Skull found on river bank in 1986 identified as missing

MORRISVILLE, Pennsylvania. – Authorities say a skull found on the banks of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania more than 3.5 decades ago has been identified as the skull of a man long thought to have been murdered in New Jersey along with his girlfriend, whose body was found in the river side of New Jersey Jersey last year.

The Bucks County District Attorney’s office said on Monday that detectives and a private DNA forensics lab identified a skull found on a riverbank in Morrisville in 1986 as the skull of 31-year-old Richard Thomas Alt, who was last seen by his parents on Christmas Eve in 1984. reported missing to Trenton police in early 1985.

District Attorney Matt Weintraub said Alt and his girlfriend are suspected of murder in New Jersey. The death of Laurie Sudam, who was found in a river in Trenton in April 1985, is considered an unsolved murder, while Alt’s case was a missing persons case, a Mercer County Attorney’s Office spokesman said Monday.

“I can’t even imagine that I will think and worry about a lost family member for even a day, not to mention 37 years. That wait has come to an end for Mr Alt’s family,” Weintraub said in a statement. “I’m just glad we were able to give them some peace of mind with this identification and the eventual return of his remains to his family.”

Weintraub expressed his gratitude for the technical expertise provided free of charge by Othram Inc. from Texas, who used forensic genome sequencing and forensic genetic genealogy to identify a skull found by a fisherman in June 1986 on the banks of the river with the Morrisville Boat Ram.

The county coroner’s office entered the skull into the National Missing Persons and Unidentified Persons database. Detectives sent the skull to Outram last September after representatives of the Woodlands, Texas-based company said they found a possible match in a public genealogy database, prosecutors said.

The author of the DNA, a 49-year-old Florida woman, told detectives on January 4 that she was 11 years old when Alt, her father, went missing in Trenton. She agreed to share her DNA results from a genealogy site with Outram, who said four days later that a parent-child relationship match had been confirmed, prosecutors said.

Bucks County prosecutors said they consider their investigation closed “due to lack of evidence of any crime committed in Bucks County.”

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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