[telephone rings]
[operator] 911, where's your emergency?
[man] I just found a human head.
-[operator] Where? -[man] On the side of the road.
In the woods, like…
-[operator] Like, in the brush? -[man] Yeah.
Why is a severed head
sitting in a field
in a nice neighborhood in a nice town?
Where did she come from? Did she die a natural death?
-[detective] Where would he get a head? -[man 1] From killing somebody.
[man 2] Someone wanted that head to be found.
I had nothin' to do with that head. That's the truth.
[man 3] This was somebody's loved one.
The family may not even know she's out here.
Who in the world does something like this?
[unsettling music plays]
[music fades]
[somber music plays]
[man 2] Economy Borough, where this happened,
is in Western Pennsylvania.
They have nice people, expensive houses,
and they also have beautiful farms out there.
Here in Beaver County,
our typical crimes are
one guy shoots another one, we already know who did it, and you move on.
This case was not anything like that.
[suspenseful music plays]
[man 3] It was a Friday afternoon.
This 15-year-old boy
was walking through the woods after school.
He was a young man getting interested in hunting.
So he was headed up to a deer processing place,
where they process the deer meat for hunters.
And that was when he came upon an object in the woods.
At first, he had thought that it was a gut pile,
something that the deer hunters do, leave 'em behind with a deer.
And then he realized that this was a severed human head.
[tense music plays]
[young man] I'm just walking up the road, and I found a human head.
[operator] How do you know it's a human head?
[young man] I went down, and it's a head.
[operator] You left it there?
[young man] Yeah, I did not touch it. I did not do anything.
[operator] Go stand where it's at. They're on their way over.
[young man] Okay.
One of our officers, Officer Janectic, was dispatched to go over there.
[tense music continues]
When I arrived on scene, I noticed a teenager standing here,
pointing down into the woods.
I did ask him if he went down and touched it. He stated, "No."
We all kind of had the thought that it was gonna be, uh,
you know, a prank or something like that.
[Janectic] It definitely was a real head.
And at that point,
um, I contacted my chief and said, "We got a real problem."
[O'Brien] I'm thinking, "This can't be good."
"If they're calling me, we've got something going on here."
"Do we have some sick individual that's out killing people,
cutting up bodies someplace,
and now we're spreading body parts around?"
[tense music continues]
[O'Brien] Very quickly after that, I contacted Andy Gall.
I told him, "Hey, you're not gonna believe this,
but, uh, we have a severed head in the woods."
[Andrew] I've always been the go-to guy.
Something weird happens, it's, "Call Andy."
My initial reaction is, "This hasn't been here long."
It's early December.
The leaves are still falling in some parts.
And this is on top of the leaves,
and there's no leaves on top of it.
[O'Brien] It was probably about 31 feet off the edge of the roadway.
It appeared to be in somewhat decent condition. It wasn't decomposed.
One of the remarkable things we noticed right away
was the nose had a little bit of a tip to it,
um, almost as if it had been
maybe in some sort of a container or a box at one time.
Looking at it, my initial impression was it was a female.
[O'Brien] Their hair was gray. Curly, fluffy.
Reminded us of an older woman.
Anywhere between 60 and 80 was what the guess was at that time.
Usually, I'm looking for the bullet wound.
I'm looking for the blood pattern.
But none of that's there.
[O'Brien] We didn't even really know if a crime had been committed.
But it's a murder until proven otherwise.
[Andrew] At that point, they had some uniformed guys
spreading out through that field
looking for other parts, looking for other evidence,
looking for anything.
This is one of the scarcest crime scenes that I've ever been on,
and one of the strangest.
[O'Brien] This isn't something that any of us have ever handled or dealt with,
but this was a human being.
This is a person.
We need to know who she is.
We decided then that we needed to just get her out of there
and get her to the morgue where we can take a better look.
So we packed the head into a cooler with ice…
and transported her to the county morgue.
[unsettling music plays]
Chief Michael O'Brien, the coroner, and other law enforcement
come into the morgue with this cooler.
[unsettling music continues]
[Timothy] They open it up, and they put it on the table.
And Dr. James Smith and I just stood there, and our jaws drop.
Is it real, or is this fake?
The hair was… Almost looked like it was combed.
There was some makeup, eyes closed.
Normally, when you have a head on the side of the road,
there's animal, insect, the weather, decomposition.
None of that existed.
We thought this was a head
that Hollywood used to reenact something.
The first thing we established was this is real.
The tissue is well-preserved and has a rubbery feeling to it.
Lips are firm. It holds its shape.
The condition was excellent.
That person was professionally and well embalmed.
Whoever embalmed the body took very good care of doing it properly.
This would be to make the deceased as presentable as you can to the family.
They knew what they were doing.
The head was severed after it was embalmed.
It wasn't somebody that just took a machete or a hatchet or something
and just cut the head off.
It went between the spine and the joints.
And they cut through the skin at the front.
So it was probably done with a scalpel and other very sharp instruments.
The biggest mystery of this head was, when I open the eyelids,
there's plastic caps over the eyes,
which is normal embalming.
But, to our amazement,
there's no eyes.
In its place, they had small, red balls,
which is unusual.
[unsettling music plays]
[Timothy] We never seen this before.
Nobody ever replaced the eyeballs with red, round balls.
So we have the, uh… some of the evidence in this box.
One, um, was these red rubber balls.
This was rather shocking,
and this became, like, the… the big piece of evidence for us.
We thought that was going to be the key that solved this case.
[tense music plays]
We contacted several funeral homes, several mortuaries.
We thought maybe someplace, somewhere, they use red rubber balls.
[tense music continues]
[music fades]
My name is David Alvarez.
I am currently the owner of Alvarez-Hahn Funeral Home
in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
I happened to be at a court hearing in Beaver County,
and at that time, the pathologist and Andy Gall was there,
and they were talking about the situation with the head.
I got included in the conversation
because they knew I was a funeral director.
And, of course, I was intrigued.
So this is a plastic eye cap.
These are used to simulate the contour of an eyeball.
Most of the time, unless the orbit or the eyeball itself was removed,
whether it be for, like, uh, organ donation or whatnot,
these are placed on top of the eye itself.
They give uniformity and shape to the eye when the body is prepared and embalmed.
These are very, very common.
With the red balls that were placed in the orbits of Jane Doe,
I had never really seen the type of ball that was there.
Somebody put that in there to fill a void,
and then over top of that, placed the eye cap
to give the eye its regular shape.
[tense music plays]
[Andrew] I spent a period of time afterwards
asking funeral directors and people who do embalming.
Nobody uses red rubber balls.
After looking into it, I walked to one of my regular places
to have a piece of pizza.
I go in, get my pizza, sit down,
and right next to me,
which I've never noticed before, even though I've eaten there many times,
is a bubble gum machine,
where you can put a quarter in
and get… red rubber balls.
[O'Brien] The balls were found to have come from China,
which are a part of their biggest and largest-selling toy.
We actually made contact with the police in China,
and it turns out that these red rubber balls are so common,
and there's no way to track 'em.
This is not what's supposed to be behind an eye cap.
This, to me, is one of the biggest mysteries in this case.
Something weird about toys being placed behind that woman's head,
behind her eyes.
Brand new here, the strange discovery of an embalmed head
in the woods of Western Pennsylvania has police mystified.
[tense music plays]
[O'Brien] The discovery was on Friday evening.
Hunting season was coming to an end.
Saturday was the last day of antlered deer season.
So we didn't want to get into the woods and do a search on that day.
So, two days after the head was found,
we conducted a more extensive systematic search of the area.
I felt there was a good chance that we may find other body parts someplace.
They may be spread through that area.
There was probably about 50 people between everybody in the search party.
And of course, cadaver dogs.
[Andrew] But they found nothing.
We did a canvass and started questioning everyone in that local area.
[O'Brien] And that's when Jay Grabner showed up.
Jay lived across the street from where the head was found.
The day of the search, Jay came down out of his house,
came up to, uh, some of us while we were at the search.
We were able to talk to him
and get him to come in and do an interview with us.
[Jay] The crows were screaming in the woods right across from the house,
right where the creek is, where the spring starts.
I said, "If you look down there somewhere, there's some kind of disturbance there."
[O'Brien] He was interested in the discovery of the head.
He was interested in the person who had found it.
[Jay] To me, this situation is just too convenient and too pretty
for a kid to come up on this.
[O'Brien] He was looking to pin this
on this 15-year-old boy who discovered the head.
[Jay] I'm not saying he did it, but I'm just saying,
it was too conveniently placed.
That it wanted to be found.
[O'Brien] Jay wanted to be center of attention.
He was that person that had to be listened to or has to be heard.
He came off with some really odd statements.
[detective] So to make sense of this, he would kill somebody, dismember them,
then put their head there, and then call us?
[Jay] I would say… I would say that's a scenario.
[detective] For what?
[O'Brien] I don't recall Jay providing anything useful
other than his own statements.
We never really were able to get
really, really good, useful information out of Jay.
And of course, we did talk to the 15-year-old boy.
-[detective] Tell me what you find. -[young man] I found a… human head.
[detective] Okay.
I watched the detectives who interviewed the 15-year-old who found the head,
and he wasn't evasive in any which way.
Um, he was open.
-[detective] Did you tell anybody else? -[young man] I told my grandma.
-[detective] Did you text anybody? -[young man] No.
[Andrew] He was very forthcoming when we talked to him.
Once we got his story, it just rang true.
[O'Brien] We did talk to a lot of neighbors about him.
We very quickly were able to determine
that he didn't really have much to do with this
other than the fact that he found it.
My question is, who does something like this?
Where's the rest of her body?
I don't think anybody deserves to have a body part cut away from them
and thrown into the woods
and left there to lay the way this person was.
One of the first things we tried to do was get DNA so we could identify
and try to match up the head with someone, some family member.
We have teeth samples, hair, brain, skin.
[Andrew] If we got the DNA sample
and we enter it into ancestry to find some relative,
find out where she came from,
that would help us determine how this whole thing took place.
We send a sample of the occipital bone to North Texas University for DNA.
Nothing.
We sent brain samples, tissue samples, hair, to the FBI
to help us determine that identity.
Nothing.
[O'Brien] We have actually, over the course of time here,
made probably five, six attempts at DNA.
[Andrew] And each time,
uh, we got nothing.
They cannot give us a DNA profile,
and we have no DNA to go with.
What we eventually found out was the embalming fluid
actually deteriorates the DNA from that sample.
And we have yet to be able to get any type of, um, DNA markers
to even begin to do any type of comparison or match.
[tense music plays]
[O'Brien] At that point in the investigation,
Andy and I started to discuss the idea
that we wanted to get some sort of a likeness out to the public
in hopes that somebody could identify her.
Um, we didn't want to release an actual photo.
So we started to look at the idea of a forensic artist.
[tense music continues]
[woman] I generally get a call when somebody is at the end of their rope.
It's a little bit of a Hail Mary pass to come and get a forensic artist.
[tense music continues]
[Michelle] There were certain things about Jane Doe's head
that were very recognizable.
She had a perm. She had a certain hair color.
She had two distinct moles, very small,
but they were very distinct moles on her left cheek.
I felt that she was possibly a smoker
because of the lines around her mouth and a bit of the coloration of her teeth.
But mostly that… [sucks air] …that thing that people do with their mouths
when they're drawing from a cigarette.
[tense music continues]
My thoughts were, once we make this drawing public,
we would be getting several calls.
[reporter] They released a sketch of what the woman might have looked like.
They do not know how long ago she may have died or why.
[O'Brien] Turned out we weren't really getting anywhere with that.
This woman's identity has been taken away from her,
and we are just unable, at this time, to figure out who that person is.
[somber music plays]
[Michelle] They came back to me and asked for a sculpture.
It takes more time to make one,
but it can be very useful
because some of us are more recognizable from other views.
So if you have a dominant, um, feature in a profile,
that wouldn't show up in a front view.
I try to maintain some kind of a sense of that individual as a human.
I feel as though I'm doing my part to bury the dead.
We want to identify her.
If a person died on the side of the road,
they're not just left there for the birds to pick at, right?
But that's what happened to our Jane Doe.
She was just on the side of the road.
It's something that has to be rectified.
That's literally what I'm trying to do, what Chief O'Brien is trying to do,
what Andy's trying to do.
It has now been one month since a human head was found along a road,
and there are still very few answers.
They released a 3D model. I want you to take a look at this.
Police emphasize that this is a clay reconstruction
that is considered a family likeness.
It is not exact.
I was reporting on the case when they hired the artist
to create her likeness.
The sculpture did generate some chatter, and some people did call in.
[telephone rings]
[Andrew] We followed up on every phone call,
every lead that came in.
I'm not a betting man, but I told Chief O'Brien
we were going to get a call that a mausoleum was broken into
or a grave was dug up.
[O'Brien] And we did, in fact, get a lead
from the coroner of Fayette County,
which is just south of us here,
about 90 minutes away from Economy Borough.
The coroner tells us about a crypt that was broken into,
casket pulled from the wall,
and the head missing from the body of the person inside that casket.
[suspenseful music plays]
Okay. They got a body without a head. We got a head without a body.
This has gotta be it.
[unsettling music plays]
On August 4th, 1988,
I responded to a call at the Teresa De Carlo Crypt.
Teresa De Carlo was a local lady.
She passed away in the very early 1950s.
We discovered her crypt had been broken into.
The rear window in the back of the crypt had been smashed.
When we looked into the coffin, the glass liner was smashed,
and Teresa De Carlo's head was missing.
From what I could tell, the tools used to decapitate the head
would have been a sharp instrument, possibly a… a sharp knife.
We made a thorough search of the cemetery
to see if they discarded her head somewhere nearby.
We did not find it,
and we did not find any other, uh, desecrations.
This is the crypt of the De Carlo family.
If it was a classic theft,
we would expect 'em to have taken gold watches and rings.
We found out they neglected to take the jewelry.
You're gonna go to all that trouble, why would you not take the valuables?
In my mind, it was absolutely a satanic crime.
At that time, we had an active satanic cult in this area.
We had calls, complaints that there was satanic activity
out at the Dunbar Cave.
It's only about 15, 20 minutes
from the cemetery where Teresa De Carlo's head was stolen.
This cave is the scene where a lot of satanic activity occurred
during the late 1980s and the early 1990s.
They had sacrifices and parties there, rituals.
Now, the key thing, the most prized possession of a satanic cult
was to have a human head.
That's what they wanted, and that's what they're looking for.
After I retired, I saw an article in the newspaper
about Economy Borough having an unidentified head.
So my natural instinct was to see if maybe they had our head.
It was certainly an interesting, um, case that fit our case.
We had compared Jane Doe's photograph
against the photographs that were supplied to us of Teresa De Carlo.
Comparing them to Jane Doe, there were some similarities,
some resemblance.
[tense music plays]
[Andrew] They were both white females.
Teresa De Carlo was 75 years old when she passed away.
The estimate on our head was between 60 and 80 years old,
which matched it.
Our forensic pathologist and our coroner wanted us to look at this very hard.
Now we needed some clear way
to match Teresa De Carlo with our Jane Doe.
[somber music plays]
My team and I were brought in to determine if the head that was discovered in 2014
was a match to the body that was in the mausoleum from 1952.
The first thing we noticed was she had a lot of dentistry done
over a number of years.
There were large tooth-colored fillings in the front of the mouth.
What we found is that the fillings were made of something called barium glass.
Barium glass products are fairly common,
but this is modern dentistry.
These techniques were not possible back in 1952
because those materials simply did not exist back then.
The head had had dental work done in the '80s and '90s,
and Teresa De Carlo had died in 1952.
We determined they could not be a match.
And we're back to square one.
Some police officers that I work with, the ones who want to compliment me,
tell me I'm relentless.
The other ones, who don't want to compliment me,
tell me I'm a pain in the butt,
and that's because I want every t crossed and every i dotted.
And I want every case, even if there's no arrest,
to have an answer.
Everybody has to have a name.
She should have one besides Jane Doe.
[tense music plays]
[O'Brien] Over the course of this investigation,
one of the questions that we continuously brought up was,
at what point do you have the opportunity to sever a head from a body?
Knowing that she was embalmed,
that tells us that she most likely was prepared for a funeral.
[Andrew] So was a body somehow tampered with
between leaving the funeral home and being cremated or being buried?
There's the option of visitation or a viewing with cremation
where the body is prepared, embalmed as it would be for a regular visitation.
But instead of going to a cemetery afterwards,
the body is then taken to the crematory.
[O'Brien] We found out that a body
could possibly lay in a funeral home for several days
before it reaches the crematory.
Could somebody pick a body up at a funeral home
and be able to have the time to do these things
on the way to a crematory?
Absolutely they could.
[Andrew] We found that there are funeral directors in this country
that were selling body parts.
That took the investigation down a whole new path.
[David] I'd like to think in my heart, ethically,
that 100% of funeral directors are legitimate and they do the right things.
But you never know what happens.
The dark side of this is that there are people that do a lot of bad things.
I feel that it's possible that Jane Doe
could be part of maybe, like, a black market deal.
This had to be something that was underground.
[reporter 1] Tonight, claims of secretly dismembering and selling body parts
in the hours after a death.
[reporter 2] We have talked to more than a half dozen families,
now victims of what they describe as a scheme to profit from their pain.
[O'Brien] We ended up getting in touch with a reporter.
He's doing this research on the black market body trade
and wants to, you know, feature our Jane Doe as part of his research.
[somber music plays]
When I started looking at this story, the question was,
did Jane Doe's head come from a body broker?
Was it part of the body trade?
I was working on a story
about people who were making a living off illegal sales of body parts,
and there were basically no checks and balances on them.
It differs substantially from the concept that more people are familiar with,
which is organ transplantation.
There are many laws that deal with how that is to be done.
But with body brokers,
there are literally chop shops where they would harvest body parts.
They would cut it up,
and they would sell it, often for research purposes, to others.
And one of the things that we noted was
that there were conferences at hotels
where the ballroom was rented out,
and they would have on hand body parts,
human heads, other parts of the bodies,
for the people there to see and work on for demonstrations.
[reporter] Torsos for $1,000.
A pelvis with upper legs for $1,200.
Heads went for $500,
and $250 for a knee.
[Blake] The idea that body brokers were selling a human head for 500,
and this one shows up in a field,
and there was no clarity as to how she got there or who she was…
It gave me some pause.
In order to tell an effective story
and to understand where that head was found,
we went out to the scene.
And as soon as we stopped there,
uh, a man came out of the house across the street,
and that was Jay Grabner.
[Jay] That head was not thrown down there. That head was placed there.
It was too convenient.
[Blake] He was, I guess, a busybody.
He was the neighbor who would insert himself into situations.
I was struck by how eager Jay was to seem to help.
He had his own theories.
One of his theories was that a teenager,
the one who found the head in the woods,
was behind this and called 911 to alert the police about it.
And I thought to myself, a 15-year-old boy getting ahold of a human head,
placing it in the woods, finding it himself, calling 911…
It seemed inconceivable to me.
Where would he get it?
[Jay] You don't remember anything till you review it,
and then when you review it, small, fine points come up.
[detective] Yeah.
[Jay] Uh…
I believe there's, like, three sections to this case.
[detective] Okay. Start with one, then.
[Jay] Well, okay.
Uh, the question is, my relationship with… with the kid.
[detective] Yeah.
What we learned was that Jay had been friends with that teenage boy for years.
[O'Brien] They had a friendship together
where he tried to, you know, mentor and teach him, things like that.
[Jay] And I said… I talked to him about baseball.
He'd come over and sit on my truck, tailgate at the front of my thing.
He'd ask me if I'd come over, show him how to hit.
I said, "I'll come down with your grandfather."
-"We'll pitch baseball." -[detective] Yeah.
[Jay] "I'll show you how to stand and swing the bat."
[Andrew] And then they had a falling out.
And for whatever reason,
it caused a breakup between the two of 'em.
And Jay no longer allowed the 15-year-old boy
to come to Jay's house and property anymore.
[detective] Did he ever threaten you at all?
[Jay] I told him, "I don't want you coming in this house ever again."
[Andrew] What happened after that is,
there was a horse that lived across the road
that belonged to the people that owned the property,
and Jay took a liking to it
and sort of considered it his horse, Ginger.
[Jay] This is the barn that she used to come in and out of all the time,
and she'd go up in the 45 acres up there, and she'd go over…
[Blake] It's hard to say what happened to Ginger.
One day, they found her bleeding in the field.
They called the veterinarian,
and Jay says the veterinarian said Ginger has been stabbed.
[ominous music plays]
[Blake] The horse lived for a few more weeks
and then succumbed to the injuries.
And for Jay, that was tantamount to murder.
Rest in peace, Ginger.
And, uh, I really love her a lot, and I miss her terribly.
I really do.
We used to play…
Jay thought that that teenage boy
had stabbed and murdered the horse.
[Andrew] Jay believed that the 15-year-old killed Ginger
because of the falling out
and the fact that he was no longer allowed to come to Jay's property.
[Blake] We interviewed people who said that, in the months after,
Jay talked about revenge, revenge, revenge.
What form that would take,
people didn't know what to think.
[Andrew] So now we have an issue between the person who finds this head
and another man whose house
is the only house that's very, very close to where the head was found.
Something wasn't right.
[Blake] One of the other things that surprised me initially with Jay
was his knowledge about the body trade industry.
What's your theory?
I don't know. I told him that I thought there was events,
and I was the first one to bring it up,
that they do seminars at some of these hotels and stuff like that,
where they put plastic on the floor, and they cut, they experiment,
and take eyes and legs and arms,
whatever, hearts, kidneys, or whatever.
[Blake] He knew that there were these conferences in hotels,
and he also knew, he said,
that sometimes body parts would just be thrown in a dumpster.
And it always surprised me that he knew that.
I hadn't known it.
And I had done a lot of research at the outset.
But Jay knew it, and I always wondered why.
It fundamentally changed how I thought about his possible involvement,
that Jay did have something to do with placing that head there.
I joked with Jay at the beginning.
I said, "You see everything that takes place on this street, don't you?"
-He said, "Just about." -[Jay] The little one couldn't make it…
He gave me a tour of the house.
In part of the house, there was a telescope.
We sent down, uh, one of our cameramen,
and I said, "Go to the spot where the head was found."
The telescope was pointed toward that area.
You could see him from… Through the telescope from that window.
It's the only spot on… on, uh, the road
where the… the, uh, the… the head could be seen from the road,
but also from the house… From the window.
Yes. I totally agree with that. Yeah.
[Blake] Part of me thought Jay put that head there in the field.
And Jay had a telescope set up to see that spot.
He was watching, and he got to see how it played out.
So if you look at this map,
that's the road where the house Jay was living is along.
It's right around here.
The head is found over here,
and that spot has another piece of significance that involves Jay.
It's mere feet
from where his horse Ginger was injured.
She was later buried by Jay right about here.
So, if you think about why this spot,
it's the spot that Jay associates with what he believed was the murder
of his friend, Ginger.
On that day, I think that boy
was doing exactly what he'd done on many other days,
which was walking through that field.
And that's how he spotted the head.
And Jay knew that boy would come across it.
And I think that's what Jay was banking on.
This continued to make me concerned about Jay
and what his involvement was.
[Blake] As I continued to visit Jay, I wanted to see if I could get deeper.
And one of the areas that I broached with him was,
would you be willing to take a polygraph test?
[Blake] Would you go in and take a polygraph test for them?
-Fuckin' right! -[Blake] You would?
You're fucking right I would!
Them motherfuckers think I had anything to do with that head?
I'll do it tomorrow!
Go get the damn thing set up! I'll do it tomorrow!
You don't think I'm serious about getting this solved?
He was very insistent.
And so we arranged with one of the state's best polygraph examiners
to do this.
We came up with three primary questions to ask him.
"Did you place that severed head in that field?"
His answer was "no."
"Regarding that severed head found across from your house,
did you place that there?"
His answer was "no."
"Did you plan with anyone to place that severed head in that field?"
His answer was "no."
In each case, deception was indicated.
And by deception,
a 99.9% chance that he was not telling the truth.
It's not like, "We're a little bit unsure."
It's, "You were lying."
Minutes after he finished,
we sat down with Jay to explain the results.
[Blake] How do you think this makes you look?
I don't care how it makes me look. I'm telling the truth.
I know nothing about the head, where it came from,
or who cooked up the idea to do that head!
I'm dead straight honest, period.
I'm not built no other way.
[unsettling music plays]
[O'Brien] I believe that Jay knows how that head got there.
I think it almost became a cat and mouse game for Jay,
where he's gonna put a little bit out there and see what we do with it.
That horse…
[Blake] Every time I spoke with Jay,
there would be some other element that would stop me in my tracks.
I had heard rumors that the head
may have been connected to Jay in some way.
Someone mentioned, could it have been his mother?
And matter-of-factly, he told me
about the fact that he had lost his best friend, his dog Jackie.
He pointed to a standalone freezer in the basement of the house
and said, "She's in there."
"Double-bagged, freeze-dried."
Could that freezer have held a human head?
Yes, it could have.
This was my mother, 1939.
[Andrew] We knew that Jay's mother had passed away
15 years before the head was found.
So we followed that as best we could,
checked her grave.
We checked with the funeral home.
We checked to see if there was any possibility
of any tampering with it before the casket was buried,
and we even double-checked with family members.
We have a couple of pictures of Jay's mom,
showed 'em to the experts,
and they don't feel it matches.
But I was certainly still looking at the possibility
that Jay Grabner is somehow involved in this.
I think Jay definitely knows,
uh, a lot more than we were able to find out from him.
[Andrew] In 2020,
we got a call from the Ohio Highway Patrol.
Jay Grabner drove his pickup truck on the Ohio Turnpike,
pulled up along an overpass.
There is a truck on the turnpike heading towards that overpass,
and Jay jumps off the overpass in front of the truck.
[Blake] I don't doubt that there were some sort of mental health issues
that he struggled with.
What they were, I don't know.
It surprised me, though.
It saddened me a lot.
[somber music plays]
[Andrew] Jay Grabner commits suicide.
My best lead is gone.
He was the last string I had in solving this case.
[Blake] If Jay were responsible for putting that head in that field,
that solves only one element of this mystery.
The other mystery,
which I think is arguably more important, is, who is she?
Who is she?
A burial service is set after a woman's embalmed head
was found in the woods in Western Pennsylvania.
The Beaver County coroner and police are still working to identify the woman.
The remains will be buried at a Beaver County cemetery tomorrow.
[bells toll]
[melancholy music plays]
[O'Brien] On the anniversary of her discovery,
we had decided to, uh, do a funeral service.
It was attended by most of us that were involved in the case
and our wives, our loved ones.
Um, and it was sad.
[melancholy music continues]
[O'Brien] The coroner was able to put her in a full-size casket
so that when the rest of her is found, she can be reunited as whole.
And she has a headstone there that reads "Jane Doe."
[melancholy music continues]
[Kristen] All the investigators in the case
wanted to make sure that she had a proper burial.
It was almost a bit of a public promise that they wouldn't forget about it
and that they would keep working for answers for her.
[O'Brien] The hardest thing about this case
is knowing that somebody out there
doesn't even know that their loved one
is the person who we're looking to identify.
What do we know about Jane Doe? We know she's a female,
probably in her 60s or older.
We don't have her DNA.
We don't know how she got there.
[Kristen] She deserves to have everyone know who she really is.
She deserves to be buried with a headstone with her name on it.
No one should be buried as a Jane Doe.
In 50 years, I've solved most of the stuff I investigate.
There are only a handful
that I've been involved in that I don't know the answer.
I don't know who put the head there.
I don't know who the lady is.
I don't know why she has red rubber balls where her eyes should be.
That's a lot of "I don't knows."
This has become something I can't let go.
Almost everybody else in that cemetery has someone who comes and mourns.
Who comes and mourns her?
[melancholy music continues]
[music fades]
[unsettling music plays]
[music stops]