PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Two mummified skulls of infants have been linked to a century-old western Pennsylvania murder after Mütter Museum employees discovered them among their inventory.
Mütter Museum staff members were taking inventory last November when they stumbled upon a box labeled, “two mummified infant heads.” Erin McLeary, senior director of collections and research, said the box identified late Montgomery County coroner Halbert Fillinger as the donor.
The box had what’s known as a “found number,” McLeary said, “meaning that at some point … someone located these two remains, assigned it a number, and simply moved on with whatever they were doing at that time.” That was back in 2005.
McLeary and her colleagues dug further into Fillinger’s donor records, cross-referencing his handwritten notes with newspaper archives.
His notes indicated the skulls were from Gallitzin, Cambria County. There, the bodies of five babies, born in the 1920s and ’30s, were found in a woman’s attic after she died in 1980. In May, the Mütter Museum returned the remains to Cambria County officials.
“I really wanna commend my coworkers for taking ownership of a problem and immediately working toward a resolution, rather than saying, ‘Oh, that’s weird,’ and setting it aside for another day,” McLeary added.
She said this saga has been even more important as the museum nears the end of its years-long Pew-funded Postmortem Project, analyzing the ethical questions about keeping human remains.
“Reconciling those records to know more about what we hold, particularly in our human remains collection, and to better describe our collections, interpret our collections, and share our collections.”