A woman whose embalmed head was found in the western Pennsylvania woods more than a year ago, might have died of a heart ailment, police said Monday.
Police have yet to determine who the woman is or why her head was severed from her body after it was embalmed.
But another twist added to the mystery was that rubber balls were found in the woman's eye sockets, officials told WPXI.
“This is just not common practice in the funeral business,” Beaver County Coroner Teri Tatalovich-Rossi said.
Tests conducted on the woman's hair at the FBI Forensic Lab in Quantico, Virginia, showed traces of lidocaine and atropine - drugs used to treat acute heart ailments - in her system, Economy police Chief Michael O'Brien said at a news conference.
Beaver County District Attorney Anthony Berosh said a company was hired to test isotopes found in the woman's body. Those substances are elements that form in human bodies from the food and drink that a person consumes, and can form combinations unique to certain geographic areas.
The tests suggest that the woman moved several times in the months before she died, which means she might have been in the care of family or friends, Berosh said.
In general, the tests showed that the woman likely lived somewhere in the Allegheny Mountains region, including western or central Pennsylvania, eastern New York and Lake Ontario, eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia and Maryland.
Authorities enlisted experts to do an age regression photo of the woman at 50 and then at 30, hoping to jog someone’s memory. Police said they won’t rest until they are able to positively identify her.
“She was somebody’s aunt, mom. We need to figure this out,” Berosh said.
The woman's head was found Dec. 12, 2014, by a boy walking through the woods in the borough about 15 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Authorities performed a burial service for the head on Saturday, the anniversary of its discovery.
