https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.true-crime/uWLxos-4KkUhttp://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=47724Who was buried here?posted 06/22/01
By JENNIFER SULLIVAN
jennifer...@herald-trib.com
Tugging on the bright orange body bag, the team removed the woman's body
from its Tampa grave. Perhaps now, after 18 years, she could be identified.
As they slid the bag into an ambulance bound for Bradenton last week, the
police and pathologists, some attending their first exhumation, were
hopeful. Perhaps they would finally be able to link the remains found off
Anna Maria Island in 1982 to a Pasco County 16-year-old who had been missing
since April of that year.
But after several hours of comparing Wendy Huggy's dental charts to the
murder victim's skull and mouth, four forensic dentists said the decay and
bone loss were too different.
The room fell silent. Pasco County sheriff's detectives were devastated.
But Wilson Broussard and David Winterhalter of the District 12 Medical
Examiner's Office - now that they're over their initial shock - have started
to view the body with hope.
Both believe they have a chance to use modern technology to help them find
out who their Jane Doe is and who murdered her.
Similarities
Countless eyes have scanned Huggy's case file over the years. She was a
gaunt teen with feathered brown hair and, as her grandmother Paula Richards
describes, "chocolate eyes."
Huggy
On April 7, 1982, she had been at a friend's apartment in Clearwater, and
was expected back at Richards' house in Holiday. She was to have started a
new job at Wendy's the next day. She never came home.
The Pasco Sheriff's Office has continued to mail fliers describing the
teen - the county's only longtime missing child case - to other sheriff's
offices, police departments and medical examiner's offices. The Florida
Department of Law Enforcement has placed a black-and-white photo of Huggy on
its Missing Children Information Clearinghouse Web site.
The photo and short description of Huggy arrived at the District 12 Medical
Examiner's office in April. Looking for a match, Winterhalter, the chief
investigator, thumbed through the short list of unidentified women whose
autopsies had been performed at his office.
Winterhalter was startled by what he found.
A Manatee County Jane Doe found in the Gulf of Mexico in September 1982,
five months after Huggy disappeared, was strikingly similar to the Pasco
County teen. Both women were Caucasian, weighed 110 pounds and had brown
hair.
When Huggy disappeared, she was wearing turquoise jewelry. There were two
silver and turquoise rings on the left hand of the Manatee County body,
which fishermen found 26.5 miles northwest of Longboat Pass.
Winterhalter called authorities in Pasco County.
A few weeks later, Pasco sheriff's Sgt. David Buhs and Detective Robert Hamm
appeared in dentist Barry Lipton's office in Seminole in Pinellas County.
Lipton, when he is not drilling out cavities and pulling teeth, examines the
teeth of murder victims and criminal suspects. The deputies asked him to
compare Huggy's dental chart with the Jane Doe's.
Lipton studied the charts, one filled out by Huggy's Chicago dentist in
1979, and one created by a former Bradenton medical examiner.
"The same teeth Jane Doe has filings in, Wendy Huggy had cavities in," he
said. But Jane Doe had more bone loss.
Pasco investigators decided they had enough evidence to justify an
exhumation.
"Basically, it was the closest we've ever been," Buhs said. "We had a good
feeling about it, although the doctor had some doubts."
A concrete block
At 1:50 p.m. on Sept. 5, 1982, the crew of the fishing boat Smithsonian
radioed a report to the Coast Guard: They had found a body floating in the
Gulf. The fishermen tied a buoy to the corpse so authorities could find it.
When the Coast Guard arrived with a Manatee County sheriff's detective an
hour later, there was no body. After an hour of searching, they realized the
corpse had floated four miles northwest.
According to a sheriff's report, the body was "wrapped in a green bedspread
and a beige, brown and orange afghan."
A white rope had been looped around the woman's chest and waist, and was
tied to a single concrete block. It took five men to pull the body, which
was covered with crabs, out of the water.
The official cause of death listed in the 1982 autopsy report was drowning,
but interviewed on Tuesday, Broussard declined to go into detail about his
findings.
Broussard would only say that the woman "may have been alive when she was
put in the water" and that drowning was "one" of her causes of death.
The 1982 report, turned in by another medical examiner, mentioned no other
injuries to the woman's body. Investigators at the time believed she was in
her late 20s.
The concrete block reminded Hamm, the Pasco detective, of another case. He
wants to talk with St. Petersburg police detectives to see if Jane Doe's
murder could be connected with convicted murderer Oba Chandler.
Wilson Broussard says the bones will be taken next week for examination by
a UF forensic anthropologist.
(STAFF PHOTO/ CAROLYN KASTER)
In 1994, Chandler was convicted of tying Joan Rodgers, 36, and daughters
Christe, 14, and Michelle, 17, to concrete blocks and tossing them into
Tampa Bay.
Chandler is on death row.
The cases appear similar, but the mother and her daughters were stripped
from the waist down, and the Jane Doe was wearing jeans.
Her body was first taken to Manatee Memorial Hospital, but because of the
odor, hospital staff asked that she be moved to a Bradenton funeral home.
Broussard believes the woman could have been dead for three or four days,
possibly floating to the Gulf from Tampa Bay or from as far away as Key
West.
Because the woman was found in international waters, the case was handed
over to the FBI.
The FBI had the hands and head severed from the corpse, and mailed the hands
to its Washington lab for analysis. A scientist at the Smithsonian
Institution examined the skull.
Since neither test yielded a positive identification, the skull and each
hand were wrapped separately in thick plastic wrap, sealed in plastic
storage containers and mailed back to Florida.
They caught up with the rest of the body in Tampa. Because of the stench,
the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner agreed to store the corpse because
Manatee County had no cooler.
In April 1983, Rest Haven Memorial Park staff held a pauper's funeral for
the unidentified woman.
Closure
After the body was exhumed April 13, the remains were sent to the medical
examiner in Bradenton.
Broussard was shocked when he popped open the container holding the woman's
hands.
He had expected to see both hands decomposed, but because the plastic wrap
bound the right hand so tightly, the second layer of skin was still there.
"There was a matter of luck; it took the right environmental conditions,"
Broussard said.
The right hand yielded five fingerprints; by some accounts, they were better
than the ones taken from the soggy body in 1982.
The Manatee County Sheriff's Office entered the new prints into state and
local databases, but didn't find a match. Detectives are working to get them
entered into the databases maintained by other states and the federal
government.
Broussard said the woman's bones will be taken to the University of Florida
next week for examination by a forensic anthropologist.
While Lipton, who spent hours peering at the murder victim's teeth, said he
believes she was in her late 20s or early 30s at the time of her murder, an
anthropologist should be able tell a more precise age after looking at her
bones.
Lipton said that because Broussard insisted on rinsing out the casket and
sifting through the body bag, five teeth that were missing from the 1982
dental chart have been accounted for.
When Lipton and three other dentists reported their findings, the Pasco
detectives were disappointed that Huggy had not been found.
Richards, Huggy's 76-year-old grandmother, said she sympathizes with the
Pasco County investigators.
"I'm amazed they're working so hard on it," said Richards, a retired
foster-care provider still living in Holiday. "Maybe someday we'll have
closure."
Doctors hope they will eventually be able to gather DNA from the bones,
brown hair and body tissue found in the rusted metal casket.
Said Broussard, "The bottom line is that we are hopeful with prints alone,
or with anthropological work-up, that maybe we'll find out who it is."