Skeleton spurred inquiry

Detectives with the Onslow County Sheriff's Department have been up and down the Eastern seaboard trying to identify a female skeleton found by local hunters in Bear Creek nearly 20 years ago.

The hunters stumbled upon a skull while looking for raccoons off Stewart Point Road the night of Dec. 2, 1991.

No one is more familiar with the details of the case than Sheriff's Capt. Donnie Worrell, the only remaining detective with the Sheriff's Department who worked the case originally.

Worrell said he knows there is family out there somewhere looking for their missing daughter or sister.

"Every cop has that one case that bothers them," he said. "For me, this is it."

Worrell has scoured through missing persons magazines, searched the Internet and tracked down several leads trying to determine the dead woman's identity.

Detectives though they caught a break when a witness came forward that remembered seeing a woman walking down Stewart Point Road one night in the late 1980s - around the time the woman would have disappeared.

Worrell tracked that woman to Pennsylvania and ruled her out as being the unidentified dead woman. Leads that the unidentified dead woman came from Virginia and Florida have also met dead ends, investigators said.

Worrell, a crime scene investigator at the time the skeleton was found, spent all night and the rest of the next day with other detectives collecting skeletal remains that had been scattered by animals.

The majority of the woman's skeleton was found 40 yards away from where hunters found the skull.

Detectives were able to find 98 percent of the remains, said Dr. John Butts, who examined the skeleton at the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in Chapel Hill.

The skull was sent to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for facial reconstruction. The jawbone was never recovered and that made the reconstruction difficult, Worrell said.

But Emily Craig, who is now the chief forensic anthropologist for the State of Kentucky, was able to work up several computer generated images of what the woman might have looked like.

Medical experts were able to determine that the skeleton was a white female in her mid-20s to mid-30s when she died. The woman had a slender body frame and stood five feet and one inch.

She was dressed in a heavy crew neck sweater with metallic thread, panty hose, stretch pants and white shoes. She did not have any jewelry.

Based on the clothes she was wearing, investigators believe she died in the fall or wintertime.

The woman died two to three years before her body was discovered, judging by the amount of foliage that had grown up around her skeleton, said Dr. Charles Garrett, the southeast regional medical examiner at the time.

A cause of death could not be determined because no detectable injuries could be found on the skeleton. However, Worrell said he feels the woman was killed because of the where her skeleton was found.

"She was dumped in an isolated location," he said. "Unless you knew about that road, you wouldn't go down it."

Many of the pine trees have been cleared now, but in the late 1980s, the area was heavily wooded. The remains were at least 100 yards into those woods.

The Sheriff's Department submitted the reconstruction photos and information about the woman to the DOE Network - an international organization that lists thousands of unidentified and missing persons on its Web site, www.doenetwork.org.

Worrell said the medical examiners found that the woman had a degenerative bone disease in her neck that she might not have even known about.

Most recently, DNA from the skeleton, which is still at the Medical Examiner's Office in Chapel Hill, was sent to North Texas State University for testing,

Anyone with information about the woman's identity can call the Onslow County Sheriff's Department at 910- 455-3113.

Contact crime reporter Lindell Kay at lkay@freedomenc.com or 910-554-8534. Read Lindell's blog at http://onslowcrime.encblogs.com.