WRENTHAM, MASS. (WHDH) - Crews are set to exhume an unidentified body in Wrentham later this month in an effort to identify the remains, officials announced.
Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey and Wrentham Police Chief William McGrath in a joint statement said crews will dig up the body from Wrentham’s Center Cemetery on Sept. 25.
Once crews recover the remains, officials said experts will work to develop a DNA profile.
Questions around the unidentified body date back to April 20, 1974 when a pair of hikers told authorities they found the skeletal remains of a white man in the area of the Eagle Brook pumping station in Wrentham.
Officials said the town buried the man at the Center Cemetery after they were unable to find out who he was.
Fifty years after the body was found, officials said cemetery personnel and members of the Wrentham Historical Commission worked with law enforcement agencies to get court authorization to exhume the remains.
Morrissey and McGrath said a forensic anthropologist assigned to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will be at Center Cemetery for the exhumation.
Once removed from the ground, officials said they expect the body will be taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Crews will bring the body back to Wrentham and rebury it after retrieving samples from the remains.
Though it does not include the 1974 case in Wrentham, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System documents 14 other cases of unidentified remains found in Norfolk County since 1986.
The system is managed by the Department of Justice and notes 202 unidentified remains cases in Massachusetts. The oldest listed case dates back to 1951 in Chelsea.
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