Identified! CO - Chaffee Co., Human remains at Trout Creek Pass, Mar'16 - homicide, teen from 1880s

The Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office announced human remains were discovered by a hiker near Trout Creek Pass...

The scene and incident are being investigated as a homicide, Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze stated.

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CHAFFEE COUNTY — What started as a nightmarish discovery unfolded into a piece of history that will come to peaceful close next week.

On March 29, 2016, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a report of discovered human remains near Chinaman Gulch, about a half mile east of County Road 301, the sheriff's office said.

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Authorities started investigating the case as a homicide, the sheriff's office said.

The remains were turned over to the coroner’s office and a forensic anthropologist examined them.

Several months later, the sheriff’s office and coroner’s office received reports from the anthropologist. The findings? The remains belonged to a 15- to 18-year-old male and dated back to the mid- to late-1800s. He was a pioneer.

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He had damage to his cranium, which suggested that he had died as a result of blunt force injuries. Examiners and authorities do not know if that was caused by the fall, or if something had struck the teen. Because the remains were dated back so far, any witness or suspect to a potential crime in this case would already have almost certainly died, the sheriff's office said.

Chief Deputy Coroner Jeff Graf, Coroner Randy Amettis and Sheriff John Spezze plan to hold an organized funeral and burial — including a donated personalized gravestone and ceremony — to lay the pioneer to rest.

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SALIDA - The bones of an unidentified teenager found with suspected blunt force trauma to the skull were buried in Salida’s Fairview Cemetery on Wednesday. The funeral was the conclusion of a more than two-year-long mystery that captivated investigators in Chaffee County.

The teenager’s identity was never determined and investigators stopped looking for suspects after a forensic anthropologist determined the bones were likely more than 100 years old.

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Investigators concluded there would be no living suspects or immediate relatives of the teenager since the remains likely dated back to the 1800s. Still, the unknown circumstances surrounding the teen’s death continued to fascinate those following the case.

“I think it just gets everybody thinking like, ‘I wonder what really happened, and who was this person, and I wonder what was behind this,” said Sheriff Spezze. “They were there alone, all those years and more than likely died alone, and it was violent, so you got to have some compassion at some point.”

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A couple of years ago, hikers in Chaffee County made a disturbing discovery: human bones lying in a rocky ravine. Investigators recovered the remains and combed the area for clues. When they couldn't determine the cause of death, the bones and artifacts were shipped off to forensic anthropologist Diane France with the Human Identification Lab of Colorado.
France talked to Colorado Matters about how she put the pieces together to solve mysterious deaths. She's examined remains found in the wreckage of 9/11 and those belonging to the Romanov family. With the help of a belt buckle and scraps of leather found near the Chaffee body, France determined the death occurred in the mid- to late-1800s. The remains belonged to a teenage male who died from a head injury, possibly after falling from his horse.

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