by Paul Bass | Jul 17, 2015 10:53 am

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Posted to: Legal Writes

After not turning up more body parts on Thursday, investigators were in the process of wrapping up a search of property around the train tracks by State Street station when reports began arriving about dismemberments in other communities.

Assistant Police Chief Archie Generoso said five state police cadaver dogs helped local and state cops comb the area where on Wednesday they found two severed human legs and two severed arms wrapped in a plastic bag. The hands were missing. (Read about that here.) The search crew called off the dogs around 12:30 p.m., Generoso reported.

Absent any new finds, the investigation now focuses on two fronts:

• The state chief medical examiner’s office in Farmington is extracting DNA from the appendages to try to determine the gender, age and/or race of the victim, and to match the DNA against a database from open cases.

“We’re looking at about a week and a half before we get anything back from the ME’s [medical examiner’s] office,” said police spokesman Officer David Hartman.

• While they await that information, city cops are combing through hundreds of missing-persons reports and fielding inquiries from departments elsewhere about cases involving dead bodies missing arms and legs. Generoso said four such inquiries have come in so far.

One call from the city of Bridgeport, where cops are investigating the death of 57-year-old grandmother Minnie Lincoln, whose naked torso was discovered April 6 in a Stratford marsh. “Initial findings have suggested that the New Haven findings are not linked to the Bridgeport case,” Hartman said.

Generoso stressed that police at this point have no evidence to suggest the body parts are connected to any of the cases so far.

The legs and arm were deteriorated; investigators didn’t know if they’d been dumped a week ago or months ago. Nor could they determine race or gender at first glance.

Police first found the two severed legs Wednesday morning in an overgrown patch of land next to the Court Street bridge by State Street, on the street side of a fence atop a 30-foot embankment from the railroad tracks. City and state investigators spent much of the rest of the day hacking through brush and examining the plot of land, with no new discoveries. On Thursday the patch was released as a crime scene. Amid remaining pine branches and bushes, the plot remained littered (pictured at the top of the story), with abandoned shoes (too new to have been attached to the discolored, deteriorated legs) ...

... a crushed Milwaukee’s Best premium can, Clif bar wrappers, an “Ivy Scholars Program—Yale University” neckband, a mini-toothbrush in a plastic tube ...

... and a couch cushion. Nooks like this along the tracks are popular spots for homeless people to camp.

A block south and around the corner, investigators Thursday morning concentrated attention on the eastern edge of the tracks, where the severed arm was discovered Wednesday evening inside the plastic bag atop a wall.

Police originally identified one arm in the bag. They didn’t want to “prod too much” into the bag, because they didn’t want to disturb evidence before the medical examiner’s office retrieved it, Hartman said at a 3:30 p.m. Thursday press conference. The bag was later determined to contain two human arms. Neither had a hand.