Berks' Best awards 2023

May 22—It's not figurative to say there are skeletons in the Berks County coroner's office.

John Fielding said he was surprised to learn early in 2022 after being elected coroner that there were human remains — mostly boxes of unclaimed cremated remains but also some partial skeletal remains and even a full skeleton — in a storage room office suite in Bern Township.

The full skeletal remains belong to a John Doe otherwise referred to as "Pinnacle Man."

The man's frozen body was found Jan. 16, 1977, in a cave at the Pinnacle, a popular vista along the Appalachian Trail in Albany Township, by two Bethlehem teens who were hiking.

The man, who was believed to be 25 to 30 years old when he died, is one of 11 unidentified human remains in the custody of the coroner's office. Five of them, including part of a skull found in a pond last year in Amity Township, are kept in the coroner's office because they contain no flesh. The others are interred in crypts in cemeteries in the county.

Fielding said he doesn't believe anyone would be OK with their remains stored in a closet in the coroner's office indefinitely, so he asked his staff what was being done about the matter.

"We just don't think it's right," he said when asked why the office was concerned about identifying bones that have been in storage for as long as 45 years. "They shouldn't be here. They should be with somebody who knows them."

Difficult process

Step by step, Fielding's staff has been working to find answers for the boxes of identified-but-unclaimed remains as well as skeletal remains of unidentified people.

But it's easier said than done.

The office has been working with Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading to find dignified spaces to store the unclaimed ashes of identified descendants, Fielding said.

In October, the coroner's office, working with the Adalyn Rose Foundation, which provides support services to parents who have suffered infant loss, had seven infant cremains interred in a niche of the cemetery's columbarium following a multidenominational ceremony.

The infant cremains represented a fraction of the 181 sets of unclaimed cremated remains held at the coroner's office at the time.

Cremating the skeletal remains is problematic, Deputy Coroner Joel Bonilla explained. First, the bones hold the key to their eventual identification through DNA analysis.

"With 'Pinnacle Man,' for example, he's an unidentified person," Bonilla said. "We have his skeleton still with us, and we can't really cremate him because we don't know who he is, and once we cremate him there's no chance of extrapolating anything."

Secondly, by law, the coroner's office is required to use all reasonable efforts to identify decedents. Once the remains are identified, the coroner's office can try to contact the next of kin and ask what they want done with the remains.

There's renewed hope of putting names to remains with the help of internet databases such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NaMUS (pronounced "name us"), which was launched in 2009 to maximize the use of DNA technology to match unidentified remains with the profiles of known missing individuals.

Successful case

That's what transpired in 2014 with the remains of two previously unidentified female teen murder victims in unmarked graves in the county's "potter's field" burial site in Cumru Township.

A year earlier, then-Coroner Dennis J. Hess got a county judge to sign an order for the exhumation of two adjacent graves of Jane Does.

The burial ground on Cedar Top Road in Cumru Township was once part of the old Berks County Almshouse estate. The almshouse was razed in 1957 after the opening of Berks Heim, the county-run nursing home in Bern Township.

Hess brought in a renowned expert in forensic exhumations at the request of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and a Pennsylvania State Police cold case investigator.

The missing children network made the request after persistent efforts by Hazel Stiver, whose sister, Sandra, ran away at age 14 from their Philadelphia home in 1968 with her brother's 17-year-old wife, Martha. The Stiver family had long before relocated to Ohio without knowing what happened to Sandra and Martha.

Around 2000, Hazel discovered on the Doe Network, a nonprofit that has operated a missing person site since 1999, that the remains of two unidentified female murder victims were found a few miles apart in wooded areas in southeastern Berks a few months apart in 1968 and 1969 and were buried in the potter's field. She suspected those graves held the remains of Sandra and Martha, and DNA analysis confirmed her suspicion more than a decade later.

The families of both victims agreed to have the remains cremated. Samples of the remains were retained by state police for use in criminal prosecution if anyone is arrested for the crimes.

Rebuilding the case

About five years later the coroner's office started with the same playbook to identify "Pinnacle Man," a process that was set back a few years due to a disruption in funding.

The contemporary attempt to identify the man using DNA technology has followed a long and twisting path.

In 2009, after NaMUS launched its public website, the coroner's office was asked to upload the case files of its unidentified remains.

Although "Pinnacle Man's" remains were buried in the potter's field in 1977, he wasn't initially on the coroner's office radar. Someone brought to their attention that the long-buried man was still unidentified.

The problem, said Bonilla, a longtime deputy in the coroner's office, was there was no case file to upload.

"We had to reconstruct the case file because we knew he existed," Bonilla said. "And now we had people telling us this guy in 1977 was never identified. We found the autopsy report and sort of rebuilt the case file."

They uploaded the profile to NaMUS in 2009 with what limited information they had and started to get hits on missing people who matched his descriptors, though most were ruled out because they didn't match his height, for example.

According to records, the man found in the cave was about 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 155 pounds. The autopsy did not determine when he died but indicated the body was fairly well preserved.

Bonilla said a state police cold case investigator identified two potential matches, both men from other states who were in their early 20s when they went missing in 1975.

A forensic odontologist affiliated with NamUs, Dr. Richard Scanlon, compared the dental records of two missing men to "Pinnacle Man" and found several similarities but was unable to make a positive identification.

Although the dead man's fingerprints were taken, the original copy of those prints could not be found and the quality of the copies was too poor to be used for identification.

State police and the coroner's office began discussing exhumation around 2016.

From their experience with the Stiver case, they knew what was involved, and it is not something to be taken lightly.

To get a court order for exhumation, the petitioner needs to make a good-faith attempt to contact the next of kin of the decedents buried in the adjacent graves, one on each side. That's because there's a chance of disturbing the wrong grave.

All the necessary steps were completed in 2019 and in July of that year, following a hearing, county Judge Jeffrey K. Sprecher approved the exhumation.

The coroner's office shipped bone samples to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for DNA testing to determine if there was a match to either of the missing men. The CHI Forensic Unit provides screening and DNA testing services of biological evidence related to criminal investigation.

To the frustration of the coroner's office, the plan never materialized.

After languishing for two years on a waiting list behind more pressing cases, the lab abruptly shipped the remains back to Berks in 2021, saying it couldn't do the DNA extraction because its funding grant had dried up.

Since "Pinnacle Man's" death isn't a criminal case — the 1977 autopsy ruled he died of a drug overdose — it was low on the pecking order of government-funded labs offering DNA testing, officials said.

Hess retired before his third term as coroner ended in 2021. Fielding was elected that November and his office was left with the decision on how to proceed with "Pinnacle Man."

"So we decided to just go ahead and take it from our budget," Chief Deputy Coroner George Holmes said.

Last year, Holmes contacted Bode Technology, a private Virginia lab. Bode offers forensic genealogy, which uses traditional genealogy research with advanced DNA testing to help identify potential links to unknown profiles.

The county will pay about $11,000 for the work, which goes beyond what the Texas lab would have performed. Unused funds set aside for DNA testing in the 2022 budget were diverted to cover the expense.

Officials shipped the remains to the Virginia lab early this year and are awaiting the results.

Though the process is expensive, Holmes felt the coroner's office had an obligation to identify the man after exhuming him, and hope to one day turn over his remains to a relative.

The fact that years have gone by since the man's remains were exhumed and he is still unidentified illustrates the enormity of the task ahead in putting names to all of the unidentified.

But it's a task worth undertaking, within budget limitations, Holmes said.

That assessment is based in part, Holmes said, on his experience over the past 1 1/2 years in the coroner's office.

He shared that a relative of a deceased young man — who had been missing since 2015 until his remains were recovered two years ago in a wooded area in the Five Points area of Exeter Township — said he thought about him every day since he last saw him.

Realistically, Holmes said, the coroner's office will only have the funds to be able to send away one set of remains a year for DNA testing and forensic analysis.

"We now have a new tool that's available," he said. "It's expensive. but when we can we're going to try to utilize it."

Berks unidentified

The Berks County coroner's office has uploaded 11 cases into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, with the following details:

—Jan. 16, 1977: The well-preserved body of a white man, 20 to 35 years old, is found in a cave near the Pinnacle, a scenic outlook along the Appalachian Trail in Albany Township.

—Aug. 5, 1986: The decomposing body of a white man, 45 to 60 years old, is found in the corner of the stage of the shuttered Astor Theater in downtown Reading.

—July 15, 1988: The skeletal remains of a Black woman in her 20s are found in a shallow grave in French Creek State Park with what appeared to be pieces of a plastic grocery bag.

—June 3, 1992: The particle skeletal remains of a white female, 25 to 40 years old, were unearthed by a farmer plowing a field in Virginville.

—Feb. 15, 1993: The body of a white male infant is found in a bathroom trash can in Kutztown.

—June 24, 1997: The decomposing body of a Black man in his 30s is found along the Schuylkill River at Old River Road in Robeson Township.

—Nov. 25, 1997: A Black man, 40 to 60 years old, is pronounced dead in St. Joseph Hospital after being found face down on a sidewalk in the 100 block of South Sixth Street in Reading.

—Sept. 25, 2000: The mummified body of a white or Hispanic woman, 25 to 40 years old, is found in a wooded area behind Eagle Distributing Co. in the 800 block of Laurel Street in Reading.

—Aug. 21, 2001: The decomposing body of a Black woman, 20 to 40 years old, is found stuffed inside a large heavy duty plastic bag about 20 feet from Quarry Road, about a half-mile from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Caernarvon Township.

—June 23, 2003: The body of a white man, 25 to 50 years old, is found floating in the Schuylkill River in Perry Township by two people tubing on the river.

—April 30, 2022: A young boy who was visiting family in Amity Township finds what he believes to be a turtle shell in the mud of a retention pond in the 100 block of Pine Lane. After washing it off, he discovers what he is holding is the top of a human skull.

For more information visit NamUS at namus.nij.gov