Mystery has a face but no name

LINCOLN — Out fixing fences washed out by a hard spring rain in 1981, Morrill County rancher Verlin Livingston and his son Mark made a chilling discovery.

While working in a sand draw — a creek bed where water drains after a downpour — Verlin spied what looked like a perfectly round white rock.

He stooped to dig it out of the mud and uncovered a human skull.

The Livingstons, who had occasionally found arrowheads and other evidence of Native American encampments in the draw, assumed they had found ancient remains.

On a trip to Bridgeport, Neb., a few days later, Verlin Livingston reported the skull to then-Sheriff Roger Sterkel. A forensic anthropologist later concluded it was, indeed, the skull of an American Indian male.

But this was no archaeological find. This man, possibly a Navajo, had been dead less than two years. Sterkel suspected foul play.

But for more than two decades, the skull and about two dozen pieces of the unknown man’s skeleton gathered dust in Colorado, where Sterkel had taken them for forensic analysis. The man’s identity remains unknown.

It’s another case that highlights Nebraska’s lack of uniform standards in death investigations. The World-Herald’s “Fatal Flaws’’ series in 2008 revealed that there is no state oversight and few standards to ensure quality investigations into murders, suicides and other deaths. The newspaper’s report found that death investigations and standards vary from county to county. Legislation promising uniform standards and more training of county officials was approved this year.

The Morrill County bones apparently fell through the cracks because of an unusual set of circumstances, said Sarah Scheer, coordinator of the Nebraska State Patrol’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse. The sheriff handling the case left office, county records were lost, and the remains were forgotten in a scientist’s laboratory.

The bones were housed for years in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Charney, a nationally recognized forensic anthropologist at Colorado State University. After Charney’s death in 1998, law enforcement agencies across the country began querying authorities on the whereabouts of human remains they had consigned to Charney’s laboratory.

After an out-of-court settlement in 2005, Colorado authorities were assigned to return the various remains to their rightful custodians.

Yet the question remains unanswered: Where do the bones found in Morrill County belong?

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The remains are suspected to be those of an itinerant railroad worker. Scheer said she did not believe race or socioeconomic status played a role in the handling of the case.

Judi Morgan gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, said standards have changed since the days when Indian bones were regarded by some as collectible artifacts.

“The world was a different world in 1981 than it is today,” said gaiashkibos, who has been assisting with efforts to find a proper resting place for the bones.

“What was acceptable then isn’t now,” she said. “Today, if remains were found like this, action would result, there would be a more thorough investigation and better communication.”

For about three years, the Morrill skeleton’s reconstructed face has watched over Sgt. Dana Korell from its perch atop a file cabinet in his office. The reconstruction was molded over a casting of the original skull.

Korell, a Nebraska State Patrol criminal investigator based in Scottsbluff, took over the case after being contacted by Colorado authorities several years ago. He has been working with Scheer and gaiashkibos to identify the remains.

Despite digging through boxes of old records in Morrill County, Korell has been unable to find files on the case. County officials today remember little about the bones found on the Livingston property.

Federal authorities say that about 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains turn up each year across the country. About 1,000 remain unidentified after one year, garnering “cold case” status.

The vast majority of unidentified remains turn out to be homicide victims, said George Adams, missing persons program manager for the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas.

But it’s often hard to tell how the person died when skeletal remains are all that’s left. Animals and the elements often carry off or otherwise damage bones that would provide the telltale signs of a violent death.

Scheer said five Nebraska sets of unidentified remains have been officially reported to the National Crime Information Center, not including those found in Morrill County.

At the time the bones were found, Sterkel told a news reporter he had some tentative leads.

No American Indian residents in the Morrill County area had been reported missing at the time, and the partial skeleton did not appear to match any missing persons reports.

Sterkel had speculated that the dead man might have been one of about 80 Navajo who worked on a Union Pacific Railroad track crew in the Broadwater area for several months in 1979.

That might explain why no one filed a missing persons report on the man, estimated by Charney to be age 20 to 25 when he died. Perhaps his co-workers assumed he had returned to his family, while his family assumed he was still working with the railroad.

Union Pacific officials say they don’t keep records of track crew employees from 30 years ago, let alone the names of seasonal employees from 1979.

It’s not known what more Sterkel may have learned. He resigned in 1989, citing burnout and stress, and died in Cheyenne County in 1998.

John Edens, who became Morrill County sheriff in 1991, said he didn’t know the bones existed until Colorado authorities began trying to return them to Nebraska several years ago.

If Sterkel kept records about the remains found on the Livingston Ranch, Edens said, he likely took them after his resignation.

Sterkel’s widow, Judy, said her husband retained some files after he left office. She said she didn’t know whether they still exist. She said she thought the case was solved several years ago.

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The Navajo have a tradition of working for the railroad, dating back to the days when track gangs worked for the old Santa Fe, which eventually merged with Burlington Northern Railroad.

Union Pacific began hiring Navajo track workers in the 1960s as part of a federal effort to combat unemployment in the Navajo nation, said company spokeswoman Brenda Mainwaring.

At one time, the railroad recruited about 500 workers from the Navajo nation each year for the seasonal work.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, more than half of our track labor and small-machine operators were Navajo,” Mainwaring said.

Only about one-third of the workers spoke English, she said. The men, many related to one another, served on the same teams year after year. They lived in a rolling camp, sleeping in railcars fitted out as bunk rooms and eating out of a dining car.

Lawrence Curley, now the division director for Union Pacific’s police department, is a Navajo who started out working summers on a track crew as a college student in 1977.

Curley, who did not work with the track gang in Broadwater, was skeptical that someone could wander away without being missed. He shared a bunk car with seven other men. He would have noticed if someone hadn’t shown up for work.

After receiving Charney’s report on the skull’s age in summer 1981, Sterkel gathered a posse to look for the rest of the skeleton.

Mark Livingston, then 19, led the way on horseback, guiding the group to the spot on the 5,000-acre ranch where the skull had been found. The men fanned out, each following a gully out of the sand draw. Four hours later, they found more bones, about 400 yards away, Livingston recalled.

George Post, a Bridgeport doctor who served as the county coroner’s physician, identified them as human bones and arranged them as they were found. Only a partial skeleton was recovered, with no clothing or other materials.

Post, now 89, said in a recent interview that it appeared to him that heavy rains had washed the body out of a shallow grave in a creek bank.

The U.P. tracks come within a mile of the Livingston ranch. Mark Livingston said the Navajo workers frequently parked in a pasture on the Livingston property to rest in the shade during the heat of the day. The bones were found a few miles from that pasture.

If the man were murdered, Livingston said, his killer might have hidden the body under a steep bank carved by torrents of water when the draw flooded.

Korell appeared surprised that Post and Livingston suspect foul play.

“I don’t have a report about trauma to the bones,” Korell said. “I guess from what I understand, it appeared that this person wandered off and probably died from exposure.”

Korell contacted gaiashkibos in May to seek her help in surrendering the bones to the Navajo Tribe. Tribal authorities then began investigating whether the remains are truly those of a Navajo.

New leads were generated after a Farmington, N.M., newspaper article included a photo of the facial reconstruction.

Three sisters came forward to report that their brother disappeared while working for the railroad in the late 1970s. Authorities have declined to name them at their request. The women agreed to submit to DNA testing to possibly determine whether the bones belong to their lost brother.

The bones will need to go to the University of North Texas for identification. The university has a federal grant to perform no-cost DNA testing in cases of missing persons or unidentified human remains.

Adams, the program manager at North Texas, said it would take four to six months to complete the sisters’ test results and even longer to complete tests on the skeleton.

Even if DNA tests do not identify the bones as those of the women’s brother, they could help lead to the eventual identification of the partial skeleton, Adams said. Test results could be entered in a national database to be compared against missing persons reports from across the country.

And perhaps the unknown man found in Morrill County may finally go home.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com