The full skeletal remains belong to a John Doe otherwise referred to as “Pinnacle Man.”
The man’s frozen body was found Jan. 16, 1977, in a cave at the Pinnacle, a popular vista along the Appalachian Trail in Albany Township, by two Bethlehem teens who were hiking.
The man, who was believed to be 25 to 30 years old when he died, is one of 11 unidentified human remains in the custody of the coroner’s office. Five of them, including part of a
skull found in a pond last year in Amity Township, are kept in the coroner’s office because they contain no flesh. The others are interred in crypts in cemeteries in the county.
Fielding said he doesn’t believe anyone would be OK with their remains stored in a closet in the coroner’s office indefinitely, so he asked his staff what was being done about the matter.
“We just don’t think it’s right,” he said when asked why the office was concerned about identifying bones that have been in storage for as long as 45 years. “They shouldn’t be here. They should be with somebody who knows them.”
The office has been working with Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading to find dignified spaces to store the unclaimed ashes of identified descendants, Fielding said.
“With ‘Pinnacle Man,’ for example, he’s an unidentified person,” Bonilla said. “We have his skeleton still with us, and we can’t really cremate him because we don’t know who he is, and once we cremate him there’s no chance of extrapolating anything.”
Although “Pinnacle Man’s” remains were buried in the potter’s field in 1977, he wasn’t initially on the coroner’s office radar. Someone brought to their attention that the long-buried man was still unidentified.
“We had to reconstruct the case file because we knew he existed,” Bonilla said. “And now we had people telling us this guy in 1977 was never identified. We found the autopsy report and sort of rebuilt the case file.”
According to records, the man found in the cave was about 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 155 pounds. The autopsy did not determine when he died but indicated the body was fairly well preserved.
Bonilla said a state police cold case investigator identified two potential matches, both men from other states who were in their early 20s when they went missing in 1975.
A forensic odontologist affiliated with NamUs, Dr. Richard Scanlon, compared the dental records of two missing men to “Pinnacle Man” and found several similarities but was unable to make a positive identification.
Unidentified remains of a man found at the Pinnacle in 1977 are being tested for DNA at a lab in the hopes of finally putting a name to the man.
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