Mysterious skeletal remains in music store’s chimney ID’d 34 years later: WI officials
Mysterious skeletal remains found lodged inside the chimney of a Wisconsin music store have fueled speculation and frustrated investigators for more than 30 years — but DNA analysis recently revealed a huge clue in the cold case.
It was September 1989 and the owners of Good n’ Loud Music, in Madison, were removing a faulty boiler in the basement when they made the discovery, the DNA Doe Project said in a May 13 news release. One happened to peer down a pipe leading to a chimney, and they saw a human skull at the other end.
The skull was part of a complete skeleton wearing an iron cross necklace and “feminine clothing,” trapped in cramped darkness, researchers said.
“No identification was found,” the release said. “There was no way the person could have gotten into the pipe from within the building.”
The question of who has finally been answered 34 years later, officials say.
Using rootless hair samples, researchers created a DNA profile and identified the skeleton as a man named Ronnie Joe Kirk.
Born in 1942 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kirk married twice and divorced both times, but had children, investigators told WKBT. Kirk was also adopted, researchers said.
Madison police detective Jim Grann, who died in 2022, had called the case the “most frustrating” of his career, and one he aimed to keep working on even in retirement, Madison Magazine reported. Detective Lindsey Ludden, who contacted the DNA Doe Project for help identifying the remains, told the magazine it’s a shame Grann couldn’t be here.
“I am sad I was not able to give him a big update before his passing — but I will continue to think of him as we work on the case,” Ludden said.
Questions still linger. It’s not clear how Kirk died and how they ended up in the chimney, where they apparently remained long enough for their flesh to fall away.
Could the clothing found on Kirk’s remains provide any insight?
The Trans Doe Task Force, an organization dedicated to investigating cases of missing or killed LGBTQ people, “especially focusing on unidentified individuals who may have been transgender,” helped bring the Kirk case to the DNA Doe Project’s attention, the group said.
Transgender people are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
But DNA Doe Project researchers are careful not to put too much weight on how Kirk might have personally identified, or how they may or may not have lived their life.
“People are going to speculate about the so-called dress, and we feel that it was mislabelled as such since we have found no further evidence to suggest Ronnie ever identified as anything other than male,” co-team leader Megan Pasika said in the release.
Investigators at the time also found “a matching belt, a shag-pile sweater and pointed, low-heeled shoes,” Madison Magazine reported.
Regardless, the case presented a unique challenge for the project’s researchers, who were first contacted by Madison police in 2019.
“This was such a unique case with adoption, and multiple generations of different marriages, despite having a relatively close DNA relative match in the family,” team leader Gwen Knapp said. “The shrewd genealogy work done by my team was amazing to tease out the various relationships. We’re so excited that we can give Ronnie Kirk his name back and hope his family has some closure for Ronnie being missing for so long.”
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