Weather slows search for remains in Dedham

DEDHAM – A search for other remains where a skull was found last week may not have turned up much but it likely was helpful to their investigation, the Maine State Police said Friday.

Members of the state police, the state Medical Examiner’s Office, the Maine Warden Service and a forensic anthropologist on Thursday were in the woods north of Green Lake Road looking for other bones where a hunter had found a human skull.

State police Detective Gerald Coleman said Friday that he and his fellow searchers didn’t have much luck.

“Yesterday the weather didn’t cooperate,” Coleman said, referring to the mixture of snow and rain that fell in Hancock County. The investigators looked around for three or four hours without any dogs but came up empty, he added.

Dedham resident James Garland found the skull while hunting in the woods Nov. 19, according to police. Garland brought the skull to the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department where Dr. Marcella Sorg, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Maine in Orono, determined it to have been in the woods for roughly 10 years and to have belonged to a person in their teens or 20s, police said. The gender of the person has not been determined.

“The assumption we’re going on is that the death occurred 10 to 20 years ago,” Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.

Coleman said the investigative team hopes to return to the scene in the next couple of weeks.

“It’s all dependent on the weather,” Coleman said. “Hopefully we can do that before winter sets in.”

Becoming familiar with the terrain near the site was helpful, if not immediately productive, he added.

Coleman said investigators also are poring over missing-persons reports and other cases in order to try to find a lead as to who the person might have been, or if foul play may have been involved in the death.

He said that until the scene has been searched completely, investigators do not want to indicate exactly where the skull was found.

“We want to keep people out of there until we’re satisfied we’ve found everything,” Coleman said.