Forensic anthropologist called in to investigate human remains found in North Union
A forensic anthropologist from Erie was called to help police with the excavation of human skeletal remains found near a Fayette County home.
State police said they received information about a missing person and located the remains in the area of Washington Avenue and Hogsett Lane in North Union Township Tuesday afternoon.
While there are no neighboring homes, two people who live nearby said Wednesday that the home where the remains were found is abandoned.
Heather Fowler lives above the area of the scene and said, to the best of her knowledge, no one has lived in the home since she moved into the area in 2014. Over the past decade, she said the only activity she’s seen in that area has been people dumping trash there.
She was concerned when police were called to the normally quiet neighborhood.
“I don’t know if someone did something to somebody there, or if someone took somebody back there after the fact,” she said. “It kind of freaked me out because I have three daughters.”
Her neighbor, Bret Fowler, said he, too, knew of people dumping trash in the area and remembered hearing and seeing a group of girls running and screaming at each other a couple of weeks ago when he was out fixing his truck.
“I just sure hope it wasn’t one of those girls,” he said.
Fayette County District Attorney Mike Aubele declined comment Wednesday, telling reporters the only information he could reveal is that the scene was still being processed.
Dr. Dennis Dirkmaat, forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst University in Erie, was called to help police handle the investigation.
Dirkmaat has worked on a number of local cases over the years, including in 2000, when the mummified remains of Ohio medical consultant Ira Swearingen were found in Greene County.
Swearingen was on his way to Uniontown Hospital to assist in a surgery in 1999 when he was kidnapped and killed by several people in Washington County.
Dirkmaat was able to determine that Swearingen’s skull fractures were caused when he was shot in the head.
He also was involved in several Fayette County homicide cases.
In 1999, Dirkmaat worked in Bear Rocks, Bullskin Township, excavating 2,200 bone fragments that belonged to Helen Gillin. Police believed Gillin was poisoned by her adoptive parents in 1992, and her body was burned in the family’s backyard fire pit.
Her adoptive parents were charged in the case. Gillins’ adoptive father, James Gillin, was convicted of first-degree murder and her mother, Roberta, was acquitted after a trial.
Dirkmaat was again called on in 2003 when the burned remains of Danielle McManus were found in a van at a junkyard near her family’s Normalville home. Dirkmaat’s examination helped lead to the second-degree murder conviction of McManus’ cousin, Brian Hays.
In 2010, he was called to investigate an area in North Union Township, off railroad tracks on Brushwood Road. There, police used information gleaned during their continuing investigation of a 2001 homicide to identify where portions of the body of Jerry Lee Cushey of Monongahela were located. That investigation led to the conviction of three men – one from Connellsville and two from Elizabeth.
And in 2003, Dirkmaat consulted in a case in which Brian Keith Hays sexually assaulted and then killed his cousin and burned her remains in a van in a Normalville junkyard.