A decades-old Chester County mystery is one step closer to being solved after exhumation

A nearly four-decade-old mystery in Chester County is one step closer to being solved.

Officials with the Chester County Coroner’s Office on Thursday exhumed human remains that were buried in an East Whiteland Township cemetery in 1989 — and are hoping that modern DNA analysis will help identify the body.

Little is known about the person, whose skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area in Caln Township on Oct. 31, 1987.

Medical examiners initially believed the remains belonged to a white, elderly man, according to Sophia Garcia-Jackson, the county’s coroner. But a subsequent anthropological examination put the person’s gender into question, suggesting the pelvis had more feminine features, for example.

The remains were buried in the Philadelphia Memorial Park Cemetery, with no evidence retained for further testing, Garcia-Jackson said.

“Law enforcement at the time were putting out news reports, they had facial reconstruction, they’re trying to identify this person, nothing’s really matching up,” Garcia-Jackson said. “After two years, the remains were buried in an unmarked grave and just kind of sat there.”

That period of inactivity ended in 2022, when an amendment to Pennsylvania law required all unidentified remains to have DNA testing on file. The Chester County Coroner’s Office, working alongside state police, set out to raise funds for the exhumation.

“DNA is expensive,” Garcia-Jackson said, mentioning that previous efforts to do such work on other remains had cost the county around $10,000. Many grants exist to support exhumations, the coroner said, though they often are reserved for female homicide victims and not unidentified persons.

However, Garcia-Jackson’s office found an unlikely donor — the University of South Florida, which awards grants specifically for unidentified remains in Pennsylvania, she said. Chester County qualified for a $13,000 grant, which covered the cost of the exhumation, and soon secured the necessary court order to exhume the East Whiteland Township grave.

Anthropologists will take new measurements and photos of the skeletal remains, with aims to determine the race and sex of the body using modern facial reconstruction methods, according to Garcia-Jackson.

A bone sample will also be sent to a state DNA lab for testing, with the results entered into CODIS, a national DNA database maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“If we get no hits in CODIS, we will do the genealogy testing to see if there’s any family members we can find,” Garcia-Jackson said.

The East Whiteland Township remains are one of four unidentified bodies under the responsibility of the county coroner.

Two other sets of remains were never buried and kept as evidence, and Garcia-Jackson said her office is working with state police to identify them. The body in the remaining case was cremated, she added, and was never identified.

The coroner is holding out hope for Thursday’s exhumation, which could take months to yield results.

“It’s due diligence, to make sure the person whose remains we have has a name, that we can reunite them with their family, that they can have a resting place with their headstone and their name on it, “Garcia-Jackson said. “We as a coroner’s office have a real passion in this job to bring closure to families and give them answers.”