Body Exhumed After 90 Years: What Was Found Astonished Investigators
By Dreamer
On Tuesday, forensic anthropologists in Pennsylvania along with state police gathered at a 90-year-old gravesite to exhume the body of a teenage boy by the name of Thomas Curry. They hoped that within the casket, they would find clues to explain the boy’s death, but what they found left them bewildered.
Upon opening the casket, remains of the boy were not found as expected, but only layers of wood – perhaps placed in the casket to deceive others that a body had been placed in there. Erin Kimmerle, one of the anthropologists on the site said:
“Wood. Layers of pieces of wood. It was completely filled with wooden planks.”
Nearly a century ago, Curry had been a resident at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a Florida juvenile detention facility in Marianna, Florida. The infamous boy’s home became known for its history of abuse and in some cases, murder. Closed in 2009 after hundreds of men came forward with their stories of abuse, investigations by Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Justice began.
Former residents of the home recounted how they were beaten and tortured, and told stories of how some of the teens had disappeared under suspicious circumstances.
The armed guards would play out twisted games called “boy hunts,” where the boys would be chased through the dark woods.
There was a cemetery behind the school where graves were marked with crosses fashioned from iron pipes. After Florida professor Erin Kimmerle became involved in the investigation, she discovered at least 55 graves in the cemetery, which was nearly double the number that the state had records for.
In her efforts to identify the 55 bodies buried there, she followed the trail for Curry. Records indicated that upon his death, his body had been shipped back to Pennsylvania to be buried after being killed under suspicious circumstances in 1925.
According to school records, Curry had escaped from the school after his arrival and was then killed by a train. But the death was never reported to the state, and Curry’s death certificate read that he had perished from a crushed skull by an “unknown cause.”
Upon finding the wooden planks in the casket, Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. Tom McAndrew said the exhumation raised more questions around Curry’s death:
“It was a little bit of a shock. It was certainly anticlimactic. Something was shipped up from Florida, and it was buried, and someone believed it was Thomas Curry.”
When asked whether the wooden planks are evidence that there was a cover-up in the boy’s death, he responded:
“Absolutely. Decades and decades of efforts to deceive, cover-ups and not just by one but by many people at the school.”
As for the direction of the investigation at this point, Kimmerle has DNA samples from several of Curry’s relatives. She plans to match those samples taken from other unidentified bodies which have been exhumed from the unmarked graves to see if she can come up with a match.
Hopefully, through these investigations, the mysteries around these deaths will be answered so these people can finally be at peace.
h/t [CNN]
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