Skull found to belong to man believed murdered nearly 40 years ago after DNA test

A skull found on the banks of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania has been identified thanks to new technology as belonging to a man believed to have been murdered along with his girlfriend almost 40 years ago.

Richard Thomas Alt, 31, was last seen by his parents on Christmas Eve in 1984, with the skull found in 1986, and now Bucks County district attorney’s office said detectives and a private forensic DNA laboratory identified it as belonging to the missing man.

The skull was found on the banks of the Delaware River in Morrisville by a fisherman, a year after his girlfriend's body was discovered in the river on the New Jersey side.

District Attorney Matt Weintraub said Mr Alt and his girlfriend were suspected homicide victims in New Jersey. The death of Laurie Suydam, who was found in the river in Trenton in April 1985, is considered an unsolved homicide while Alt’s case has been a missing person’s case, a Mercer County prosecutor’s office spokesperson said Monday.

Mr Alt is thought to have been murdered along with his girlfriend (Bucks County District Attorney's Office)

“I can’t even imagine wondering and worrying about a lost family member for even a day, let alone for 37 years. That wait is now over for Mr Alt’s family,” Weintraub said in a statement. “I’m just glad that we could give them some peace of mind with this identification, and the eventual return of his remains to his family.”

Mr Weintraub pointed to the technical expertise from Texas-based firm Othram, which used forensic genome sequencing and forensic genetic genealogy to identify the skull found by a fisherman in June 1986 on the banks of the river by the Morrisville Boat Ram.

The county coroner’s office entered the skull into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database and last September detectives sent it to Othram after the company said they had found a possible match on a public genealogy database, prosecutors said.

The DNA contributor, a 49-year-old Florida woman, told detectives on January 4 that she was aged 11 when Mr Alt, her father, went missing in Trenton.

She agreed to share her DNA results from the genealogy site with Othram, which four days later said the parent/child relationship match had been confirmed, prosecutors said.

Bucks County prosecutors said they consider their investigation closed “due to lack of evidence of any crime being committed in Bucks County.”