Dental professors’ forensic work featured on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’

When a red cooler arrived in the forensics lab at the School of Dental Medicine in early 2015, no one imagined its contents would lead to a UB professor’s appearance on “Unsolved Mysteries” almost a decade later.

The cooler, which the Pennsylvania State Police delivered to Squire Hall, contained an unidentified severed head that a teenager discovered in the woods in Economy, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The UB dental forensics team was tasked with determining if the head belonged to a torso in a broken-into mausoleum in Uniontown. The police only knew the head belonged to an older woman.

“It was an embalmed head that had originally gone through some sort of funeral process,” says Mary Bush, a forensic dentist and associate professor of restorative dentistry. Bush was interviewed about the team’s findings in May 2023 by a film crew of the iconic mystery documentary show in the coroner’s officer in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

She evaluated the dental work with Raymond Miller, clinical associate professor of oral diagnostic sciences, and her husband, Peter Bush, director of the material analysis core in the South Campus Instrument Center. What they discovered revealed that the severed head did not match the headless body.

“The problem was the body was interred in 1952 and all the dentistry in the head was modern, from the mid-1980s at the very earliest,” Bush says. “It more likely was done in the 1990s or even later.”

So, who is this deceased individual? And why was her head sitting in the woods?

These questions and others are examined in Volume 4, Episode 3 of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which began airing July 31 on Netflix.

“The experience was almost surreal,” says Bush, who also has tools of her forensics work refuting bitemark evidence included in a current yearlong exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“When I first got off the phone with the Smithsonian, I remember saying to my husband, ‘Did we just talk to the Smithsonian?’” she recalls. “And then I talked to ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ about the case, wondering if we had enough material they would be interested in, and next thing I know, I’m being interviewed in the conference room of a morgue with all this camera equipment around me.”

UB was tapped for the project because the Pennsylvania State Police had worked with Miller, who also serves as the forensic dental consultant to the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office, in a previous murder investigation he helped crack through dental records. Miller emphasizes that the microscopy work that Peter Bush oversees in the South Campus Instrument Center also put the dental school on the forensics map.

“Peter uses a scanning electron microscope that has the ability to evaluate minimalized amounts of what’s left of teeth or restorations,” Miller explains. “And our research team has published significant articles in the area of composite resin identification based on their elemental composition.”

The team also leaned on researchers in UB’s Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology Clinic, who took radiographs of the skull and teeth. They added these to X-rays taken by a dentist in Pennsylvania who initially examined the head.

“When we first saw the X-rays I said, ‘There’s no way this is 1952 dentistry,’” Mary Bush says. “There were a bunch of resin composites, and that technology did not exist in the ‘50s. Some older faculty members conferred with us and they placed it no earlier than the mid-1980s.”

The UB team spent an entire day with the head but were stymied as to its identity.

“We used every technique and tool in Peter’s lab and in the dental school,” Miller says. “But we couldn’t come to a conclusion. Thus, it’s an unsolved mystery.”

The three forensic scientists have used their technology and expertise for other big cases where they have been successful in identifying victims, including Colgan Air Flight 3407, which crashed in Clarence Center in 2009, killing all 49 passengers and one person on the ground.

“It was rewarding to be able to do the work and help identify victims of that tragedy,” Miller says.

Likewise, Bush says she would like to see the identity of the deceased woman they examined as well.

“I hope to get closure for the family,” she says.

While Mary Bush says she considered this Miller’s case, he had a conflict at the time of the filming, so she ended up representing the team on the show.

“Mary is very personable, and I knew she would make a good interview,” Miller says. “I’m glad they are putting the story out there. Sometimes, these cases do stimulate answers from the viewing public.”

Neither Bush nor Miller saw the episode before it aired and were curious as to what the producers ended up using and what other evidence they’re including from the case.

“I think there is more to the story that will be revealed on the show,” Bush says.