Authorities in Pennsylvania have determined that a skull found on the banks of the Delaware River belongs to a man who went missing nearly 40 years ago.
The owner of the skull had been a mystery Bucks County since 1986, when it was first discovered by a fisherman near the Morrisville Boat Ramp.
The fisherman, who lived in Buckingham Township, took the skull to the police, but it was unable to be identified at the time and remained that way for decades.
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In October 2019, more than 30 years after it was discovered, Bucks County Detectives who were investigating a homicide took possession of the skull.
However, there were still no answers and it was then transferred to the Bucks County Coroner's Office, who entered the skull into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database.
It wasn't until September last year that Bucks County Detectives took another look at the skull, sending it to a private forensic DNA laboratory in Texas for genealogy testing.
Scientists at the lab managed to find a match for the skull with someone who had uploaded their DNA profile to a public genealogy database.
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Officials from the lab, Othram, then contacted Bucks County Detectives about the match, which turned out to be the daughter of Richard Thomas Alt.
In a statement about the discovery, the district attorney's office explained: "Building a profile from a contributor on that database, Othram officials believed the skull belonged to Richard Thomas Alt."
Alt was last seen on Christmas Eve 1984, when he was 31 years old. He was reported missing to the Trenton Police Department in early 1985, and officials at the time expressed belief he and his girlfriend, Laurie Suydam, were suspected homicide victims in New Jersey.
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Suydam's body was discovered in April 1985 in the Delaware River in Trenton, though Alt's body was never recovered.
After learning of the DNA match with the skull, detectives contacted the woman who had used the public genealogy database and she confirmed she was the daughter of Alt.
The 49-year-old woman told police her father went missing when she 11 years old, and that his girlfriend had been murdered in 1985.
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She agreed to share her DNA results from the genealogy site with Othram, and the lab returned with the results less than a week later, determining a parent-child relationship match to Alt.
Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub said he couldn't 'even imagine wondering and worrying about a lost family member for even a day, let alone for 37 years'.
"That wait is now over for Mr. Alt's family," Weintraub said. "I'm just glad that we could give them some peace of mind with this identification, and the eventual return of his remains to his family."
Following the identification of the skull, the Bucks County District Attorney's Office said it considers its investigation closed due to a 'lack of evidence of any crime being committed in Bucks County'.
Emily Brown