Sunday, February 10, 2013
The man's death was ruled a homicide.
An Independence Township resident was hitchhiking on Old Route 40 in Donegal Township, Washington County, at about 9:20 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 18, 1972, when he spotted the badly decomposed body of a man. The body was down an embankment, about 65 feet south of the roadway. Its skeletal remains were found in a brier thicket, near a small trash dump, about two miles west of Claysville Borough. It was estimated that the body had been there for about 8 to 10 weeks. The man's death was ruled a homicide, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. The man had gunshot wounds in his left torso, possibly from a .22-caliber weapon. While details about the man's appearance and clothing are many, there are no clues as to who he was, where he …
Monday, September 3, 2012
Patch has been featuring missing persons, homicide victims and the unidentified dead with open case files, but today, we are honoring the labors of those who work these cases by sharing some solved ones.
When someone goes missing, there's usually a large effort by law enforcement, family and friends to find him or her. When someone is murdered without a known suspect, police and relatives try to find out who did it. And when a body is discovered, and no kin claim it, advocates who work on such cases push to link circumstances or DNA to bring them home. In honor of Labor Day, Patch is recognizing the efforts of all those who work to solve these cases, bring the missing and unidentified home, and provide closure to the families or justice for the victims of unsolved homicides. Included in that are the many people who give the missing and unidentified "temporary homes" on websites like The Doe Network or NamUs until they are found or claimed…
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The 1-year-old was last seen in the front yard of his West End home in 1986.
Little Jamie Martin Thornton was just more than a month shy of his second birthday as he played in the front yard of his home in the West End of Pittsburgh on Oct. 4, 1986. But when his birthday arrived on Nov. 12 that year, Jamie, whose nickname was "J.T," wasn't around to celebrate it. Some reports say that he disappeared in Chartiers Creek. There is very little information available on his case, other than the standard listings on Pennsylvania Missing Persons, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, NamUs and The Doe Network. Jamie is considered one of the "endangered missing." Today, he would be 27 years old. In a March 17, 2011, story, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that Jamie's mother—Gloria Steffens, of Pittsburgh'…
Saturday, June 9, 2012
In 2007, a serial killer confessed to killing the Robinson Township teen, missing since 1977—and claimed her body is 'unrecoverable.'
Ranee Ann Gregor was just nine days away from turning "sweet 16" the evening of Oct. 21, 1977, when she and boyfriend John Feeny left her residence on Clever Road in Robinson Township and were believed to be headed for a pizza parlor. They made it as far as a gas station, where they were last seen at about 10 p.m., but they never made it home. The next morning, Feeny, a 17 year old who lived on Maple Street in Coraopolis Borough, was found slumped over the armrest of the rear seat of his blood-splattered van. He had been shot once in the neck at close range with a shotgun. The vehicle, with its engine still running, was parked on a secluded dirt road known as a lovers' lane—off of Crescent Drive near Pittsburgh International Airport in …
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Each weekend, beginning May 12-13, Patch will review a missing person, an unidentified body or a cold case involving a homicide victim from Allegheny or Washington counties.
The Pennsylvania Missing Persons website features the somewhat-haunting sketch of "Beth Doe" on its homepage. Nancy Monahan, of Penn Hills, who started and runs the website, chose the sketch because, in nearly four decades and despite social networking and modern forensics, no one has ever been able to determine where the woman came from or who she was. Monahan was intrigued, in part, because the woman would have been in her own age bracket. The details of the case are rather disturbing. The young woman had been dismembered and mutilated. She and her full-term, unborn child were stuffed in three suitcases and thrown from a bridge along Interstate 80 over the Lehigh River in Carbon County, PA. Police think that the killer meant for the …
