A photo of Linda Pagano compared with Carl Koppelman’s drawing of her. (Carl Koppelman)
By
Meagan Flynn
July 19, 2018
The human skeleton stuck in the mud along the banks of the Rocky River took the three boys by surprise.
The year was 1975. They were hiking in the woods in Strongsville, Ohio, near Cleveland, when they found it there, as they would soon tell police. The skeleton was missing most of its flesh and part of its jaw. The boys couldn’t see it then, but it also had a small hole in its skull.
The wound came from a .25-caliber bullet, which fit “snugly” in the hole in the left temple, the Cuyahoga County coroner wrote in the 1975 autopsy report. The body appeared to belong to a white woman who was “about 20.” Little else was known about her, except that she died of homicide, the coroner ruled. Her name was “Unknown White Female Bones,” and because no one claimed her, she was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Potter’s Field at a Cleveland cemetery....
... Scates got a half step closer to learning her name when she decided to upload all of her research to Reddit’s “Unresolved Mysteries” forum and on Websleuths.com, where the case caught the attention of Carl Koppelman, a forensic artist.
Koppelman, based in California, liked cross-referencing unidentified remains with unsolved missing-persons reports. Then he makes facial-reconstruction drawings using what he knows about the skulls. He was just a hobbyist. But authorities started to take him seriously when he
helped crack a 36-year-old cold case out of Caledonia, N.Y., with an eerily accurate facial-reconstruction drawing he made of the missing girl.
Scates asked him to make a drawing for Strongsville Jane Doe. By then, it was June 2016.
“There was about five or six photos of this muddy skeleton,” Koppelman told The Post. “I looked at that for a couple of months. I thought, no, the angle’s wrong. There’s no mandible. No hair color. The front teeth are all missing. There’s no way I can do anything with this — but eventually I came along and said, ‘What the hell. I’ll give it a shot.’ ”
As Koppelman got to work, he had a phone call with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office about a separate case he was interested in from the Cleveland area. During the call, he said, he talked to Anjanette Fischer, the office’s missing-persons liaison, about his latest project, the drawing for the Strongsville missing-girl case....
... The drawing Koppelman ultimately made was stunning — but still, it was nameless.
That was all about to change. Thanks to Koppelman’s inquiry, Fischer said she promptly entered the Strongsville Jane Doe case into NamUs. And it ended up being a crucial development.
A few months later, a detective at the Akron Police Department’s missing-persons unit, Sgt. Jeff Smith, was assigned to work on cold cases. The oldest was that of Linda Pagano,
according to the Akron Beacon Journal. Pagano had gone missing in September 1974 after leaving home following an argument with her stepfather, reportedly because she had gotten home late from a concert. The 17-year-old was never seen again.
At Fischer’s suggestion, Smith jumped on NamUs. He uploaded the Pagano missing-person report to see whether any unidentified remains from that time period seemed to match with her case.
And sure enough, there were: Strongsville Jane Doe. It looked to Smith like an immediate match....
... Finally, after more than a year of continued investigation and more than 40 years after Pagano was buried in an unmarked grave, authorities
announced July 12 that a DNA test confirmed the remains found on the Rocky River indeed belonged to Pagano....
LINK:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...t-to-internet-sleuths/?utm_term=.d9d9589d5acf