SALEM, Ill. – In an effort to identify an unknown train wreck victim, Salem, Illinois, has instead uncovered a new mystery.
For 54 years, an unidentified victim of a 1971 train wreck lay at rest in a Salem cemetery.
But Henry Morton, a Mizzou student and Salem native, and the city of Salem teamed up to exhume the body in hopes that new DNA testing could help give this person a name.
However, what they dug up was completely unexpected.
“It’s really thrown everyone for a loop because it’s not what we originally thought or believed,” said Myron Lloyd, president of the Salem Historical Commission.
In 1971, an Amtrak train going from Chicago to New Orleans derailed. Seven train cars rolled over and 11 people were reported dead.
But now, that number could rise. Marion County coroner Claud Howell told FOX 2 that multiple people were buried in the unidentified victim’s grave.
“You could tell by the growth plate in the top of the cranium it was an adult of some kind. We don’t know how old, but it certainly didn’t go along with the little arms,” he said.
Howell said that claim proves there were at least two people buried there together: one adult and a child.
However, the other remains that were discovered might belong to a third person. Howell was amazed by the condition of the bodies.
“You go in here and you see this from 50 years ago, and it was unbelievable. I don’t think anyone was ready for that,” he said.
The nonprofit DNA Doe Project was planning to run testing to identify one victim. Now, it is going back through old death certificates to see if these newly discovered remains belong to one of the previously known victims or if there were more deaths than originally reported.
“It was a different time. You didn’t have near the finesse that you have available to people today in determining DNA, let alone just handling the bodies. They may have picked it up thinking it was all the same person,” Lloyd said.
The findings could alter a piece of Salem history. The DNA results were already expected to take at least a couple of months.
Now, the work is expected to last even longer as they try to answer new questions.
