Members of the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Office are investigating skeletal remains discovered along a remote mountainside in the Alderson/Fort Spring area.
At about 8:20 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 28, the sheriff’s office received a telephone call from a property owner clearing brush to build a fence.
“They found – what they thought to be – a part of human skeletal remains,” Sheriff Bruce Sloan told members of the media Tuesday afternoon. “We came out to the scene [about 8:45 a.m.], we looked at what the individual had found, and were of the same opinion that it did appear to be skeletal remains. At that point we requested a cadaver dog to come search the area.”
Describing the investigation scene as a very hilly, wooded area, Sloan said, “It was going to be difficult to search with individuals unless we knew specifically where we were looking, so the cadaver dog arrived, it did indicate on some locations in the general area where the piece of the remains was found. And since that time, our crime scene team has located and are in the process of recovering other pieces of what we believe to be human skeletal remains.”
Sloan noted that members of the sheriff’s crime scene team, a medical examiner and an investigator from the West Virginia State Police serving on the Greenbrier County Drug and Violent Crime Task Force were at the location on Tuesday.
Acknowledging the capability of the investigative team assembled at the scene, Sloan explained, “It’s really not an area that’s conducive to having too many people, so we have an adequate number of people, and we have what we need at this point to continue with the search and recovery.”
The investigation continued Tuesday as the team attempted “to locate and recover as much of the remains as we possibly can, they will be transported to the state medical examiner’s office for possible identification at that point,” Sloan said.
There is no way to determine how long the investigation will take to conclude after the remains arrive at the medical examiner’s office.
“It depends on what [the medical examiner’s] caseload is, it depends on what items of skeletal remains we have that can be used for identification purposes, whether they can use teeth, if they have to use DNA, that type of thing so, there is really no way to give a specific time frame on how long that might take,” Sloan said.
Members of the GCSO were still at the site as of 10:45 Wednesday morning.
To contact the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Office, call 304-647-6634.