The Woman In Limbo Case Study

The hit television series, Bones Season 1 Episode 22, followed a storyline into the disappearance of the lead player, Temperance Brennan aka “Bones” parents. Bones and her brother were abandoned by their parents when they were children (Fox Film Corporation, 2006). Over the years Bones found herself plagued with questions of what might have caused the nature of their disappearance. Did her parents simply abandon her and her brother, or where they dead? The Woman in Limbo episode brought to light an investigation surrounding her parent’s lives to help answer those questions when her mother’s skeletal remains and personal effects were recovered from an unmarked grave.
Case Background
In 1998, grave diggers found skeletal remains in an unmarked grave on the edge of a Pennsylvania cemetery. The remains recovered included a skull, partial leather belt, dolphin belt buckle, large marble, partial movie ticket, and three bags of soil samples. The episode did not touch upon the collection evidence. It did, however, discuss that the coroner sent the remains and contents obtained from the scene to the Jeffersonian Institute to determine identity and cause of death. The skull was analyzed to determine the …show more content…
Ruth Brennan’s remains were found in an unmarked grave by grave diggers on the edge of a cemetery and placed in evidence bags by police who sent them to coroner’s office. The coroner did not find any signs of foul play and later sent the unidentified skull, personal contents, and soil samples to forensic anthropologists (Fox Film Corporation, 2006). According to Byers (2011), recovery efforts by police and untrained workers such as those applied in this case create difficulty because vital evidence and bone material can be lost or mixed. Also, partial remains often never make it past the coroner’s office to be processed by forensic anthropologists