Stingl: Buried skull from Wauwatosa is poked and prodded but holds tight to its secrets

A human skull found buried in a Wauwatosa backyard retains much of its mystery a year later, though we now think it's a she.

That's according to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, which took a good long look at what used to be somebody's head.

But whose? The experts don't know that. Even after careful analysis, they're also still unclear about:

How old the skull is — "many years to potentially decades."

The age range of the person who lost it — 30 to 60 years.

Ancestry — mixed. Aren't we all?

And there's no sign of perimortem trauma, meaning at or near the time of death. That tells us nothing, of course, about what may have happened to the rest of the body, which was not found. Other bones and bits discovered in the dirt were not human.

The skull yielded a DNA profile, but it lacks the short repeated sequences that help with human identification. And its so-called mtDNA, or mitochondrial profile, is very common in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, meaning it has limited value as a searching tool.

On Jan. 20 of last year, while digging a basement for a new house on Underwood Ave., workers found the skull. On March 7, the skull was shipped UPS to the forensic anthropology lab in Texas.

And three weeks ago, the skull returned to the Milwaukee County medical examiner's office, where it now sits in a tape-sealed cardboard box in an evidence room. On Tuesday, I went to visit what's known around the office as the Tosa skull.

It's a brownish color. The jaw and teeth are missing, and the right eye socket is mangled. The analysis has left it with a removable top and a rectangular piece missing from the forehead. That's what yielded the DNA results, said forensic investigator Michael Simley.

Based on the report from Texas, "our office is treating the remains as an old cemetery skull until proven otherwise from a DNA match, or other new investigative leads arise," said Karen Domagalski, medical examiner operations manager.

Many years ago there was a cemetery less than a block from where the skull was found, but all the remains were moved to a new site.

Wauwatosa Police Capt. Brian Zalewski said perhaps it's the skull of an American Indian from long ago, but it's hard to know for sure.

"There's not a ton for our detectives to even go on to do anything more," he said.

A house that stood on the site since the 1920s fell into disrepair and was razed in 2014. Four generations of a family lived there, and John Serwe was the last to leave. He told me a year ago he doesn't know where the old skull came from. The new house on the property remains under construction.

Since the skull was found, investigators have tried to match it to three cases of missing or murdered people.

Julia Baez, 36, of Milwaukee was killed in 1990 but her remains in two shallow graves were not identified until 2015. Her skull was never found. Kenneth Plaisted, of New Holstein, was 48 when he vanished on a trip to Milwaukee in 1971. And Nahida Khatib, 30, disappeared from her Wauwatosa home in 1976 and was never seen again.

None of these people was a positive match to the skull, but in the years to come new cases will be compared to its DNA on file at the University of North Texas.

Someday we may learn the rest of her secrets.

Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl