Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s04e03 Episode Script

[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]