Mystery:  Who left the bones in the woods? 

From CNN.com
10 January, 2008

By Patrick Oppmann and John Zarrella

The woods off Arcadia Street in Fort Myers for years concealed an unmarked graveyard, police say.  Eight sets of human remains were found in these woods last March.

An ecologist found the first set of human remains there in March 2007 by chance. The man was surveying the area thick with melaleuca trees and scrub brush when he saw what he thought was a human skeleton and called police.

Arriving quickly at the scene, Fort Myers Police Sgt. Jennifer Soto found that other officers had already discovered a second set of remains. Then, there was a third set.
"At that point, things started to slow down," Soto told CNN last month as she recalled the grim discoveries. "We wanted to make sure we were dealing with a crime scene, which was exactly how we were treating it. So we stopped and called in more resources and we started to expand. By 7 p.m. that evening, we had located the eighth set of remains."

In a single day, police had eight new deaths to investigate and few clues other than a wooded area full of human bones. There were no witnesses to interview and no suspects to track down.

It would be an investigation built almost entirely on forensics.  

Soto said police were determined to find every scrap of evidence. Crews cleared the forest, cadaver dogs sniffed for more bones and for days searchers sifted through buckets of excavated dirt looking for the smallest fragment of human remains.

Mystery Bones Probe

• March 23, 2007: Police discover eight sets of human remains.

• June 8, 2007: Investigators release descriptions of each of the eight remains. The dead were determined to be between the ages of 18 and 49 years old.

• Summer 2007: More than 50 people submit DNA samples to see if their missing relatives are among the eight set of human remains.

• November 20, 2007: Police identify two of the eight sets of human remains as Erik Kohler and John Blevins. Both men disappeared in 1995, police said.

As a result of the effort, police said, eight "remarkably complete" sets of human skeletons were found.

The scientists were able to determine that the eight were men and were either Caucasian or Hispanic. They were between the ages of 18 to 49 years old when they died. Their bodies were left in the woods between the 1980s and 2000.
But there was no evidence on the bones explaining how the men died: Was it the work of a serial killer? Were the bodies dumped by an unscrupulous funeral home?
 

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