WINNEBAGO COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – It’s been over a week since law enforcement officers were made aware of human remains in the village of Fox Crossing. Because of the body’s condition, they aren’t able to use traditional identification methods.
The Winnebago County Sheriff’s office believes that remains found in Little Lake Butte Des Morts on April 27 have likely been there for some time.
“Probably more than six or eight months,” Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office Detective Lieutenant Chris Braman said. “With that, there is some decomposition that takes place.”
Braman said because of deterioration, the usual process for identification wasn’t possible- so the department recruited outside help.
“We partnered up with the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh- professor Karsten.”
“We get involved in these kind of cases where you have individuals who need to become identified and what we can do is look at skeletal remains in an effort to try to figure out if the person was male or female, we can try to figure out how old they were when they died, how long potentially they’ve been dead,” UW Oshkosh Anthropology Professor Jordan Karsten said.
Karsten is helping with the case, as he has with many others. His alternative methods include: looking for demographic and unique anatomic features.
“If somebody has a healed fracture, we can use that healed fracture to come up with an ID. If someone had surgery where they had a metal bar placed in a leg.”
It was somewhere in a marshy area of Little Lake Butte Des Morts where a fisherman found the remains. Part of the reason officials believe it took so long is because of the rising water levels over the last couple months.
“We hope that everybody can be patient with us because a lot of it is out of our hands,” Braman said. “Normally we can send items to our state crime lab and have a turnaround and get that information back a little more quickly.”
The usual identification process includes dental or fingerprint testing. When those options aren’t available, the timeline becomes murky.
“If we have to eventually rely on genetic identification, that could take us several weeks to potentially a few months,” Karsten said.
“First and foremost we need to identify the individual, and then once we have an identity, then some of that information probably will help us get to a cause or manner of death,” Braman said.
The sheriff’s department does say a potential identity has been developed, and the family of that person has been notified.
After Karsten’s demographic analysis is complete, private labs will then do additional testing.
