The Bone Reader - Snap Classic

Summary

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The Bone Reader – Snap Judgment (Snap Classic)

Podcast: Snap Judgment
Host: Glynn Washington (Snap Judgment and PRX)
Episode Air Date: January 1, 2026
Main Guests: Michelle Vitale (forensic artist/professor), Chief Michael O’Brien (Economy Borough Police Department)

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Episode Overview

This episode, called The Bone Reader, dives into the heart of a chilling and baffling mystery: how did a well-embalmed, severed head of an unidentified woman end up in the woods of a small Pennsylvania town? Through the perspective of forensic artist Michelle Vitale and Police Chief Michael O’Brien, listeners follow a vivid journey through forensic science, law enforcement, and the ethical ambiguities of the American “body trade.” The episode explores grief, respect for the dead, and the quest for identity for the unknown.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Forensic Artist’s Unlikely Path

• Michelle Vitale’s Background: Started as an art professor teaching scientific illustration and anatomy. She was unexpectedly thrust into the world of forensics as a courtroom sketch artist during the infamous “Pizza Bomber” trial.

  “I think, essentially, I prepared for a life as a forensic artist my whole life. And I came out of it with a whole new direction.” — Michelle Vitale (07:30)

• Interest in Human Faces: Her fascination with reading nuancing bone structure for artistic portrayal led to forensic facial reconstruction.

2. Discovery of the Severed Head

• The Call: In Economy, PA, police received an unusual call—someone had found a human head in the woods (09:08).

  “He says, ‘Okay, this is a strange one… somebody found a head in the woods.’ I said, oh, this can’t be good.” — Chief O’Brien (09:15)

• On the Scene: The head showed little evidence of time in the elements. It was freshly coiffed, clean, and missing eyes, which had been replaced by red rubber balls—a bizarre, almost ritualistic touch (12:18).

• Embalmed and Disconnected: Discovery that the head was embalmed, as if prepared for a funeral, yet detached, puzzled authorities (13:12).

3. Initial Investigation and Forensic Process

• Searching for Answers:

  • Police eliminated possibilities of a recent violent crime or missing person locally.
  • Early theories: serial killer, grave robbery, or an extreme ritual (14:52–16:28).

• Michelle’s Entry: Michelle is contacted to help ID the woman via forensic artistry (14:21).

4. The Bone Reading

• At the Lab: Michelle and a physical anthropologist meticulously examine the head, focused on facial features and evidence only bone and skin can reveal (17:07–19:32).

  • Notable Quote:

    “What are the most salient parts that she's presenting here that need to be in the drawing… What can I do with this information?” — Michelle Vitale (18:44)

• Critical Observations:

  • Hair was not styled for a wake but simply permed (20:10).
  • No makeup present (20:27).
  • The precise surgical removal of the head—clean cuts through the topmost vertebrae—hinted at an expert, not a frenzied killer (22:08).

5. Shifting Theories

• Initial Dead-Ends: Sketches are distributed, generating a flood of leads, none of which pan out. The heads’ unique features—missing eyes, odd mouth shape (due to the way it lay)—make matching difficult (30:11–31:04).

• Michelle’s Professional Insight:

  • She tells Chief O’Brien that the exacting, professional cuts and embalming fit patterns seen in the “body trade”—the legal but loosely regulated donation and sale of bodies for anatomical science (45:51–48:25).

    “None of this says grave robber, crazed killer, serial killer, any of that stuff. To me, it all says the body train.” — Michelle Vitale (45:51)

6. The Body Trade Revelation

• Explaining the Trade:
  • Donated bodies are routinely split and sold for research, dissection, and training, often without families realizing how remains are handled (47:01–48:25).
  • Poorer families sometimes donate bodies for cost relief.
  • Organ donation is highly regulated; body donation is not distinguished and is poorly controlled (48:36).

7. Pursuing Closure Without Resolution

• No One to Miss Her:

  • Michelle theorizes the woman was never reported missing—her family likely believes she was properly interred.
  • A Reuters investigation demonstrates how easy it is to purchase human body parts online, corroborating Michelle’s theory (49:34–50:35).

• Funeral for Jane Doe:

  • The woman, still unidentified, is given a respectful burial organized by Chief O’Brien and attended by all involved, including Michelle as a pallbearer (51:10–53:18).

    “It was an honor. It was beautiful weather… She kind of was a springboard for different kinds of conversations along those lines.” — Michelle Vitale (51:10, 37:53)

  • Chief O’Brien: “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?” (53:01)

8. Epilogue and Continuing Impact

• The Unsolved Still Watching:

  • Chief O’Brien keeps Michelle’s clay sculpture of the woman on his desk, a reminder that the case remains open and unresolved (55:19).

    “People come in my office and they say that’s a little creepy… I look at it as this is my reminder that we don’t know who she is yet… maybe toss me in the right direction.” — Chief O’Brien (55:27)

• Michelle’s Legacy:

  • She continues to work on other forensic cases, striving for closure and honor for the unidentified.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Michelle’s Chill at the Trial (Drawing Marjorie Diehl Armstrong):

  “She looked at me and gave me a look of death, like she wanted to kill me then and there. I got a chill from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet.” — Michelle (05:36)

• The Bizarre Finding in the Morgue:

  “Her eyes are both missing. And there’s two red rubber balls placed inside our eye sockets… he picked it up, he had dropped it, and it just bounced across the room.” — Chief O’Brien (12:18)

• Michelle’s Dedication & Bond:

  “I just wanted her to be around. I wanted her to be in my peripheral vision even when I wasn’t working on her.” (35:41)

• On Reading the Bones:

  “The bones speak to you. And the bones are telling me they’re not the same person.” — Michelle, on debunking a possible match (33:36)

• On the Grim Realities of Death for the Unclaimed:

  “She might never be found because no one’s looking for her. If she’s part of the body trade… she’s not a missing person in any way.” — Michelle (48:06)

• Funeral and Remembrance:

  “And I cut a bunch of rosemary sprigs because they’re for remembrance, of course… and I left both of them on her grave.” — Michelle (53:18)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 03:12 – Michelle’s first day as a sketch artist at the “Pizza Bomber” trial
• 09:08 – Discovery of the severed head in the woods
• 12:18 – The morgue reveals missing eyes, red rubber balls
• 17:07 – Michelle and colleague begin the forensic exam
• 22:08 – Surgical cut on the neck hints at expert removal
• 29:10 – Michelle completes and submits her first forensic sketch
• 45:46 – The big reveal: Michelle proposes the body-trade theory
• 51:10 – The Jane Doe funeral, with Michelle as pallbearer
• 55:19 – Chief O’Brien’s reflection on closure and the reminder in his office

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Language & Tone

Reflective, empathetic, and intimate. The speakers, especially Michelle and Chief O’Brien, reveal a raw blend of professional detachment, empathy for the unknown woman, and a stubborn, human drive to bring dignity to the dead. The episode carefully respects the dignity of its subject while inviting listeners to confront the reality of anonymous death and the underregulated “body trade.”

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Takeaway

The Bone Reader is a haunting story about loss, identity, and the fate of the unclaimed dead. As much about the people who try to restore a name and a story to the nameless as it is about the mystery itself, it’s both a procedural and a meditation on dignity and remembrance.

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If you want the full emotional weight, listen to the voices themselves. But if you can’t, this summary has you covered on every critical beat, detail, and twist.

Transcript

[A]

SNAP Studios we are so grateful to you for your support over the years. We get to make stories year after year because of you, but we really love to know more about you, what makes you love the Snap. And if you're willing to tell us a little about yourself and your relationship with the show, I would really appreciate it. We we'd love your honest feedback. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Our first few questions will ask a little bit about you so we can make sure we're talking to people from a wide range of backgrounds. KQED.org snapsurvey that's KQED.org snapsurveY and thank you so much for taking this survey and listening. It means a lot. KQED.org snapsurvey thank you. If you're running the party this year, know that Whole Foods Market is your holiday headquarters. Host like a pro with heat. Neat sides from the prepared foods department. Easy and delicious. Yes, they have all the fix ins. Stock up with wallet friendly favorites from the 365 brand sales throughout the month on main course proteins with no antibiotics ever. And if you're anything like me, you'll appreciate that you can order online for pickup and delivery and select zip codes. Make it look easy. Shop for everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. Snap Judgment is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save Hundreds of Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. 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? Today on snap, a mystery like no other. We're calling it the Bone Reader. My name is Lynn Washington. Congratulations. You've just been deputized because you're listening to Snap Judgment. 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 the listeners should 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

This was Michelle Vitale's very first day.

[B]

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

[C]

And the task before her was huge. To capture in drawings the trial of Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

[B]

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

[C]

Google 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.

[B]

Marjorie Diehl Armstrong was the mastermind of this plot.

[C]

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.

[B]

My main job is teaching.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

And I was directly behind her, her.

[C]

Focus entirely on the defendant, Marjorie Deal Armstrong.

[B]

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

[C]

Gave Michelle so much material to work with.

[B]

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 immediately half thoughts, embryonic thoughts, including this sort of lightning expression that crosses her eyes. She had bone structure and meatiness about her that was just fun to draw.

[C]

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

[B]

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, 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. So 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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

It was such a special, special moment.

[C]

But when Michelle got home later that.

[B]

Day, 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, should I rethink this whole job? On day four, I was just glad it was over.

[C]

In four days, the trial was over. Marjorie Diehl Armstrong would be found guilty and ultimately sentenced to life in prison without parole.

[B]

And I was like, good, done.

[C]

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

[B]

I teach regular illustration, scientific illustration and.

[C]

Human anatomy, who can paint and sculpt, and also happens to be married to a retired cop.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

My expertise is in human bone structure.

[C]

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. 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.

[B]

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

[C]

Michelle started giving talks to various police departments and coroner's 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.

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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.

[C]

Michael o' Brien is A police chief with the economy Borough Police Department.

[D]

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 when.

[C]

Chief o' Brien arrived on scene.

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

And when he squatted to the ground for a better look, her face and.

[D]

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 30ft from the roadway.

[C]

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

[D]

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.

[C]

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.

[D]

It was, I could use the word Eerie, probably, to say the least. You know, here you are walking out with this bag with this human head in it.

[C]

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

[D]

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 remove those. And that's where we discover that her eyes are both missing. And there's two red rubber balls placed inside our eye sockets. 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.

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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.

[C]

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.

[D]

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.

[B]

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.

[D]

It's her. It's Michelle Vitaly. 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.

[B]

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 did they think so far?

[C]

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

[D]

Could this be some crazy serial killer?

[B]

They were saying serial killer?

[D]

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?

[B]

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

[D]

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

[B]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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.

[D]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[D]

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

[B]

And I said, that's weird.

[C]

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.

[B]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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. I needed four hands. Essentially.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

When she walked through the doors of the wet lab, it was a tiny.

[B]

Wet lab, basically stainless steel surfaces, one gurney, one sort of sink.

[C]

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

[B]

And that plastic bag is what contains the head.

[C]

Quietly, Michelle and her colleague got ready.

[B]

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

[C]

They suited up.

[B]

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

[C]

Michelle dabbed some Vicks vapor rub under her nose.

[B]

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

[C]

And then she reached for the black.

[B]

Bag, which I opened up, and inside that, there was yet another bag, and in that one was the head. I gently lifted her out of the bag.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

What are the most salient parts that she's presenting here that need to be in the drawing, but to recreate the.

[C]

Woman'S face in a way that highlights her most prominent features that are very ID worthy, 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

Everyone was saying she had a hairdo, her hair had been styled, and that 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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

I was already aware that the eyes.

[C]

Had been removed, but only now could she fully appreciate what a challenge that presented.

[B]

As human beings, we're hardwired to recognize each other's eyes very much first and most powerfully. So how exactly would her eye lids 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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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. 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 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, 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.

[A]

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

[D]

At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

[B]

But but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

[C]

Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs.

[D]

Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers and.

[B]

Hopefully make you think. See the world anew.

[D]

Radiolab Adventures on the edge of what.

[A]

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[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

When Michelle got home, I basically cleared.

[B]

The decks and I spent nothing but the next 24 hours either drawing. I really was in a rush. No Doubt or sleeping. 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. Coming back to drawing her, like, I had forgotten, for example, that she had two tiny moles.

[C]

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

[B]

Face, then 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 JPEG to Mike.

[D]

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.

[C]

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

[D]

Severed head, embalmed, eyes are missing.

[C]

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.

[D]

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

[C]

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

[B]

It was, you know, a separate head.

[C]

Right.

[D]

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

[C]

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.

[D]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[D]

And while I'm talking to her on the phone, she's on a computer googling or whatever on ebay, embalming fluids, embalming tables.

[C]

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

[D]

You know, I'm listening to this thing. 1. Wow, this is just nuts.

[B]

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

[D]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[D]

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

[B]

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

[D]

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.

[B]

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

[C]

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

[D]

She became a very huge, integral part of the case.

[C]

A couple of weeks into the investigation, he got a tip where a woman's.

[D]

Head was removed from her body while it was in the casket.

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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, what can I put out there? What can I go back to the media with?

[C]

So Chief O' Brien reached out to Michelle again.

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

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

[C]

Sure, Michelle had studied the severed head up close and she'd taken some 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.

[B]

I just wanted to work on her fairly non stop.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

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

[C]

And then she grabbed six pounds of plastilina oil clay.

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

I knew exactly where her eyes were.

[C]

She knew the distance between her eyes.

[B]

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

[C]

She knew where the nose landed.

[B]

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 began built all of that.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

Really became part of our family. It was kind of weird.

[C]

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

[B]

You could see her from the dinner table. And 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.

[C]

Lines, 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.

[B]

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

[C]

When she began forming her mouth, I.

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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. I just felt like I was looking into her eyes for the first time, which 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.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

I was kind of in awe that the model looked identical to her drawing. I knew that I wanted to get it on television. You know, I was really, really excited about that.

[C]

He went public with the sculpture showing the face from different angles, hopefully prompting somebody somewhere out there to recognize a woman and come forward. But the few tips that came in were immediately ruled out. And then one day a call came.

[D]

In 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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[D]

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.

[B]

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

[D]

Different hairdo, you know, moles on her face, just her face, her nose, the position in 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.

[C]

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

[D]

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.

[A]

When we return is the Ohio woman who went missing from her home under mysterious circumstances. Jane Doe. Don't go anywhere. Snap judgment. Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Bone Reader episode. My name is Glenn 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.

[B]

But apparently the dentals don't line up enough, so it can't be her.

[D]

And this definitely isn't her. I. I was just like, it was like all the wind went out of me. It's like, oh, man. From an investigative standpoint, we know that we could 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.

[C]

Leads as they neared the one year anniversary of discovering the head.

[D]

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.

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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

[D]

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

[B]

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

[D]

Should we look at something else?

[B]

You know, and, 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?

[D]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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?

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

She accepts 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.

[B]

And thus you have a cut right through again, the odontoid process right at the very base of 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.

[C]

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.

[B]

I really honestly think that based on what I've seen, that this woman's head came from this trade. You know, part of her is in California, part of her is here, part of her is 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 strip mined for all your parts and then they go everywhere.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[C]

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 in.

[B]

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

[D]

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

[C]

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, no one has stepped up to say they know her. 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.

[B]

A year, just getting worse and worse. In terms of her condition, we felt.

[D]

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

[C]

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.

[B]

I didn't expect to be invited, let alone asked to be a pallbearer, which I'd never done for anyone in my. 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.

[C]

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

[B]

Everybody who was a principal on the case, it seemed, was there, all the detectives. It was actually a fairly. Well, 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.

[C]

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

[B]

Casket and I was towards the bottom, the foot end of the casket.

[C]

They squatted down to grab ahold of it, and when they lifted it up.

[B]

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

[D]

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

[B]

It took almost no effort.

[D]

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

[B]

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 most of us felt exactly the same way.

[D]

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?

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[D]

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.

[C]

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

[B]

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.

[D]

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

[A]

A very, very big thank you to Michelle Vitale and Chief Michael Bryan for sharing the 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.

[D]

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

[A]

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.

[D]

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 she's watching over what I'm doing and maybe toss me in the right direction. I don't know.

[A]

The original score for this story was by Renzel Gorio. It was produced by Nancy Lopez. It happened. It happened. Think consider that was just one episode, just one magic bean. And understand there's a whole tree full the Snap judgment podcast. Subscribe snapjudgment.org Snap is brought to you for 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 representative, producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the national association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers America, AFL CIO Local 51. There's Nancy Lopez, Pat Mesini Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorio, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Ducat, Flo Wiley, Jon Facile, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Davey Kim, Bo Walsh, and David Exma. Wow. This is not the news. No way is this the news. But this is prx.