The Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office (South Carolina) is requesting the public’s assistance in an attempt to identify skeletal remains that were discovered in 1977. The case has been making improvements due to the efforts of the Cold Case team and Detective John Plitsch.
“We are asking the public to please take a look at these photographs of the facial reconstruction to see if you might know who this individual could be,” Berkeley County Sheriff Duane Lewis said. “We would like to get in contact with the next of kin of this victim so they can have their remains laid to rest, properly.”
On October 4, 1977, skeletal remains were discovered by a worker clearing brush at a location off Highway 52. At the time of the discovery, the coroner responded to the scene, recovered the remains and transferred them to the Medical University of South Carolina for analysis, but nothing pointed to the woman’s identity.
In January 2020, Plitsch looked at the cold case with renewed interest, transporting the remains to Texas and then to Palm Beach County. In April, the remains were transferred back to the Berkeley Sheriff’s Office, complete with a detailed facial sketch.
“This is just an amazing reconstruction,” Lewis said during a press conference on Wednesday. “I’ve looked at these things many times over my 30 years and we don’t see this type of detail with an individual when all we had was skeletal remains.”
The sheriff said facial features and poor dental care suggest the unidentified woman may have ancestral ties to another country, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica or the Bahamas.
Investigators are running DNA samples from the remains against CODIS in hopes of a hit. Lewis said they also plan to use genetic genealogy to try to get an identification.
The remains were recently transferred to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification Forensic Anthropology for further analysis.
Republished courtesy of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office.