Re: 30 Skulls Found In Illinois Attic UPDATED
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/chi-0606140171jun14,0,2178093.story
From the Chicago Tribune
Home buyer finds 26 skulls in attic, but it's no crime
Jun 13, 2006
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- The attic held a secret: more than 26 of them.
After dentist Dale Fitz-Henry died, his modest bungalow fell into disrepair over a dozen years. Last fall the city sold it for back taxes.
As the new owner tried to clean out the attic, she uncorked a mystery: more than two dozen well-preserved human skulls, ranging from a child of 6 to men and women more than 50 years old.
The McLean County coroner and the Bloomington Police Department quickly determined this was no crime scene. Instead, the skulls were Native American bones collected by Fitz-Henry, an apparent Indian buff whose house the coroner described as a kind of "dusty museum" chock full of antiques and artifacts.
Since the discovery, Bloomington police have kept the skulls out of public view out of respect for the deceased. But police said most of the skulls were intact and that one has a little handle attached atop the cranium so you could flip it open and see a gold-painted tin pan inside--perhaps for use as a container, or even an ashtray. Another had one artificial eye, a material approximating skin on half its face and some fake hair.
State anthropologists who examined the bones said they were the remains of 33 individuals--26 skulls, but also a handful of mandibles, suggesting the dentist may have been studying the teeth.
The skulls were in good condition, dark-colored and treated to prevent decay, police said.
"It's the strangest collection of things in that house you could ever imagine," said archeologist Alan Harn of the state's Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown. "You would see that and think this must've been one of the most eccentric men you'd ever encounter."
Police were puzzled when the home's new owner, Kathleen Hollonbeck of Rochelle, made the find, but for scientists, the clues quickly added up.
The apparent location where the bones were unearthed--an Indian mound on an Illinois River bluff in Downstate Fulton County called Anderson Lake--had been written in script on some of the specimens, as well as the year, 1933, and Fitz-Henry's signature. That matched a well-known excavation that year of remains from 600 to 700 years ago of a regional population of a mix of Oneota and late Mississippian Indians, an agricultural community with no modern tribal equivalents, so there are no written records of their history.
Some other artifacts at the home pointed to those Indians, including pottery shards and a spoon fashioned from a mussel shell. Other telltale signs, according to Illinois Historic Preservation Agency physical anthropologist Dawn Cobb, were the shapes of the skull--flat-faced and round-headed--as well as the five-cusped molars.
"The artifacts from the site are very unique to that site," Harn said. "We know what was going there in 1933. We have good documentation of that."
State laws protecting Indian burial sites from excavations were not enacted until the 1980s. In the 1930s, "anyone with a shovel" could dig into these sites, Harn said. Some did so to build personal collections, while others hoped to sell curiosities for cash at the height of the Great Depression.
For those reasons, Harn said it is not terribly uncommon to find human skulls and other bones tucked away in private homes, but it is rare to find this many. IHPA spokesman Dave Blanchette called it the largest collection of human remains found in a private collection in the two decades the department has existed.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Blanchette said. "We can find out about the way people before us lived."
The fate of the bones is up to Hollonbeck, who did not return messages left by the Tribune seeking comment.
Blanchette said Tuesday the agency is in contact with Hollonbeck and is urging her to donate the bones to the state for further study.
But Joseph "Standing Bear" Schranz, executive director of Midwest SOARRING Foundation, a Westchester-based non-profit that helps re-inter Indian remains, said he was "extremely appalled" at the size of this find--and particularly by the skull possibly fashioned into an ashtray. He said he hoped Hollonbeck would decide to return them to the ground.
"We don't want to put them from one [display] case to another," he said. "We want to give them a proper burial. We'll give them that, and we're just eager and anxious to correct what is wrong."
Because the discovery has attracted much interest, police have been posting an officer outside the house to guard it against burglars. With the anthropologists' findings Tuesday, McLean County Coroner Beth Kimmerling declared the "very unique death investigation," from her office's standpoint, "administratively closed."
The house had been empty for 12 years, police said. The last known member of the family, Fitz-Henry's son, Dale II, is believed to have died about a year ago in a fire at a Woodford County cabin, freeing up the city to sell it for back taxes.
"[Hollonbeck] probably got it for a song and now she's getting a dance too," said Bloomington Police Public Affairs Officer David White.
The A-frame bungalow sits on a quiet street in Bloomington. The white paint is chipping away, the roof is covered in tarps and a wall of weeds is growing in the back yard.
But after touring the interior for two hours Tuesday, the coroner and the scientists left in awe of Fitz-Henry's eclectic collection.
"I'd like to spend a month in there. From the basement to the attic, every wall is like a museum," Harn said.
Neighbor LaVon Shultz, 70, said she had lived about two houses from the Fitz-Henry family all her life and never knew what was inside the home.
"I was totally shocked," she said. "I never thought of a bunch of skulls over there."
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jbiemer@tribune.com
