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A skull found in Bucks County nearly 40 years ago finally gets ID’d

Richard Alt was reported missing from his home in Trenton by his family in 1985. A fisherman discovered a skull in the Delaware River a year later.

Richard Alt was reported missing by his family in 1985, according to prosecutors in Bucks County.
Richard Alt was reported missing by his family in 1985, according to prosecutors in Bucks County.Read moreCourtesy Bucks County District Attorney's office

Using DNA data from a genealogy website, a Texas laboratory has helped Bucks County prosecutors identify a skull as belonging to a Trenton man who had been missing for decades, authorities said Monday.

Richard Thomas Alt, 31, was reported missing in early 1985 and had last been seen by his family on Christmas Eve 1984, according to a statement from the District Attorney’s Office. For years, his relatives had assumed that he and his girlfriend, Laurie Suydam, had been killed. Confirmation of that took more than 30 years and came only after the DNA test results definitively identified the skull, authorities said.

Suydam’s body was discovered by two fishermen near a marina in Trenton in April 1985. She hadn’t been seen by her family or friends for about two months, and detectives said it appeared that her body had been in the water for an extended period.

A year later, another fisherman found a human skull in the Delaware River near the Morrisville Boat Ramp and turned it over to police in nearby Buckingham Township, prosecutors said. Little was known about the skull for decades, until county detectives working with the District Attorney’s Office reexamined it in 2019 during a routine review of homicide cases.

The skull was entered into a national database and then sent to Othram Inc., a Texas-based genealogy laboratory, in September, according to prosecutors. Technicians at Othram found a possible match from a DNA profile uploaded to a website customers can use to trace their lineage. Using that profile, Othram was able to identify the skull as Alt’s.

Bucks County detectives interviewed the person who provided the sample to the website and discovered that it was Alt’s daughter.

District Attorney Matt Weintraub praised the work Othram did on the case and said he hoped it could be the foundation for future efforts to identify victims of cold-case crimes.

“I can’t even imagine wondering and worrying about a lost family member for even a day, let alone for 37 years,” Weintraub said. “That wait is now over for Mr. Alt’s family. I’m just glad that we could give them some peace of mind with this identification, and the eventual return of his remains to his family.”

Bucks County investigators said they had closed their probe into Alt’s death, since there is no evidence he was killed in the county. The deaths remain under active investigation in Mercer County.