railroad tracks that leads down into the water.”
GBI anthropologists determined the skeleton belonged to a 33- to 42-year-old white or Hispanic man who had been dead one to five months. Some clothing items were found on the remains: a worn pair of Georgia-brand work boots, overalls and a stainless steel ring with crosses on it. Detectives looked through about a dozen open missing persons reports that seemed promising, but ruled them all out.
“We did not get a lot of tips on this,” Whitcomb said. “We had one guy who said he thought it was a homeless person who lived in a camp nearby. We actually found that person; he’s alive and well and living in a homeless camp still.”
Garden City police at one point thought the remains were of a man missing from their jurisdiction, but Whitcomb said dental records ruled that out.
GBI anthropologists made a clay facial reconstruction around the skull, and like in other such cases, pictures of it have been posted to the GBI and NamUs websites.
“We haven’t gotten a report that matches anything near the description of this guy, so he remains unidentified until we can come up with something or someone happens to maybe go through this NamUs website and looks on there and maybe one of the reconstructions looks like one of their relatives, and they can tell us something,” Whitcomb said.
Time goes on
The cases become less likely to be solved as time goes on.
“I think with any death investigation, when you’re looking for answers, (it’s harder to solve) the more time passes,” Gay said. “I think the one little difference now is they can do so much more with forensics.”
The last time he got any tips about the man who jumped from the Talmadge was in 2007, when he was a sergeant working Savannah-Chatham’s downtown precinct. The GBI called him with a lead he thought would be good, but it didn’t pan out.
Gay has hope that one day something will come from the crime lab, but for now, the case more or less rests on tips. If the day ever comes that an identity is made and he can take the sketch down from his wall, he said it will mean a lot to him: “Just the satisfaction that the family at least has been given the information to realize that a loved one is no longer among the living.”
For Whitcomb, the last tips about the skeleton found at the lake came just weeks after the remains were recovered. He, too, said he hopes exposure and improved forensic technology can lead to some of Chatham’s unidentified remains cases eventually being solved.
“Here in the past few years, I think they’ve gotten better about taking the DNA profile from any unidentified remains,” Whitcomb said. “They’ll have a profile that they’ll keep in the system so that later on, if a relative sees something on that NamUs website or the GBI website and think they might be their relative, they can always do DNA testing … to see if they can determine whether or not that’s the relative they’re looking for.”
Despite not recovering any personal items on the Bloomingdale skeleton, aside from the ring, Elliott was still able to follow several leads based on missing persons reports.
“I traveled to Ohio, Alabama, Kentucky, Florida,” he said. “I’ve been all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio, up there interviewing people. … The city in general has been great about giving me a lot of leeway on this case, and pretty much everybody wants this solved.”
Not so long ago, the detective even thought he had a sure match: a Florida woman who had gone missing. Though it seemed promising, he said, the FBI determined that DNA taken from the skeletal remains did not match that of the missing woman’s family members.
He’s not giving up just yet. Elliott said he plans to submit the DNA to NamUs — a service that hasn’t seen it yet — and he plans to submit other DNA along with it to continue searching for a match. If he can identify her, he said, then he can start to determine why she may have been killed and by whom.
In his years in law enforcement, Elliott has never had a case stay open as long as this one. Solving it, he said, would be a huge achievement.
“At this point, as much time as I spent on it, I’d probably chalk that up as the diamond ring of my career so far, because this is a hard one,” he said. “That’s my goal. Before I retire, I’m going to figure this one out.
“I may retire frustrated, but I’m not going to quit on it.”
The cases
• June 21, 1988: The body of a black woman was found in the Wilmington River at the edge of a salt marsh not far from Bonaventure Cemetery. She weighed 130 pounds, was 5 feet 2 inches tall and had gray hair. She was wearing a buttoned shirt with green, red and beige stripes, jeans and a patterned head scarf.
Green sunglasses and a small mirror were found in one of her pockets. She had permanent upper and lower metallic bridge work, according to the GBI, and she had a long, thin scar from the left ear down to her chin. Investigators at the time believed she may have been fishing or crabbing before drowning. She was buried nameless in Laurel Grove Cemetery.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• March 7, 1989: The skeletal remains of a white woman were found near the eastbound Interstate 16 ramp in Bloomingdale. She weighed 100-135 pounds, was between 5 feet and 5 feet 4 inches tall and had brown hair that was dyed from a lighter color.
She was estimated to be in her 40s or 50s. A front tooth was chipped at both corners, and the only item found on her body was a size 6, 10-karat gold ring with a diamond and the initials “KES.” She had a congenital anomaly of her lower back that likely did not affect her mobility.
An excavation of the immediate area later uncovered 22 .38-caliber rounds in a circular pattern around where the skeleton was found. This case is being investigated as a homicide.
Call the Bloomingdale police department at 912-748-8302 with any information.
• Jan. 27, 1991: The skeletal remains of a black man were found by hunters in a heavily wooded area off Little Neck and Pine Barren roads about two miles from Interstate 16.
The bones were spread over an area of 30-40 feet. The person was estimated to be between 5 feet 11 inches and 6 feet 1 inch tall with a weight of more than 200 pounds.
He was estimated to be between 50-70 years old, and it was unclear when or how he died. He had upper dentures, and no lower teeth were located. The upper teeth were extracted years before his death.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• April 15, 1993: The badly decomposed remains of a black man were found inside a vacant house on the 1300 block of East Broad Street. The body was discovered by a Savannah police officer who was on patrol checking vacant buildings in the area of East Broad and Anderson streets.
The man was believed to be 20-40 years old. His weight could not be estimated, but he was measured as 5 feet 7 inches tall. He is believed to have died the same year he was found.
He had black, tightly curled hair about 1 inch in length. He was found wearing a long-sleeved, pullover Jerzees sweatshirt size 42-44 and gray pants with a zipper, light colored, size 34 BVD briefs and white socks. He was also wearing low-cut Nike athletic shoes.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• March 15, 1994: The skeletal remains of a black man between 18-25 years old were found in a wooded area on the CSX Transportation Center property off Staley Avenue. It was estimated there had been years between his death and the discovery of the remains.
There was a gunshot wound to the left face and neck. The skeleton had a healed fracture of the left proximal femur with a missing lesser trochanter. The man was wearing off-white and dark blue vertically striped boxers, off-white to gray Nike sweatshorts and white, size 10 red and blue Nike low-top athletic shoes. This case was being investigated as a homicide.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• June 10, 2001: A black man jumped to his death from the Talmadge Bridge into the Savannah River in front of police. His body was recovered from the river two days later. He was 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighed 144-155 pounds and had black hair that was beginning to gray.
He was believed to have been 35-50 years old. He was wearing a white and black or blue horizontally striped shirt and dark pants. A tattoo on his arm displayed the letters “TL” and an inverted “C,” and a tattoo on his right arm displayed the letter “C” with “Red Sun” spelled out below.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• Jan. 3, 2005: A skull was found on Long Island in the Savannah River. The island is immediately to the west of Cockspur Island. Few details are available, as only a cranium was discovered. The skull belonged to a white man, believed to be 25-50 years old, and death is estimated to have occurred any time between 1950-2005.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• April 13, 2008: A man chasing after his dog in a wooded area off U.S. 80 near the Lazaretto Creek Bridge on Tybee Island discovered a man’s skeletal remains about 100 feet into the wood line. The skeleton was fully clothed.
A plastic bag containing deodorant, razors and hair gel was found nearby, leading investigators to wonder if the man had been homeless. There was no identification present in the person’s pants, the personal belongings or anywhere near where the remains were found.
Call the Tybee Island police department at 912-786-5600 with any information.
• Oct. 25, 2010: A white man was seen stepping off a dock near the Savannah Mariott Riverfront. His body was recovered three days later in the Savannah River near the 500 block of East River Street. The man appeared to be 45-65 years old, was 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed about 185 pounds.
He had well-groomed gray hair and a mustache. He was wearing a blue button-up long-sleeve shirt, a blue long-sleeve T-shirt, tan pants with a brown, woven belt, white socks and white briefs. On his feet were white Velcro athletic shoes with “H. Wright” written on the inside borders. There was a bandage over a wound on his left leg.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
• Dec. 27, 2010: The skeletal remains of a white or Hispanic man were found on the edge of an unnamed lake off Tremont Road at the Interstate 16 overpass. He was believed to have been 33-42 years old and 5 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 11 inches tall.
He had been dead for one to five months. The cause of death has not been determined. He was wearing a worn pair of Georgia-brand work boots, overalls and a silver or stainless steel ring with crosses on it.
Call the Savannah-Chatham police department at 912-651-6675 with any information.
Sources: GBI, NamUs, Savannah Morning News archives, and the Savannah-Chatham, Bloomingdale and Tybee Island police departments