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It’s all the work of New Jersey State Police Forensic Anthropologist Donna Fontana, whose work has been featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and elsewhere.
Late last week, Fontana issued a revised report on the 38- to 48-year-old man, whose naked body washed up on July 21, 2008.
Authorities also issued a photo of a distinguishing mark – a tattoo on his left chest that says “Lyniol,” “Lynios” or “Lynias.”
He was also missing most of his teeth before he died, the report says.
An online report published by a Bergen County daily newspaper says the man was “believed to be either a white or Hispanic male in his 30s or 40s. He had black hair and a receding hairline and was believed to be about 5-foot-10 in height and weighing 150 to 180 pounds….”
In fact, he was a much smaller man – 5’7 ½” and weighted 140 pounds, according to Fontana’s report (available at https://identifyus.org/cases/2265). He had brown eyes, brown hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, it says.
Fontana worked in relative obscurity for several years. But reality programs such as “America’s Most Wanted,” as well as fictional ones, such as “Bones,” have brought her work — a bit of art and a bit of science itself — to the fore.
The 30-year veteran helped identify 9/11 victims, as well as those killed in plane crashes, including one in which a commuter jet smashed into a Queens neighborhood in 2001. She works at a State Police laboratory that is considered one of the country’s premiere facilities of its kind.
There, forensic scientists extract and identify everything they can from the remains of murder victims, suicides and other unnatural deaths.
Fontana then produces a wealth of information, in the hope that someone recognizes something, anything, that can lead to an identification — and, in this instance, maybe solve a cold case.
Thanks to Fontana, Brandon Strater is serving five years in state prison for burying his friend, Joseph Butterworth, in Wharton State Forest, after he’d died of a heroin overdose.
Stater’s father is serving two years of probation for his role in disposing of the body, which a hunter found.
Brandon Strater admitted he and his friend were doing heroin when Butterworth died in his SUV.
Lee Strater picked up his son after Brandon buried the body and left the vehicle in the woods.
The DUV was found a few months later. It then took two years for Butterworth’s body to turn up.
Then Fontana went to work (SEE: NJSP charge father and son in mysterious woods burial of missing man).
Fontana has also worked one of New Jersey’s best-known cold caes, the discovery of a victim dubbed “Baby Bones,” whose remains were found near Six Flags Great Adventure (SEE: “Baby Bones” case gets “ad”-ed publicity).
Investigators have no idea who the Passaic River victim is and are hoping Fontana’s work jogs someone’s memory.
State Police have ruled out three missing men: One, 42, from Louisiana; another, 44, from North Carolina; and one, 51, from Arizona.
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