“I just found a human head.” With those six words, a quiet borough in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, was plunged into a baffling mystery. On Dec. 12, 2014, a teenage boy walking through the woods happened upon what appeared to be a human head, deposited just off a roadway. Authorities arrived on the scene, assuming they would encounter a macabre prank, but when they realized that they were dealing with the actual severed head of an unidentified older woman, questions swirled.
It seemed to investigators that the grisly scene had been arranged in order to be found: The head was located about 31 feet off of the roadway, it was not decomposed, and it appeared to have been severed with precision and medical expertise after the body had already been embalmed. Though the change in season had resulted in fallen leaves, the head was laid atop them, indicating it had been deposited recently. A lack of blood, bullet fragments, or any other sign of a murder contributed to the notion that the head had been deliberately placed there. “This is one of the scarcest crime scenes I’ve ever been on. And one of the strangest,” says Andrew Gall, chief of detectives at the Beaver County D.A. Office.
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4, Episode 3, “The Severed Head” takes up their ongoing investigation and poses their questions to a broader audience: Where did the head come from? Who would commit such a heinous act? And who is the woman whose body was so cruelly desecrated?
When police first responded to the 911 call reporting the discovery, they observed that the severed head appeared to belong to a gray-haired woman possibly between the ages of 60 and 80. It appeared to have been professionally embalmed, complete with eye caps, which are prosthetic shields used to preserve uniformity and shape to the eyes of a deceased person. But the autopsy technician uncovered a bizarre detail once they removed the pair in this case: The woman’s eyeballs had been removed and replaced with small red rubber balls. This perplexing detail — unheard of in the mortuary community, both locally and beyond — spurred an international investigation as police tried to trace the Chinese provenance of the toy rubber balls.
In order to identify the woman, the authorities sent DNA samples to several institutions. A partial match might have allowed them to track down a relative of the deceased, but each attempt failed to produce a profile. The embalming fluid had deteriorated the DNA to the point that investigators weren’t able to glean anything.
In 1988, a Fayette County, Pennsylvania, crypt containing the body of a woman named Theresa DeCarlo was vandalized. DeCarlo had died in the ’50s, and upon examining her coffin, investigators found that her head had been removed from her body. Local police suspected that the crime was related to Satanic activity. Because Fayette County is just 90 minutes south of Economy Borough in Beaver County where the severed head was discovered, police explored the possibility that the recently discovered head belonged to DeCarlo. But the presence of modern dentistry in Jane Doe’s mouth proved it didn’t.
Interviewing forensic artist Michelle Vitali in her lab.
“I generally get a call when somebody’s at the end of their rope,” says Michelle Vitali in the episode. “It’s a little bit of a Hail Mary pass to come and get a forensic artist.” Beaver County authorities reached out to Vitali when they decided to involve the public in their search for the identity of the Beaver County Jane Doe. Not wanting to release an actual photo of the severed head, the police hoped that forensic artistry could help them craft a reasonable likeness of the woman.
Vitali produced a two-dimensional sketch as well as a sculpture, both of which were shown on local television. While neither representation of the Jane Doe in question could be a perfectly accurate rendition of what she looked like in life, Vitali and the Economy Borough Police Department hoped that it would be a close enough likeness to catch the eye of someone who knew her.
A resident of Beaver County, Jay Grabner lived in a house from which he could see the spot where Jane Doe’s head was found. He contacted authorities not long after their investigation began and instructed them to look closely at the teenage boy who had discovered it. When they did, they learned that the kid had once been friends with Grabner. After the two had a falling-out, neighbors recalled that the older man had spoken about getting revenge. Further investigation revealed that Grabner knew about the sale and trade of human body parts and kept his own deceased dog in a freezer. A polygraph test, administered to determine if Grabner was involved with the severed head, found that he was not truthful about his connection to the case. But when Grabner jumped off an overpass and ended his own life, police were back on the case with few leads to follow.
See bonus material below for “The Severed Head,” including more evidence and additional webisodes.
Watch “The Severed Head” here.
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