My wife called me and she said, I got this phone call, and I said, oh my god, Marge, what did you tell them?

How much have you told them?

She was telling me was that there were some bones that were found in a wall in a house.

I said, that sounds like just such a scam.

Investigating a cold case is challenging.

Often the crime scene evidence is damaged or contaminated, witnesses may have died, and police reports are sometimes lost, and then there are inexplicable mysteries.

In the past, I'd always thought human remains were found pretty soon after a crime, or if it takes a while, that they're found in secluded spots, like in the woods off a main road or in a field behind a barn.

But what if there remains sitting right next to you for years?

They could be anywhere at your office and a friend's backyard, or maybe in your own home.

Producer Catherine Fenalosa is here with one of the oldest unidentified human remains cases ever to be solved.

This case takes place outside of Chicago, and it's nineteen seventy eight.

Okay, so you got to go back a bit, and there's a couple, James and Martha Skinner, and they've rented this house, and it's a cute house.

I actually looked it up.

Then it's a shingled house, two stories with a little picket fence.

It's in a little town called Batavia.

And even though they're renting this house, they decide to do some renovations.

It's a Sunday.

They are taking down the baseboard and part of a wall, and Martha starts to notice that things are falling out of the wall and hitting the floor.

First she notices a corn cob, which is like a little.

Weird right, like an ear of corn.

Yes, an ear of corn.

But the house was built in the eighteen fifties, so it's not totally out of the norm for people to have like stuffed things in the walls as insulation.

So then five shoes, not pairs of shoes, but just five individual shoes, a couple of old bottles, and then a woman's bonnet, a black bonnet, so picture like a cotton hat that you would tie under the chind.

This bonnet is fairly old.

And then.

A jaw bone, like a human jaw bone.

Martha Skinner says, and I went back and read the newspaper article that was written at the time.

Martha Skinner says, the second the jawbone hit the ground, I knew it was human, and she freaks out.

So they pull a little more of the wall apart and part of a human skull falls down.

So at this point Martha and James are completely freaked out and they call the police.

Yeah, my immediate thought would be like serial killer, you know.

So that was on their minds.

So they call the police.

The police come and they bring a cadaver dog with them, and the police officers lead the dog around the house and the dog doesn't stop and show interest in any other spots of the house, just this one particular area of the wall, and they determine that's it.

I just think that if I found human remains in my wall, first of all, I would not be able to sleep that night.

Second of all, I would be like, am I in danger?

Now?

If I bring these remain to the police.

Will someone come in here in the middle of the night and try to take other evidence out of the walls?

You don't know who knows about the remains, where they're from, what crime was involved, what the motive was.

Martha did admit that she was worried that a murder had happened in the house.

I mean, obviously a crime was involved if there are human remains in a wall.

There are photos from that Sunday when they take down part of this wall and you can see Martha down on the ground looking at all of the you know, the bottles and the shoes that have fallen to the floor.

And her first thought was exactly the same as yours.

Alan, I mean, she was like, Oh, my god, did a serial killer live here?

Like, are we living in the middle of a crime scene and we had no idea?

Oh and are there other bodies buried in this house?

What a nightmare.

I would need to get a hotel.

I would get out of there.

Oh my goodness, I know.

So the police do their investigation, they look through their missing person reports and it's not leading them anywhere, so they actually reach out to one of the top forensic anthropologists at the time.

His name is doctor Clyde snow And Alan, this guy is a really big deal.

He worked on serial killer John Wayne Gacy's case.

He examined JFK's remains and even toot in common the Egyptian pharaoh from three thousand years ago, and so Snow determines that this skull is really old.

It probably belonged to a white female.

He's thinking someone like sixteen to eighteen years old who died before nineteen hundred.

So this skull is at least say ninety four years old by the time they find it.

How many different people have lived there, just eating their dinner next to this body in the wall.

What a horrifying thought.

They list this as a Jane Doe case, and they decide to ship the skull to the local history museum in town, and the case goes cold.

So that's nineteen seventy eight.

Fast forward to twenty twenty one.

There is an employee who works at this history museum in Batavia, Illinois, and she's cleaning out an office and there is a box and she opens the box and she is shocked to find parts of a skull in this box.

Yeah, so she freaks.

Out yet again.

This person their remains are just getting moved around to random locations, and we still don't know even who it is or how they died.

We have no idea.

She calls the police, and the police again look through their records and they realize that these are the same exact remains that were found in this house.

So they take them back and the case is officially reopened.

Finally.

It's actually kind of miraculous that after all that it does get reopened.

I know.

So this box with the skull lands on the desk of Gabriella Allison.

She's an investigator in the cold case unit of the Kane County Corner's Office in Illinois, and ailan she's actually the perfect person to look into this case because it really hits home for her.

My grandfather was murdered and basically everybody knew what happened, but nobody investigated.

The police knew, everybody knew, and unfortunately my grandma she really just kind of had to move away and not know anything as to, you know, having any justice for his case.

So for me, it's obviously about the families and if I can help families get some answers in a way of maybe giving back to my family in some sort of you know way.

Oh my god, And she basically promises herself that even though this case seems unsolvable, we owe it to whoever this person is to give them a name.

This can't stay as a Jane Doe.

The information that she had to go on was that this skull probably along to a young woman, you know, sixteen to eighteen years old.

And this was a person who lived and had a name, had a family, had a life story.

Yeah, and they wanted to put these remains to rest and to understand who this person was and how they ended up in the wall of a house, which is also an incredible mystery in itself.

Yeah, because you know someone put them there.

To be honest, if I were a Gabriella, where would you even start.

I mean there's no one to talk to who was there, who knows what happened.

I mean, how could you possibly know what to do?

I asked Gabriella that exact question.

So she and the corner at the time, a guy named Rob Russell, they jump right in.

They realized they're going to need help since the only evidence they have to work with are these skeletal remains, and with no other clues, it comes down to get DNA from the skull, because without it, this goes back to being a cold case.

Okay, so the best shot at solving this case rests on getting DNA from the skull.

Yes, Gabriella and Rob at the corner's office reach out to authram and the lab agrees to take the case, but first Alan they need Gabriella to ship them the skull hang on.

I know we've talked about a number of cases at this point, and they've all had to send incredibly valuable evidence to Authroom's lab, But I gotta admit I'm fascinated with what happens behind the scenes.

I mean, this can't be like shipping a birthday present to a friend or wait, is it.

So it's kind of wild.

It's both highly orchestrated and shockingly simple at the same time.

So I visited the Authroom offices a while back, and basically every morning a similar scene plays out.

I had to detail the type of package that I received, who I got it from, and then had to detail the time and day that I got it.

That's Raina Ramirez.

She's the first person you meet when walking into the Authroom offices.

She's at her desk, bright and early, and pretty immediately trucks start rolling in.

There's FedEx, ups, DHL and the post office.

One two, three, four, six.

And on this day, six cardboard packages are quickly stacked on Reina's desk.

It all depends how I was shipped equally Express Priority or just a regular delivery.

So those typically get here in the afternoon, but if it was Priori, they'll be here before seven o'clock in the morning.

If they are going to be FedEx expressed, they'll be here between nine to eleven o'clock in the morning.

So this is where crime scene evidence lands when it's shipped from state crime labs and police departments.

Yeah, and packages hold human remains like this job, but it could also be vials of blood, teeth, scraps of blood stained clothing, really anything with DNA.

The first step is to inspect and make sure that it's not open or any damage at all.

Then I take pictures of all sides of the box and angles.

Again, what are making sure that there's no tampering with the evidence.

Raina quickly enters the information into a database and the boxes are taken into an evidence room.

Do the delivery drivers know what they're delivering.

So they're more regular ones.

They know what they're bringing because they've been seeing us on TV or stuff like that.

Like all these package is Priority needs to go to ATUM and typically they don't like to miss my route because of their snacks.

Raina's got tons of snacks dashed behind her desk.

She's got bottles of gatorade and cold water, bags of chips and cookies.

She wants to make Authrum their first delivery stop of the day.

She's a smart woman.

I mean these packages are priceless.

Really yeah, And she says, the drivers are really part of this work.

They're amazing.

There's one particular FedEx guy that he was amazed by our Christmas tree.

So every winter Authorum puts up a tree in the lobby and instead of ornaments, they hang pictures of victims whose cases they've solved.

And when he saw the pictures, he's like, it makes me proud that, in a tiny part, I'm part of that salut.

Oh wow.

So I have to ask, does NA know what's inside every box that lands on her desk?

I don't.

On my end, I try to avoid even focusing on who's the center.

I feel like the less I know, the better I guess subconsciously protect myself.

I don't know, but my part, it's concentrating on the tracking number.

That's all I need to know.

I don't need to know anything else.

That's for the scientists.

That have to do the magic.

Good for her, but honestly, I'd be so curious to know what evidence was inside.

So back to Gabriella in the Kane County Corner's office.

Yeah, so Authurne just told her, Hey, ship us the skull that was found in the wall of the house and we'll see what we can find out about it.

Yeah, I just put it in a box and ship it to us, and I'm like, do you know what you're asking me?

So we packed it up, you know, lots of bubble wrap, and then I'll never forget when I was at the FedEx, I'm like, the person was asking me the value of it, and I'm like, uh, yeah, right, but I wrote like fragile all over it.

I'm like, please be really careful.

You know, you're just kind of like freaking out because obviously if something happens to it, I mean, you've lost your taste and you've lost human remains, which would not be good.

Gabriella did a great job packing up the skull because it arrives undamaged, and after Raina enters it into their chain of custody, it's unpacked and examined in the lab.

Now this is a highly controlled environment.

Forensic scientists wear head to toe white coveralls with gloves and goggles.

And the day I visited, a technician had a human leg bone laid out on a table.

Oh, it's like a sci fi movie or something.

Yeah, And Kristin Middleman of Authorham explains what happens next.

Here we are in the bone room.

So this is a human bone, and you can see here she has the measuring tape out and she's this is an unidentified remains case.

You can see that the remains are pretty old because you can see all that classification and stuff on the outside.

Where were you watching from?

Were you in the room with the bone?

So we weren't in the room because it's such a highly controlled environment.

But we're standing just outside of the bone room, which has floor to ceiling glass.

And so what she's going to do now is she's going to label and photograph all of this and then she's going to drill into that bone and get a small amount of the interior of the bone so that the DNA can be extracted.

And once she does that, and she's linda it right now so you can watch it.

She's going to take that part of the bone and solubilize it in a solution and then start to extract the DNA and that's when it goes back into the DNA extraction room.

I can hear the sound of the drill.

Yeah, and it sort of looks like if you were to drill through a piece of pottery, like there's some dust coming up.

Once the technician is done, the bone samples are run through custom built machines and software that identify hundreds of thousands of DNA markers.

All of these are tiny clues as to who this person is.

So I'm guessing this is the same thing that happens to the skull gabriellasent.

And once the DNA is extracted, what happens because we need a name, like who does this skull belong to?

Yeah, exactly, And that's where authrm's team of genetic genealogists come.

Men, my name is Carla Davis, and I am the chief genetic genealogist at AUTHRON.

Carla Davis and her team take the genetic profile that's been generated and they start building out family trees.

I'm fascinated by this part of the investigation, so I was really excited to talk to Carla and ask her how she got into this kind of work.

I was born into it because I was born not knowing who my father was, and that part of me was always missing.

It was as if there was a hole in my heart.

Right and DNA came on the scene.

So my first DNA test was on twenty three and meter and at that time, I had like to eighth cousins.

I didn't know what to do with fifth to eighth cousins.

I didn't understand how DNA worked, and I didn't know anyone on my list.

Right, I'm like, oh, this is not going to help.

Then I took an ancestry DNA test.

I had a third cousin match, and I said, Okay, I think I can do something with a third cousin match.

So I just started absorbing and learning anything and everything that I could get my hands on.

So how to apply DNA evidence to genealogical research?

And I'm like, I'm on something here, and then I ended up identifying my birth father.

What was that like for you?

Even emotionally?

Oh my goodness, you know, it was like if you look at a picture and you tear it in half, you only see half of that person.

You don't see the other half.

It's just.

Finding who he was, even though he had passed away back in two thousand and five.

And completed the picture of who I.

Was, Carla learned that her dad was a truck driver and an amateur race car driver, and that she was his only child.

And I should add that Carla's mom died when she was five, so she grew up desperate to know more about both of her parents.

After that discovery, Carla says she became kind of addicted to genealogy research and she started helping adoptees who were looking for their birth parents.

She ends up solving over two hundred cases, and before she knows it, strangers are emailing her asking for her help.

So when the Golden State Killer was announced, it was like, I can apply what I know.

So I knew that this was this was going to be the future of how perpetrators and unidentified human remains would be identified.

So how does she make the leap to working on crime scene evidence?

Yeah, good question.

I was curious about that too.

For me, it really is personal because when my daughter was ten years old, her friend was kidnapped and brutally murdered and her body was thrown in the ravine in your Orleans and it was devastating, not just to my daughter, to myself, to the entire community.

It was as if time stopped until she was found.

What did that mean to that community?

She was just our house, just the weekend prior to her being taken.

I didn't want my daughter going outside to play anymore.

I was scared to death for that.

When a person is taken and they go missing, it's not just their family that suffers.

Is such a larger scale.

Yeah, So to get them home and give everyone answers.

I don't think anyone has closure, but somehow it's information that will allow them to hopefully heal.

That should be our mission.

I wanted to talk about the case of the human skull found in the wall of the house you worked on that.

One of the things that caught my attention was this person died before for nineteen hundred, This could be one of the oldest cases that author them solves, And sure enough, it was one of the oldest cases that we have solved to date.

What was challenging about the case.

So, if you've ever taken a consumer DNA test, once your results are complete, you are given a list of names that are your genetic relatives, and in this case, the most recent common ancestors dated back to the late seventeen hundreds.

Oh my goodness.

So we had to use historical records, census records, birth certificates, birth records, death announcements, death records, military records, whatever we can use to identify each generation.

In this case, Carla is able to track down ancestors a couple who had six kids, and based on the DNA, she thinks the skull belongs to one of the six kids.

So after almost two hundred years, there are only six people that these bones could belong to.

Two two sons, and four daughters.

One daughter had died when she was eight years old.

Two of the other daughters lived full lives and they had died and were buried in Nebraska.

But there was one daughter that really we were focused on, and that was Esther.

Esther was born in eighteen forty eight.

So now you have to confirm Esther's identity with one of her living relatives.

So I mentioned that Esther had one daughter, so that daughter had two children, So then we identified who those children were, and then we got down to living people.

At this point, Authoram gives Gabriella Allison at the Kane County Corner's Office a short list of names because they need one more DNA sample, and this time from someone who's alive.

Well it started.

My wife got a phone call and it was Gabriella calling from the Kinge County Corner's office.

I was at work.

My wife called me and she said, I got this phone call.

And I said, oh my god, Marge, that sounds like just such a scam.

My wife said, no, you should call him back.

I think it's the real deal.

Wayne Swiller is a retiree living in Oregon, and he listens to his wife and he calls Gabriella back, and Gabriella begins to explain why she's calling.

I interrupted her and I said, hey, I just got to tell you right off the bat, I don't believe you.

This is just too incredible.

And it turns out he's a former police officer who's worked cold cases for decades.

Oh so maybe he's skeptical from experience.

Yeah, I mean he knows this call could be a scam.

Maybe like someone he put behind bars years ago is trying to get back at him.

But his wife is intrigued, and she convinces him to give Gabriella a chance to explain.

They knew the history of the whole case, and they were so excited and committed that I thought, you can't fake this.

These guys are all in and I've got to help him out whatever I can do.

It's ironic that, having investigated cold cases in the past, now weans on the other end of the phone.

Yeah, and he knows how it feels for Gabriella to make that call because he's done it so many times himself in homicides and missing person cases.

You don't just work that job and then leave, do You take that job with you because you get to know the families.

You get to know the victims.

There's mothers of some of these victims that will come down to the precinct every year on the anniversary of their son or daughter's death and just check in and see if there's been any new developments.

I mean, you're talk in twenty years after their loved one has been killed, and it made it really personal.

That's more than a job that walks around with you.

I'm guessing Wayne agrees to give some of his DNA.

Yeah, he gives what's called a DNA reference swab, which is really just a quick swab from the inside of his cheek.

Is it a match?

Yeah?

It turns out that Esther Ann Granger is Wayne's great great grandmother.

Oh my god, that's so cool.

So now that we have a name, what do we know about her?

She was born in Indiana in eighteen forty eight, and she marries her husband, Charles, when she's sixteen.

Esther becomes pregnant pretty soon after that with her first child, but sadly, she dies after giving birth to her daughter, who they also named Esther.

Oh that's so sad.

But that's so sweet that they named her daughter after her.

But I also wonder how did her skull end up in the wall of a home eighty miles away in Illinois?

And where's the rest of her body?

Yeah, I know a lot of people have been wondering about that.

Gabriella and Rob have some ideas well.

The running theory is that she was grave robbed.

Her body was sold to somebody, you know, a medical school or individual who was a broker.

Kind of gross to talk about, but a broker of body parts.

We don't know if she was sold as a whole, or if they parted it out and sold it to different types of schools.

We also know the first home owner that had the house built.

He was a doctor.

He died soon after that, and his son stayed and lived there and he was a surgeon.

How she actually got in the wall, I don't know that we'll ever know.

So we don't know if the rest of Uster's body is so in that house.

We don't.

But remember the cadaver dog didn't smell anything, and police back then didn't have any reasons really to take apart any more of the walls, So maybe we won't ever know.

What about Wayne, what does he do with Esther's skull?

So officials in Batavia, Illinois, where Esther's remains were found, offered to cremate the skull and inter her ashes in the local cemetery, and Wayne traveled to be there.

I think in some ways my reaction surprised me.

I've been really a private person.

It was just that wave of emotions that I never got to meet her, and kind of I guess sadness about how we got to where we were, but also just the emotion of closure and the respect that she deserved and wishing that she had a different path right, sad that she had died at such a young age, and then the way that her remains retreated in the process.

And I don't blame anybody for that.

From almost the beginning, I felt like this story needed to be told.

Your life makes a difference the people you touch it made a difference, and it needs to be acknowledged.

It strikes me that solving this case not only gives esther back her identity, but it fills in some of Wayne's family history, connecting him to ancestors he didn't even know existed.

And it's a case with no eyewitnesses, no clues.

I mean, there's not even a crime scene to investigate, and it all came down to DNA to solve a mystery from one hundred and fifty years ago.

Next Time on America's Crime Lab.

Received a nine one one call from a neighbor.

When they answered the door, they found her in nothing but a blood soaked T shirt.

You know what it looks like.

There's another case in another state that it also has unknown DNA that.

Is the same.

You know, then, I'm really excited.

Now we have a potential suspect.

America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is by David Woji.

Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa, Emily Foreman and Jessica Albert.

Our Executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hattigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at AUTHRM.

I'm Ailen Lance Lesser.

Thanks for listening.