Transcription
Human remains were found hidden within the walls of a suburban Chicago home, and this shocking discovery remained a mystery for over four decades. Hey y'all, I'm Christina, and you're listening to History and Heist.
On November 12th, 1978, a couple was remodeling their home in Illinois when they found what they believed to be a human skull inside the wall of their home. Of course, they immediately stopped what they were doing and alerted the police, like, "Uh, we knocked this wall down and a human skull fell out." So, the police department came out to the home to start an investigation, and they discovered that apparently this skull had just been lodged between two studs in the wall of the home, and during the remodeling, they had just kind of like shook it loose.
And so, of course, in 1978, they didn't have the DNA and the genealogical records that we now have, and so their options were pretty limited. But what they did do was reach out to some outlets, including national labs, some local museums, and also some colleges and universities. And one university professor told the police that this skull belonged to a young woman who was probably around 20 years old, and that this person had died prior to the year 1900. Police searched their records for missing persons and came up empty-handed. And after what was said to be a very thorough investigation, the case went cold, and the skull was donated to a museum.
And this is where it sat until March 10th, 2021, when some museum employees were cleaning up, trying to make room for new inventory, and they came across a box that contained the skull. So, the employees who found it, they didn't know where the skull came from or who it belonged to, and so they called the police and they were like, "Um, we have a skull here, we're not really sure where this came from, and so do you guys maybe know anything about it?" And so the police searched their records and they found the original report from 1978.
So, the police decided that they would come and get this skull, and they were going to send it to the county coroner's office, and they would reopen the investigation into who these remains belonged to. So, being that this case was over 40 years old, Rob Russell, who is the coroner in the county, he decided that the cold case team would be the best suited to handle the investigation. So, the coroner's office contacted laboratories in Texas. This company was known for performing a relatively new investigative technique called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIG for short. Now, this is actually the same procedure that was used to catch the Golden State Killer in 2018, and as of 2022, this technology had already solved more than 500 cases.
So, the coroner's office reaches out to them to see if maybe they could get some kind of profile on this skull. And after having this skull for a few weeks, the lab was able to obtain some usable DNA for testing. So, the lab tells the coroner's office that if they're able to obtain a profile, then they can run it through a database to see if they could find any family members and figure out who this person was. Now, of course, these tests would require funding, but the lab said that there were crowdfunding websites that they could use and possibly get the funding to go ahead and run these tests.
So, the coroner's office felt that this was something that the public would really take an interest in, and so they figured, "You know what? I think people would want to help." The coroner's office agreed, and in December of 2023, a press release was sent out about the unknown identity of the skull that had been found in 1978. So, with the media's help of spreading the story and the generous financial support of private citizens, the funds were quickly raised to start working on this case, and within two weeks, the report came back, and they had a match. There was a family tree with living relatives.
So, all of this information is handed over to the coroner's office, who then makes contact with the family to get confirmation. So, they reach out to the family member, which is a potential great-great-grandson for the remains, and he's willing to help out and submit his DNA to the lab, and they were able to confirm that he was, in fact, a match. So, we now know that the skull found in the wall was Esther Granger.
Esther was born on October 26th, 1848, in Indiana. She was married to Charles Granger in 1865 at the age of 16 years old. She became pregnant just a few months after they got married, and in May of 1866, Esther gave birth to a baby girl but soon passed away from complications from the birth. She was buried in Merriville, Indiana, leaving behind her husband and new baby girl. In honor of his wife, Charles named his baby girl Esther.
But you might be wondering, um, if she was buried in a cemetery in Indiana, how in the world did her body end up in Illinois? Sadly, we may never truly know. But the county coroner did come up with a theory that he's calling a "common sense theory," and that is that Esther was possibly the victim of grave robbing. Now, there is also the possibility that her body could have been sold by her husband directly to this medical college, but I didn't find anything that would make me think that would be the case. It just seems a lot more likely that this was a grave robbing situation.
Now, I did do a video on grave robbing. I actually have several that kind of talk about it. If you want to check that out. But it was a pretty common thing back in the 1800s. It was a really profitable gig that many people felt was worth the risk. According to the county coroner, stealing a body and selling it paid the grave robber the equivalent of what an average worker made in a three to four-month time period if they were working 60-hour weeks. Most grave robbers would just steal one body every few months, and they made a pretty good living doing it. I'm not going to lie, I can see how that was tempting. If you lived back then in harsher times, it might have kind of been a hard thing to pass up.
And of course, like I mentioned in my previous videos on the topic, grave robbing was legal at the time, but those laws weren't really strictly enforced by law enforcement agencies, and so I'm sure that made it pretty tempting work. 60 hours a week, every week, or steal two or three bodies a year. Now, to clarify, the ones stealing bodies were actually technically called body snatchers, and grave robbing was when you would steal valuables from a grave. But most people call them grave robbers because they don't understand the difference. So, I do kind of use these terms interchangeably, but it was probably a pretty important distinction back in the day because sometimes the punishment for stealing valuables was more than the punishment for stealing bodies, just depending on the time period and the area.
So, like I said, police didn't really prosecute people for these crimes or arrest people for these crimes, and so this meant that justice was often left to vigilantes. So, the dangerous part for these grave robbers were the family members who took matters into their own hands. Back in those days, there were several riots that happened after a known grave robbing incident had taken place, and these vigilantes would sometimes end the lives of the grave robbers. So, I, I might be taking back what I was saying earlier, 'cause I feel like losing my life would be a bit of a deterrent for me. I may have just changed my mind on my life of crime.
Now, there was actually a famous riot that happened in Kane County in the 1800s, sometimes referred to as the St. Charles Riots or Resurrection Riots. This was an uprising fueled by public outrage over body snatching, as communities all across the Midwest became more and more disturbed with how frequent these body snatchings were happening. In St. Charles, Illinois, during that time, some of the locals started to worry that their relatives' graves weren't safe because there had been quite a few incidences in nearby towns where bodies had been stolen. And suspicion at that time started to fall on a local physician by the name of Dr. Edwin Carson. Now, people thought that he and his associates were involved in providing bodies to the Chicago medical schools, and as these rumors began to spread, a furious crowd of people began to protest.
Tensions quickly escalated during this protest as accusations of disrespect of the dead and violating community trust inflamed the crowd, and this just escalated and escalated until a mob stormed Dr. Carson's office and residence, vandalizing property and destroying medical equipment in their search for evidence. Although Dr. Carson denied involvement, the crowd's fury was fueled by long-standing suspicions that he and the others were profiting from the sale of cadavers. And in response to public outrage over incidents like the St. Charles or Resurrectionist Riot, laws were eventually introduced to regulate the supply of cadavers for medical study. By the early 20th century, Anatomy Acts in various states established legal avenues for medical institutions to acquire bodies, often from unclaimed remains or donations, reducing the demand for grave robbing.
But if you want to learn more about that, I do have, like I said, quite a bit of details on that stuff in a little series of videos that I did last year around the same time. So, I'll have all of those videos linked at the end of this episode, as well as in the description and the show notes on the podcast. So, the St. Charles or Resurrectionist Riot is not believed to be at all related to Esther's case, but it is interesting that it happened in the same county, leading us to believe that body snatching was a very big problem in this area at the time. It kind of adds to the pile of evidence that Esther was a victim of body snatching.
Of course, we'll never know for sure what happened to Esther, and the rest of her body was never found. Once the police were able to discover Esther's identity and get a positive match through her great-great-grandson, Wayne, they wanted to continue with the goal of restoring a sense of decency to the life and death of Esther. And so, the police got approval from Esther's family to lay her to rest once again in a donated plot in the cemetery. And there was a ceremony where Wayne was able to give the eulogy for his great-great-grandmother, who he had never physically met, but he said that because of the great relationship he had with his own mother and grandparents, he felt as though he knew Esther through them.
So, the press conference on all of this just came out this past week, and I thought it was so interesting. I've been working on a much longer episode for you guys, but I needed a bit more time to do some research. So, when this popped up, decided it would be a really interesting one to talk about. I did mean to get this out to you guys last week, so I apologize for the delay. But let me know what you think about this case, and check out some of those other episodes that I mentioned if you haven't seen them. And until then, I'll catch you all in the next one. [Applause]