Authorities said this week that a skull discovered on the Delaware River’s banks about four decades ago has been recognized as belonging to a man who has been missing for roughly the same amount of time. When a genealogical database connected the man’s remains to his daughter, who is now 49 and resides in Florida, cutting-edge forensic testing provided fresh insight into the unsolved case.
According to the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, the guy was 31 years old when he vanished and was from New Jersey. His name is Richard Thomas Alt. Alt’s parents reported him missing to Trenton Police Department at the beginning of the next year after they last saw him on December 24, 1984.
In Morrisville, Pennsylvania, where the skull was found in 1986, under the purview of Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub, it was revealed on Monday that forensic examination has finally shown the bones are those of Alt.
“Even a day of wondering and fretting about a missing family member is beyond my comprehension, much less 37 years. The family of Mr. Alt may finally stop waiting “In a statement, Weintraub said. I’m simply happy that with this identification and the final repatriation of his remains to his family, we were able to provide them some comfort.
According to a press release from the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, Alt and his girlfriend Laurie Suydam were both suspected murder victims in New Jersey at the time of Alt’s disappearance. Although Suydam’s corpse was discovered in the Delaware River in April 1985 near Trenton, New Jersey, neither her nor Alt’s cases were ever solved. According to the district attorney’s office, Bucks County officials have “ended their investigation owing to lack of proof of any crime being committed in Bucks County” regarding Alt’s death and disappearance.
The human skull now known to belong to Alt was discovered by a fisherman on the banks of the Delaware River close to the Morrisville boat ramp, the office said. It added that the fisherman brought the skull to township police in the area of Bucks County where he lived. This sparked the initial police investigation in June 1986. Detectives from the county would not acquire the remains until October 2019, when they were working on what the district attorney’s office referred to as “a probe of a murder inquiry.”
The skull was sent to the Buck’s County Coroner’s Office, which entered the remains in a national database for unidentified or missing persons, and was subsequently recovered by county police who sent it to a Texas facility for forensic genealogy testing. A DNA sample from the skull was compared earlier this year in the lab to a user profile in a public genealogical database, where individuals may contribute their own personal data.
The 49-year-old Florida woman who created the profile told Bucks County investigators that she was 11 years old when her father Alt vanished in Trenton in 1985; however, the woman’s identity was withheld by the district attorney’s office. She said that Alt had not been seen since the same year that his fiancée was killed.
The district attorney expressed his hope that “this powerful combination of technology and genealogy becomes the template for solving cold and current cases now and in the future” after a subsequent test comparing the woman’s full DNA results with Alt’s revealed a parent-child relationship between their individual samples.
»DNA test identifies 1986 skull as missing NJ man«