A bag of bones discovered hanging from a tree near the Cal-Sag Channel in December 2022 has been turned over to a Texas lab that specializes in forensic genetic genealogy.
The bones were discovered a few days after Christmas when somebody walking along the bike path at Lake Katherine Nature Center in Palos Heights saw something strange hanging from a tree near the canal.
The pedestrians removed the sack from the tree and peeked inside, discovering bones and an asphalt pebble.
“The assumption was that a moving car had tried to throw the bag into the canal from the Southwest Highway overpass but missed the water,” said Palos Heights Police Chief Bill Czajkowski. “The bones ended up hanging from a tree instead, adjacent to the water.”
The bones were transported to the Cook County Medical Examiner, where anthropologists found that they were a combination of human and animal bones. The wrappings that the bones were discovered in were transferred to another private crime lab that Palos Heights police utilize, the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Lab in Mundelein.
“We pay a fee to a private lab instead of the state lab which has a backlog so we can get a quicker turnaround on fingerprints, DNA, and blood/urine kits for DUIs,” Czajkowski told me.
The age and origin of the bones are unknown.
The Cook County Medical Examiner recently turned over the bones to Othram, a Woodland, Texas-based company that collaborates with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies across the country to use cutting-edge technology to analyze DNA and other forensic evidence to close previously unsolved crimes.
Othram investigators compare the results to public databases in the hopes of finding a match. Families are approached to see if they have a missing person and to give a DNA sample alongside family members who have already submitted their DNA in the hopes of finding a match. The family is then called to see whether they have a missing individual and are asked to provide a DNA sample to confirm a match.
Palos Heights police and Othram have set up a crowdfunding site with DNASolves and are seeking the public’s assistance in financing the $75,000 cost of advanced DNA testing, which might offer closure to a family missing a loved one.
Meanwhile, Czajkowski stated that police had no cause to believe a crime occurred in Palos Heights.
“It’s somewhat strange. “We believe it was just someone passing through who weighed the bones down in the hopes that they would sink in the canal,” the police chief added. “Our investigators did a great job following up on this and determining the process to find the origin of the bones.”