‘I didn’t even need to see the head:’ UB forensic dentist appears on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“I just found a human head.”

The finder was a then-15-year-old boy who discovered a severed head in a wooded area of Western Pennsylvania in December 2014. Police determined it had been embalmed before being cleanly removed by someone with medical tools and medical knowledge.

The head appeared to be that of an older woman between the ages of 60 and 80, police said. DNA testing came up empty because embalming chemicals destroy DNA.

That is where the University at Buffalo’s forensic dental team came in. Unfortunately, they didn’t provide the answer detectives hoped for, and 10 years later, the case is still cold.

The bizarre story of the severed head – including the finding that her eyes had been replaced with red rubber balls – is featured in Episode 3 of the new season of “Unsolved Mysteries” on Netflix.

Dr. Mary Bush, a forensic dentist and professor at UB’s School of Dental Medicine, traveled to the Beaver County, Pa., coroner’s office for the filming in May. The episode began streaming July 31.

UB’s forensic dental team had assisted Pennsylvania State Police on a prior homicide case, so they turned to UB for help with Jane Doe. They were hoping to match her head to a body in a mausoleum that had been broken into about 80 miles south.

When the crypt break-in was discovered, police found that the coffin of a woman interred in 1952 had been opened and “the head taken from the body,” as narrator Robert Stack says on the show. They asked the UB team to determine whether the found head might belong to that body by examining the dental work.

“They really wanted it to be the head from the mausoleum,” Bush said.

Jane Doe’s head arrived at the dental school’s Squire Hall on UB’s South Campus in a red Igloo Playmate cooler. It was received by Bush, her colleague Dr. Ray…