The Bone Reader - Snap Classic

A severed head turns up in a small rural town. While police investigate this as a crime, they look at disturbed graves, search for missing people — suspect a killer. But the forensic artist on the case has a very different theory for how the head ended up in the woods. This story contains references to forensic material, sensitive listeners please be advised. Thank you to Michelle Vitali & Mike O’Brien for sharing this story with Snap. Produced by Nancy López, original score by Renzo Gorrio, artwork by Teo Ducot. Happy New Year Snap Nation -- thank you for listening in 2025! We love you! Snap Classic - Season 16 - Episode 61 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:37Glynn Washington?

  In order to prove that a crime occurred, you have to demonstrate that somebody did something to someone. You've watched TV, you understand this, but what if you don't know what they did, who they did it to, or even who did it?

• 2:59Glynn Washington?

  Today on Snap, a mystery like no other, we're calling it The Bone Reader. My name is Justin Washington. Congratulations, you've just been deputized because you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 3:18Glynn Washington?

  We begin with an unusual journey to discover exactly who someone is. And of course, there is a small town police chief doggedly searching far and wide for answers. And since this is a listener's shit note, this story does contain reference to forensic material. It also involves a forensic artist who believes the biggest clue is right in front of their face. Snap Judgment.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I had rarely been in a courtroom before and I had to set up, I sort of saved two or three spots for myself in a very crowded courtroom, so I had to fight people off for that a little bit.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  This was Michelle Vitale's very first day in court.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  And I just needed a place to lay everything down because I had a complete set of grayscale markers, some pencils, some erasers.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  And the task before her was huge, to capture and drawings the trial of Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  It's a very famous case. It's the pizza bomber case. If you just Google pizza bomber, you'll be all over it.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Pizza bomber case. An American pizza delivery man who was murdered during a complex plot involving a bank robbery, scavenger hunt, and homemade explosive device near his hometown of Erie.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the mastermind of this plot.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  This was easily one of the biggest trials to ever take place in Erie. It was also a big day for Michelle. She'd never worked as a courtroom sketch artist before.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  My main job is teaching.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  She's an art professor at Edinburgh University who got thrust into this role.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I can draw very well, and it's kind of thrilling to draw from life because you know it'll never exist again somehow.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  The courtroom that day was packed. Michelle sat attentive with a grayscale marker and a drawing pad in hand, ready to go.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  And I was directly behind her.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Her focus entirely on the defendant, Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  You know, I had to draw everybody else too, but she really was the most interesting person to draw.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  And she gave Michelle so much material to work with.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  She had a particularly fascinating face, which is literally what I'm very interested in all the time. So if a thought crossed her mind, you saw it immediately. Half thoughts, embryonic thoughts. Including these sort of lightning expressions that crosses her eyes. She had bone structure and meatiness about her that was just fun to draw.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Then on day two of the trial, Michelle noticed a shift in Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Because she turned around, she looked at everyone who was there, and there was lots of press and so forth. But she looks at me, and then she sees that there's space around me. She looked over everything. She realized that I was there drawing her, and she gave me a look again of death, like she wanted to kill me then and there. I got a chill. I got a chill from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. It was a little unnerving. You know, this was a woman who had body parts in a freezer. I acted like nothing, I acted like she was a TV screen, frankly, because I just didn't want her to have the satisfaction of getting to me either, because she was clearly trying to intimidate me.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Throughout day two and day three of the trial, Marjorie Deal Armstrong kept shooting Michelle dirty looks.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  And I sort of embraced it because in a strange way, it kind of caused an interaction between us.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  A moment that she captured in one of her court drawings of Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  It was such a special, special moment.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  But when Michelle got home later that day.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I remember my daughter telling me that she was afraid, that what if she doesn't get convicted? Is she going to come after you, Mom? I'm not a terribly fearful person, but I was a little bit, uh, should I rethink this whole job?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  On day four.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  I was just glad it was over in four days.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  The trial was over. Marjorie Deal Armstrong would be found guilty and ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And I was like, good, done.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  But Michelle walked away from that courtroom, realizing something about herself. As an art professor with a unique set of skills.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I teach regular illustration, scientific illustration and human anatomy.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Who can paint and sculpt and also happens to be married to a retired cop.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I had, I think, essentially prepared for a life as a forensic artist my whole life. And I came out of it with a whole new direction.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  After the trial, Michelle kept her day job, but she signed up for a class on advanced osteology, which is a detailed study of bones. She already knew a lot about human anatomy.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  My expertise is in human bone structure.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  She could read bones, what they tell you about a person, the effect muscles have on human facial expression, for example. But this class helped her apply that knowledge to forensic reconstruction. This is a process of recreating the face of an individual, be it in a drawing or a 3D sculpture, in order to identify them.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Michelle went on to publish a big research paper about her findings. Then she was invited to present that research at the Academy of Forensic Sciences.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  I was surprisingly well received. I had a crowd around me, people were taking all my cards in literature, and I've been busy ever since.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Michelle started giving talks to various police departments and coroners' associations. She could sketch crime suspects. She could build a sculpture of a face, simply based on the dimensions of the skull. She was a bona fide forensic artist. And then one day, in the winter of 2014.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  December 12, 2014, it was a Friday, around 12:30, and actually, a couple of us were sitting here eating lunch.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Authorities in the small town of Economy, about two hours south from where Michelle lives in Pennsylvania, got a call.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  And one of the officers answered it. He says, "Okay, this is a strange one." He says, "They said that somebody found a head in the woods." I said, "Oh, this can't be good."

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Michael O'Brien is a police chief with the Economy Borough Police Department.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  We're not busy, busy. We're busy enough, is what I always say, you know? So, I'm driving out to the scene, which is probably about a five-minute drive or so. And, you know, of course, I've got all kinds of things going through my mind. "Oh, maybe it's something, just a Halloween mask, or it's a prop, or something like that," you know? And I just don't think I was really sure as to what I expected to see.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  When Chief O'Brien arrived on scene...

• 10:35Speaker 03

  It's in a wooded area. There's probably, I think, 10 houses altogether.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Two of his police officers were already standing on the side of the road, looking down over the hillside.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  And I walk up, and I said, "Uh, I don't see it." And he said, "No, it's right there, it's right there." We go down to hillside, and, uh, yeah, sure enough, it was a real head. And what I was looking at was the back of her head. This gray furry lump. And it reminded me of like a possum or something like that had been laying there.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And what immediately struck Chief O'Brien was the condition of the hair.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Like her hair had just been done. There's very little vegetation leaves mixed within her hair and stuff like that.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Which he found odd because it had rained the past couple of days.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Very hard. And the fact that it was just laying on top like somebody had just set it there. Or possibly rolled it there and it just came to rest there.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  And when he squatted to the ground for a better look.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Her face and skin were fairly clean. I mean, there were some dirt marks on it, but it was fairly clean, you know? Certainly didn't appear that it had been in the ground or anything like that for, for any amount of time. So really all we had and all we're looking at is this severed head that's laying in the middle of this bare area 30 feet from the roadway.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  This was the first time in his 30-plus year career that Chief O'Brien was confronted with a stray body part, a severed head at that.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  There was just a lot of, I think, questions running through my mind, like, what am I supposed to do? We didn't know how it got there. We didn't know, you know, where it had come from or who it belonged to. We knew we had a crime scene, let's put it this way.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  After doing a quick sweep of the area and coming up empty, Chief O'Brien and his team carefully placed the head inside a large brown paper bag.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  It was, uh, I could use the word eerie probably to say the least, you know? Here you are walking out with this bag with this, with this human head in it.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Once they arrived at the morgue, Chief O'Brien hoped they would start getting some answers.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  The pathologist sets her on a table and starts to take a look at things. He had lifted the eyelids and pulled out those eye caps. It's almost like a contact lens, but it's just a lot thicker. It has these little barbs on it that hold the skin down. So they removed those. And that's where we discover that her eyes are both missing. And there's two red rubber balls placed inside her eye sockets.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And I say a red rubber ball, it's like a toy ball that you would get out of a gumball machine. And in fact, when he picked it up, he had dropped it and it just bounced across the room. We didn't know why these balls are placed there. Was this some type of a ritual? Was this some type of a practical joke? So that was very, very strange.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Also strange was the fact that the head was embalmed, as if the body had been prepared for a funeral.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  I think we were all kind of shocked and dumbfounded. So yes, the whole thing became quite bizarre at that point.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien walked out of the morgue with more questions and answers, and that disturbed him.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  This isn't just a head. This is a woman. This is somebody's mother, somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, an aunt, you know. So it was more than just a human being or a part of a human being laying in the woods.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  And the police chief, who rarely deals with homicides or aggravated assaults, in fact, economy hadn't reported any violent crimes that entire year, now had a true mystery on his hands.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  I want to know who this is because she deserves to have her body together. How are we going to do this? We can't take a photograph and put this out to the public. And the first thought was, we need a forensic artist.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  I get an email from the coroner of Erie, and it really is just one line, and it says, "I think they're looking for you." I called Mike O'Brien, as requested.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  It's her. It's Michelle Vitale, and she says, "I hear you're looking for a forensic artist." It was probably Monday or Tuesday, two, three days after the discovery here.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I asked immediately whether this was the case from the news, and he said, "Yes, this is the severed head case." So I asked where they were with the case, what, you know, what did they think so far?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  At that point in the investigation, Chief O'Brien and his team were considering a couple of theories.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Could this be some crazy serial killer?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  They were saying serial killer.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Can this be some weirdo that's in their basement chopping up bodies? Could this be somebody that's murdered somebody and embalmed them in their basement?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  They were saying grave robber. They were checking for disturbed graves.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Well, in fact, what we did immediately was we put out over our police networks, emails to departments that have a cemetery in their jurisdiction. Please go through there and check to make sure that none of the graves are disturbed.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  They were checking anything that they could for missing people that fit her description.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  One of the thoughts in my mind was that this is a body that's been dismembered and possibly spread throughout the area.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien told Michelle how the day after discovering the head, they returned to the scene of the crime to scour the woods. This time, they brought in reinforcements, cadaver dogs, to hunt for more body parts.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  And what was really crazy was the one dog got the scent from the head. As soon as she sent the dog into the woods, it immediately went down this path, went directly to the spot where she had laid and sat down. That dog went directly to the spot that that head was found in.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  But the dog would not move from that spot. He stayed put and went nowhere else.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  There were no other parts that were found to this woman. It was just a severed human head.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  That's about where we were at at that point. We were absolutely nowhere.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And I said, "That's weird."

• 17:11Speaker 02

  And that's when Chief O'Brien asked Michelle, how soon could she draw a sketch of the woman's face, one that they could present to the public?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And I said, "As soon as I have access to the head, I can have it to you within 24 hours."

• 17:25Speaker 03

  And I'm thinking, "Wow, that's pretty quick. Okay, that's, this is, this is great."

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien even offered to take the head to Michelle.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And I said, "Well, what do you mean to me?" And he said, "Well, I'll bring her up to your house." I said, "No, no, no, no. Let me mention that there's a wet lab up in Erie that we can utilize."

• 17:44Speaker 02

  The very next day, Michelle hopped into her car. She brought along a colleague.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  She's a physical anthropologist, and I knew I was going to have to take a lot of different photographs, and there was no way to take them without somebody else positioning the head, right? I needed four hands, essentially.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  The two women made the 30-minute drive north from Edinburgh to the wet lab at Mercyhurst University in Erie.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  I was really curious to see the head, because I have some experience with human dissection, and I just wasn't sure what on earth this could be. So, this is intriguing, for sure.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  When she walked through the doors of the wet lab...

• 18:20Speaker 01

  It was a tiny wet lab, basically stainless steel surfaces, one gurney, one sort of sink.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  In that sink, Michelle saw a stainless steel bucket with a black plastic bag inside.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And that plastic bag is what contains the head.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Quietly, Michelle and her colleague got ready.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  We had brought a lot of our own materials. We had some calipers to take some measurements, and, obviously, my camera and so forth.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  They suited up.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  We had our lab coats on, we had our gloves on.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Michelle dabbed some Vicks Vapor Rub under her nose.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  I wore a mask, mainly just because I didn't know what smell was going to be happening.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  And then she reached for the black bag.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Which I opened up, and inside that, there was yet another bag, and in that one was the head.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I gently lifted her out of the bag.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Michelle carried the head to a gurney in the center of the room.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I was really focused on the matter at hand, which is, what can I do with this information?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Again, as a forensic artist, Michelle's job wasn't to simply draw a portrait.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  What are the most salient parts that she's presenting here that need to be in the drawing?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  But to recreate the woman's face, in a way that highlights her most prominent features.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  That are very ID-worthy.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Not things like hair color or eye color. Those features aren't reliable, they can change. But more the shape of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, her nose, and where they all live on the face in relation to one another. Think of them almost as data points that taken together would make the face recognizable to anyone who personally knew her.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  So in other words, you can do a beautiful image that's really inaccurate and you can do a pretty weak image sometimes that can be remarkably accurate. So I was trying to be as observant as I could, knowing I had to draw her. As I'm holding her and I'm looking her face to face.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Michelle had to sort of unmesh the skin in order to soften it. It was so rigid from the embalming.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And for the most part, indeed, she was very recognizable. She was an older woman.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  But when Michelle fluffed up the hair, she noticed something that started telling her a different story than the one the police were running with.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Everyone was saying she had a hairdo. Her hair had been styled and that indicated to people that she had had a wake. And I remember thinking, I don't think she had a wake for two reasons. Number one, her hair had not been styled. She just had a perm. It was a pretty standard older woman perm.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  And number two, the woman had no traces of makeup on her face.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  No makeup, no lipstick, not the hint of anything. And I swapped for it. There was nothing on her.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  With the trained eye, Michelle continued working her way down the woman's face.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  I was already aware that the eyes had been removed.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  But only now could she fully appreciate what a challenge that presented.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  As human beings, we're hardwired to recognize each other's eyes very much first and most powerfully. So how exactly would her eyelids have formed around what were essentially a missing structure? Then I'm slowly turning her over in my hands. She had two very subtle moles on one cheek.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And then she settled her eyes on the woman's mouth.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  So I don't really know what her lips looked like.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  They were disfigured because of the way the head had been laying on the ground.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  If you could imagine, for example, falling asleep with your face sort of mushed into the pillow and then it freezing like that, right? That's what she looked like. So I turn her around further.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Michelle now shifted her attention away from the woman's face.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  I really needed to very carefully examine what happened underneath, you know, at the neck. When I'm holding the head in my hands and I'm literally looking at the underside and I'm manipulating some of the structures in the neck.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  And that's when Michelle saw something else that struck her as odd. Something that only a trained professional like her could see.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  So I'm looking at what's called the apron, which is the bit of skin close to and around the collarbones where it would have been cut. There was no vertebrae present. Every single vertebra of her back had been removed. So if I were just chopping off somebody's head like a crazed killer, there would be at least a couple of vertebrae up in there with the rest of the cranium. Not only was that not the case, but I could see the very tip-top of her odontoid process. Let me explain.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  The top vertebra is called the atlas and the second one is called the axis. And I liken it to a little bit like a hitch on your car, the people who pull boats on their car. It's like a ball that goes straight up and it goes into your top vertebra and then sort of engages with the head. Whoever had cut this person's head off had cut directly through that. In other words, that is the absolute topmost point that you can cut a head off without damaging the head. This is something anybody who teaches gross anatomy can do. This is something I know how to do. A couple of wheels started turning in my head, but I couldn't, I can honestly say I don't even think I formed the full thought at that point yet.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  But that was the beginning of me possibly thinking, this is not in the direction that they're going and it's a different direction.

• 24:14Glynn Washington?

  When we return, how did a woman's head end up in the middle of the woods? And where is the rest of her body?

• 24:23Glynn Washington?

  On Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode continues. Stay tuned.

• 24:37Glynn Washington?

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• 26:22Glynn Washington?

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• 26:52Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode. As listeners should note, this show does contain reference to graphic material. When last we left, forensic artist Michelle Vitale had just discovered a big clue about what might have happened. Snap Judgment.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  She had not been decapitated, sort of serial killer hacker style, right?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  It really wasn't Michelle's job to figure out what happened to this woman.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  My job was really just to be as neutral as possible.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  With the help of her colleague, Michelle began snapping picture after picture to capture the head from every possible angle.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Respectfully, I covered her face with a cloth and then I wrapped the first bag and then the second bag and then we washed up, cleaned all and disinfected all of our instruments and then it was time to let them know that we were finished with our work and we left.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  But Michelle's thoughts stayed back. The woman's bones had spoken to her loud and clear, so much so that during the drive home, Michelle felt she knew what had actually happened to her.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  I realized that it... Listen, as a person who's an artist in a law enforcement world, I don't want to say I know my place, but I kind of do. I know that there's a certain amount of slog that police just have to go through. So I could tell them whatever I want, but they still have to go through, you know. So I just figured, no one's going to listen to me. Let's just see. I mean, a million things could have gone wrong here.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  When Michelle got home.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I basically cleared the decks and I spent nothing but the next 24 hours either drawing. I really was in a rush, no doubt, or sleep, but I also have to build in some what I tend to call cogitation time or resting, you know, I really need to just let it settle. And coming back to drawing her, like I had forgotten, for example, that she had two tiny moles.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  When it came time to draw the woman's missing eyes and disfigured mouth, the two most important features on a person's face.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  And I had to sort of neuter them a little bit and make them as neutral as possible. And then when I felt that it was ready, I sent the JPG to Mike.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  I was, you know, really impressed with the drawing that she produced and especially in the amount of time she did it. So we were really excited about that. We scheduled a press conference with all of our local media.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien told the press almost everything he knew about the case, which was still very little.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Severed head, embalmed eyes are missing.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  But he was able to add that the head belonged to a Caucasian woman and that they estimated her age to be anywhere between 50 and 80 years old.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Then we pushed Michelle's drawing out there. Obviously, the sketch was our biggest piece of this.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  The image Michelle had started sketching just the day before was now all over the news.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  All the news media because it was, you know, a severed head, right?

• 29:54Speaker 03

  We dedicated a phone number, you know, in hopes to generate leads.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  And over the next couple of days, leads started coming in. People called and offered up names and photographs of someone they knew who had passed away and looked like the woman in Michelle's drawing.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  I think that just about every name that has been given us had some sort of resemblance to not only the picture, but there was something on that person's face that I would look at and say, well, it does look like the head.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  But just as quickly as those leads came in, they died out.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, this isn't panning out. She turned out to be alive. This woman with Alzheimer's isn't actually gone. And then they would find out the person couldn't have possibly been this, or they had the wrong, the dentals didn't match up.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  By now, Michelle felt she had to say something about what she discovered back at the wet lab. She was convinced she knew why the police weren't finding any answers, why these initial leads were going nowhere. So, within days, Michelle decided to do something.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And I told the key person who, he literally was the one who could turn it around.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  She called Chief O'Brien, asked him if he had a minute. Then she went on to describe how the woman's head had been surgically severed from the body.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  You know, while I'm talking to her on the phone, she's on a computer Googling or whatever on eBay, embalming fluids, embalming tables.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  And why she believed that this had everything to do with why the police had not been able to identify her.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  You know, I've listened to this thing, went, wow, this is just nuts, you know?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  He was very polite, and he did say that there were some other things that they were looking into at the time.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  I can't say whether I really had a firm belief in it or not.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And that that was a really interesting idea. So, I sort of stepped back at that point and just let them do their thing.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The head, now living in a refrigerator in the evidence room of the Economy Borough Police Department, would get regular visitors who would take this sample to run that test.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  You know, we tried DNA testing with the teeth. We've tried DNA testing with a bone. We did this isotope testing.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  So, there was an awful lot of that going on in order to identify her?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  And we actually went as far as subpoenaed cremation records from several funeral homes, and we ran down every single one of those names, women that had passed in these certain years, to check to see if there was a likeness on that photograph compared to that of the drawing.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I was definitely frustrated, and, you know, I was in a difficult position because I thought all those theories were wrong.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  It became even more difficult when Chief O'Brien started to consult with Michelle.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  She became a very huge integral part of the case.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  A couple of weeks into the investigation, he got a tip.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Where a woman's head was removed from her body while it was in the casket.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  They brought me one picture of a woman who died in the 1980s.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien asked Michelle her opinion on whether there was, in fact, a real resemblance between the person in question and the severed head.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So I'm looking at her going, no, her eyes are half an inch higher than this woman's eyes. There's no way. The bones, the bones speak to you and the bones are telling me they're not the same person. So there's only so much you can stretch it.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  So that was ruled out. So we were able to, you know, move away from that.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  And now, just a month into their investigation, they were running out of leads.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  So I had this big fear that people were gonna forget, walk away. And every so often, I sit back and I say, you know, Mia, what can I put out there? What can I go back to the media with?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  So Chief O'Brien reached out to Michelle again.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Chief O'Brien had asked me for a 3D reconstruction, which is a sculpture.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  He was asking for a full-scale clay replica of the woman's head. Maybe a three-dimensional image of what she may have looked like alive would jog the public's memory and ultimately lead to a positive ID of their woman.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Oh geez, how am I going to do this? I don't have a skull. I actually have a human head this time.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  She was used to using the metrics of an actual skull to then build a face from. A skull influences what our face looks like on the surface, so much more than people realize.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I had a skull technically, I mean, but it was inside of her head. And I wasn't working from a skull with depth markers attached to it.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Sure. Michelle had studied the severed head up close, and she'd taken several photographs of it. But the woman's main features were also the most compromised. Again, the eyes were missing, the nose was pushed up, the mouth was disfigured, not to mention, the head was so heavily embalmed that the texture of the skin was off. It had puffed up, hardened, and essentially frozen everything into place.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  I just wanted to work on her fairly nonstop.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Michelle had a work studio that she would normally use, but for this special project, she decided to work on it from home.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I just wanted her to be around. I wanted her to be in my peripheral vision, even when I wasn't working on her.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  So she cleared the coffee table in her living room and laid out her sculpting and dental tools. And instead of building the face from the inside out, she'd have to work backwards.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  First, I got a head armature. It's a wooden armature with some wire at the top. I just filled that with tin foil.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  And then she grabbed six pounds of plastilina oil clay.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And I just started adding it and adding it and adding it and turning it into a conceptual model. But then I started shaving it down and turning it into her conceptual model. And that had to be spot on accurate, or else nothing else would matter.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Michelle started carving out the foundational elements that would make this woman's face recognizable.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I knew exactly where her eyes were.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  She knew the distance between her eyes.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I know what the shape of her bridge and her nasal bones was like.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  She knew where the nose landed.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I knew where her mouth and teeth were. I knew where her ears were. I knew where her hairline was. I knew the very specific dimensions of, for example, the width of her cheekbones, her zygomatic arches. I knew her frontal eminences. I knew where all that stuff was. I built all of that.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  And after the hard part was done, Michelle began sculpting and carving out the more superficial details of the woman's face.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  And I just hoped that every little minute decision that I made that was based on, you know, a few decades of anatomical knowledge yielded something close to the truth.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  And as a woman's head began to take shape on the coffee table in the middle of Michelle's living room.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  She really became part of our family. It was kind of weird.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Her two kids, who were teenagers at the time, they would walk past the head.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  You could see her from the dinner table in this. My kids would sometimes ask me questions about something that had occurred to them about the case. They knew the story, but they were not really privy to the pictures. My goal as a mother is really just to protect them from the worst of it, but not to pretend that these terrible sides of life don't exist. So she kind of was a springboard for different kinds of conversations along those lines.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Conversations that got Michelle thinking deeply about what this woman's face could tell her as she continued to mold and bring her features into focus.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  I didn't have bones to read, but I had facial tissue to read. She had a bit of a recessed chin.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  When she began forming her mouth.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  I sensed that she might have been a smoker just because of the spokes of the wheel around the mouth. Maybe that just means she pursed her lips a lot, but it also could have meant that she dragged off a cigarette a lot, too.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  When she finished working on the woman's eyebrows, another mannerism popped out at her.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Well, she had two very sparse eyebrows, and I want to say it was her right eyebrow, perhaps. I think that was the right one. She had one or two very pronounced arching lines up in her forehead that were completely indicative of her raising that eyebrow an awful lot. So for whatever reason, she raised one eyebrow a lot.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  And then Michelle finally started working out the woman's eyes.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Do I know her eye color? Absolutely not. Do I know if I was 100% right? No. And in fact, I'm probably close to, I would say at best, I'm like 80% right about her eyes.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I just felt like I was looking into her eyes for the first time, which just sounds bizarre, but it was a moment for me. And I just felt really satisfied with the feeling that I'd gotten reasonably close and given her something back that was out there in the world somewhere.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Now, after manipulating her face for two weeks, Michelle took a step back and took it all in.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I couldn't help it, really, to piece together what this woman's life would have been like.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  The one cocked eyebrow, the spokes around her mouth, her eyes.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I started to picture her as, you know, kind of sassy somehow. I also started to think about some of the sadder aspects, that perhaps this wasn't necessarily her choice.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Michelle still held on to her theory about how the woman's head ended up off the side of a two-lane road. How the few choices she might have had in life made it possible for someone else to decide what happened to her in death.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  A couple of days later, Michelle tucked the sculpted head in her trunk.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  So I kind of had it surrounded by boxes that were heavy, as heavy as it. So it couldn't really topple in any way.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  And she drove two hours south to Chief O'Brien's office in Economy, Pennsylvania.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  I just, it was like, I was very impatient, probably. Like, okay, when's she gonna be done? When's she gonna be done? I want to get this done.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  So Chief O'Brien was thrilled when Michelle walked into his office with the finished sculpture in arm.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  I was kind of in awe that the model looked identical to her drawing.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  I knew that I wanted to get it on television. You know, I was really, really excited about that.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  He went public with the sculpture, showing the face from different angles, hopefully prompting somebody, somewhere out there, to recognize the woman and come forward.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  But the few tips that came in were immediately ruled out. And then one day, a call came in.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Concerning a woman who was missing from Ohio. She was missing on mysterious circumstances. She lived across the street from a river. She walked out of her house and never came back. And they had found her glasses laying on a log near the riverbank, and the area there was very, very muddy. So we get her photograph. And if you take the glasses away, she looks just like her.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  So Chief O'Brien went back to Michelle and asked her to draw alternate sketches of the severed head.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I did a younger version. I did a different hairdo. I did a different mouth shape, I believe, because her mouth was such an unknown.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  So Michelle produces this drawing with these glasses on, changes the hairstyle a little bit. And it looks just like the photographs that we have of this missing woman.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Boy, oh, boy, this woman's photo looked a lot like the drawing with a different hairdo.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  You know, moles on her face, just her face, her nose, the position and the size of some of her teeth. We're actually looking at her teeth now. And we're measuring and drawing lines and all these different things. Going, wow, these teeth even look like her.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  It took a couple of months to determine whether there was a match between the missing Ohio woman and the severed head.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  And I can tell you that I can remember emailing those dental records to our odontologist, thinking, this is going to be her. It's going to be her. It's going to be her.

• 42:45Glynn Washington?

  When we return, is the Ohio woman who went missing from her home under mysterious circumstances Jane Doe? Don't go anywhere. Snapchat.

• 43:08Speaker 04

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• 43:53Speaker 04

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• 44:12Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode. My name is Gun Washington, and sensitive listeners should note, this episode does contain mention of graphic material. When last we left, Chief O'Brien had just got an exciting tip. A photograph of a missing Ohio woman looks just like Michelle's drawing. Snap Judgment.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  But apparently, the dentals don't line up enough, so it can't be her. And this definitely isn't her. I was just like, it was like, oh, the wind went out of me. It was like, oh, man. From an investigative standpoint, we know that we can move on now. But the downside to that is, here's this woman who's still missing from the place she belongs. We probably looked at about 60 different leads.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  As they neared the one-year anniversary of discovering the head.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  We know exactly what you know right now, which was the fact that we had a severed head found in the woods that's been embalmed, whose eyes are now missing, who's been replaced with red rubber balls, and we have no idea who this person is. I think it's time we bring everybody together. And to me, it was a big deal.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien called up every person that had been involved in the investigation.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  You know, I want a conference to sit down and say, all right, here's what we've done.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Chief O'Brien and a couple of his officers, the DA, the coroner, the county detective, they all met up at the Economy Borough Police Department in the large conference room.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  And he very kindly invited me as well. And we were all around the table. And I just sort of sat quietly.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  So let's brainstorm, you know, let's throw some ideas out here. What can we do? What, what can't we do?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And then maybe an hour into the meeting, they said, okay, so where are we? We're nowhere. We have absolutely nothing.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Should we look at something else, you know, in?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And that's when Chief O'Brien said, you know, a year ago, Michelle told me that she had this idea. And he said, why don't you tell them? And then they all looked at me. And I remember giving Chief O'Brien sort of a quick look like, can I really speak?

• 46:27Speaker 03

  You know, I'm going, okay, I can't rule out anything here, you know?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  And he gave me a look like, now's your chance. And I said, none of this says grave robber, crazed killer, serial killer, any of that stuff to me. It all says the body train.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Michelle explained how every year, thousands of people across the country donate their bodies to science.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And I said, as soon as I saw this head, I knew exactly what I was looking at, which is professional anatomical cuts for very particular reasons. And they said, well, what reasons are those?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  She explained how these bodies are carefully divided into their respective parts. Usually they're used for scientific research, but there's also a gray market.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  And I talked about how the different parts of the body have different price amounts. If you are going to sell a head to a research institute and then you want to sell the spine to another entity, you've got to maintain the integrity of both.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  She explained, for instance, how the severed head had been removed from the rest of the body. The cuts had been precise and clean. Every single vertebra had been expertly cut to keep the head and the spine intact.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And thus you have a cut right through, again, the odontoid process, right at the very base. So the skull so that you maintain both areas in the most sellable form. And they said sellable and I said, yeah, sellable. We're not allowed to sell human parts, except guess what? It happens every single day. Listen, you can buy a human head for 800 bucks. And then they asked me more about the trade and how I knew about the trade. Well, it's because I'm an anatomy professor and I gave them references.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  She told them about that one time a company reached out to her via email, asking her if she was interested in purchasing body parts for her anatomy class.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  I really honestly think that based on what I've seen, that this woman's head came from this trade. You know, part of hers in California, part of hers here, part of hers there. You know, she probably has nerve tissue here and this there, you know? This is the way the trade works. It splits you up into, you know, you're essentially stripped mine for all your parts and then they go everywhere.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Finally, Michelle explained that this is the reason why they hadn't been able to identify her.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  She might never be found because no one's looking for her. If she's part of the body trade, no one's even looking for her. Right? She's not a missing person in any way. And a lot of people were floored by this. And I said, well, please don't be number one. And number two, it's happening all the time. And it's especially happening to the poorest among us in the United States.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Michelle's guess was that this woman or her family probably didn't have the means to pay for a funeral service. So they opted to donate her body.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  In order to get a free funeral or a very much reduced in price funeral. And that this was an alternative way to give her a send off, I suppose, that didn't incur a lot of debt in the family. Of course, I mean, people can and do donate their body to sciences for all the right reasons, not just because they're too poor for a funeral. So it was one of those two things. And I always, at this point, want to have a very strong disclaimer that donating your body to science is distinctly different than donating your organs. Organ donation is a totally different thing and it's highly regulated. So for me, the case wasn't closed, but it was definitely sort of decided or narrowed.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  to a degree that they could limit what they were doing. And it became the new theory that day.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Let's go for it. You know, nothing else has worked. Let's go for it.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  An investigative team from Reuters would ultimately step in to help to see how easy it is to purchase a body part and to see whether the anatomical cuts match those of the severed head. Well, just a few emails later, they were able to secure two heads for $600 plus $300 in shipping. The parts arrived vacuum packed and covered in dry ice. At the neck, both heads had cut marks very similar to those on our woman with the cocked eyebrow and smoker's mouth. And while this may confirm that she did in fact come from the body trade, there's still no way of knowing. Because to Michelle's point,

• 50:59Speaker 02

  no one has stepped up to say they know her.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  By the time December rolled around again, the police investigation was as cold as ever, and the severed head had been sitting in a refrigerator in the evidence room of the Economy Borough Police Department for a year.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Just getting worse and worse in terms of her condition.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  We felt that she deserved better than that. We decided that we wanted to have her buried.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  This isn't something that police departments do for the unidentified. Usually, the county morgue will dispose of an unclaimed body. But in this case, Chief O'Brien decided to plan a funeral. Over the next two weeks, the coroner's office helped him secure a donated cemetery plot, a donated placard, a pastor.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I didn't expect to be invited, let alone Asked to be a pallbearer, which I'd never done for anyone in my life. It was an honor. It was beautiful weather, I remember that. I don't know what I was wearing, right? It's like the least important thing that day. I showed up at this beautiful chapel inside a cemetery that was near Economy.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  It would turn out to be the funeral service Michelle believes a woman probably never had.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Everybody who was a principal on the case, it seemed, was there. All the detectives. It was, it was actually a fairly well, I've been to, I've been to worse populated funerals than this woman. So I was really overjoyed at that thought. There's just an entire lineup of men in dark suits. The hearse, we're at the chapel. And I walk in and I will say I was, I didn't know what to expect. But I was happy to see a full-size casket. Obviously, she didn't need all of that, but it was the dignified thing to do.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Michelle, Chief O'Brien, and the rest of the pallbearers positioned themselves around the casket.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And I was towards the bottom, the foot end of the casket.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  They squatted down to grab a hold of it. And when they lifted it up.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Even though I should have expected this, I was very surprised at how light it was.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  There's nothing there, you know, there is very little weight.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  It took almost no effort.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  I could see where that could, you know, say, hey, we're missing something, you know?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  And then we carried her very light casket into the hearse, which then traveled just a little way down the hill. It was extremely somber and I, there, most of us felt exactly the same way.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  This was our life for a year. So it was almost as if it was a loved one of our own, you know what I mean?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  We watched her get laid into the ground and then we all were handed flowers, which we all dropped into her grave.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Before heading out to the funeral, Michelle had gone out to her garden.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  And I cut a bunch of rosemary sprigs because they're for remembrance, of course. So I tied them with a ribbon. I made a beautiful little, like a nosegay of rosemary, and I left both of them on her grave.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  There was a part of me that was hesitant about walking away from her at this point. I don't want this to be the final thing. I didn't want closure because this isn't the right way to close this case.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  The placard that now sits on her grave says Jane Doe, found on December 12, 2014.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  It does really get under your skin, and I lived with that story for so long. I missed having an emotional, daily connection to thinking about a problem that I and many others wanted to solve. And that's when I made a promise never to really forget or stop trying for her.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  She is at least in a place better than in an evidence refrigerator, or laying in the woods where she was found.

• 55:23Glynn Washington?

  A very, very big thank you to Michelle Vitale and Chief Michael Bryan for sharing this story with SNAP. More recently, Michelle worked on the Frontier Park skeleton case. A human skull turned up in Erie, and as soon as Michelle saw it, she drew a number of forensic sketches showing a white male with strong features. When the man's identity was ultimately discovered, he looked a lot like one of Michelle's drawings. Meanwhile, back in economy, Chief O'Brien still waits for a new lead to pop up in the severed head case.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, and let me try to get out of the way a little bit.

• 55:59Glynn Washington?

  Behind his desk sits a clay sculpture of Jane Doe. Looking at him, he placed it inside a fish tank that he bought at a local store.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  I get people to come in my office and they say, "That's a little creepy." But I look at it as this is my reminder that we don't know who she is yet. You know, it's like she's giving me the feeling that she's watching over what I'm doing and maybe tossing me in the right direction. I don't know.

• 56:27Glynn Washington?

  The regional score for this story was by Renzo Goryo. It was produced by Nancy Lopez.

• 56:40Glynn Washington?

  It happened. It happened. Think, consider. That was just one episode, just one magic bean. And understand, there's a whole tree full of the Snap Judgment Podcast. Subscribe. SnapJudgment.org. Snap is brought to you by the team that has a place for everything and puts everything in its place. Except for the uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, it just shoves stuff in its pockets. On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers, America, AFL-CIO Local 51.

• 57:21Glynn Washington?

  This is Nancy Lopez, Pat Lucini Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, John Facile, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Davy Kim, Beau Walsh, and David X. May. Wow. This is not the news. No way this is news. But this is PRX.