Investigators dig up wrong body seeking to crack nearly half-century-old cold case

Authorities exhumed a body in a Connecticut cemetery Wednesday in hopes of identifying the victim of a nearly half-century-old homicide only to find that they'd dug up someone else's remains.

But East Haven Police Chief Joseph Murgo told WTNH News 8 they will keep investigating and try to pinpoint the victim's actual grave in the cemetery in Hamden.

Murgo told CBS Hartford, Connecticut affiliate WFSB-TV they hope to try again within two weeks.

The victim was female. The body they exhumed was male.

The victim's body was found wrapped in a tarp in a drainage ditch behind a now-gone department store in East Haven on Aug. 16, 1975.

She'd been strangled, WFSB says. Authorities were never able to learn her name, so police refer to her as Jane Doe.

Police have determined that she was buried in 1976 at the State Street Cemetery. But Murgo said her grave wasn't marked, making it difficult to locate.

WFSB points out that the grass is high in the old cemetery and some of the tombstones date back centuries.

"We're going off of basically a handwritten drawing of the cemetery and of the plots and what we're finding is that there are a large amount of unmarked graves and there are large amount of people who weren't necessarily documented on our records, buried in our area," Murgo told WFSB.

The cemetery "has been abandoned for many years, there's no association and even when there was an association, they came under fire at the time for keep really inaccurate records, so that's sort of the challenge we're facing now," he added.

Police say they know she's in that area -- they just need to find the exact gravesite.

"Throughout the years several generations of detectives investigated the case, but we were never able to identify her, we were never able to lock in on a definite suspect," Murgo told WFSB.

With advances in DNA testing and genealogy, they're hoping to solve the case, he said.

"Forty-seven years is a long time to wonder what happened to your loved one and there is somebody out there that wants some sense of closure and it's our hope that we're able to bring that sense of closure to our victim's family," Murgo said.