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Bones sent to Boston Globe ends long limbo for Worcester area families
Inside the nondescript cardboard box were a skull and other skeletal human remains, along with a plea and a clue. The plea was from the anonymous sender: Find out whose bones these are. The clue was about where to start, with four young people who vanished at sea in 1976, four whose families never gave up the dream of their return.
Marge Habib waved to her brother and sister as they rode past early that Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend in 1976. Her brother's 16-foot motorboat was hitched to the back of her sister's Mercury Cougar and they were heading to Plymouth for a day of fishing along with their dates.
“It was a beautiful day,” recalled Marge, who was working at a fruit stand on Route 9 in Westboro when the coast-bound foursome cruised by. “They were tooting and laughing and they were happy.”
That was the last time she ever saw her younger siblings, Danny and Elaine. The next morning, fishermen came upon Danny Kwiatkowski's tri-hull Arrowglass motorboat floating partially submerged — but otherwise undamaged — about 6 miles off the coast of Marshfield. The people were gone, leaving behind only Elaine's purse, two pairs of shoes, and some cans of soda.
The Coast Guard concluded that the four were probably dead — victims of the frigid Atlantic – but their families never believed it. They kept looking for the lost boaters, scouring the shoreline and islands of Cape Cod Bay, traveling the country on the advice of psychics, and appealing for help in every imaginable quarter.
But answers seemed lost to the vastness of the ocean and the passage of time — until the arrival last fall of one of the strangest packages ever mailed to The Boston Globe.
The worn-looking cardboard box, postmarked in Medford, contained skeletal remains from two human beings, including what appeared to be a human skull. Each was accompanied by a medical examiner's note from 1978 indicating that the bones had been evidence in police investigations.
Also in the box was official paperwork suggesting some of the evidence may have been linked to the mysterious loss of Danny and his mates.
And then there was the letter. “This is not a Halloween prank,” read the Oct. 29, 2012, typed appeal, written by someone using the pseudonym “Veritas” — the Latin word for truth — who said he was a doctor.
Medical examiners had given up hope of identifying the remains back in 1978, Veritas explained, and literally wanted to put them out with the trash — “dispose as you see fit,” the medical examiner said. Instead, a conscience-stricken state crime lab employee slipped the bones to Veritas for safekeeping until a day when science could figure out whose they were.
“Please see that justice is done now for the sake of these two victims,” wrote Veritas.
So began the unraveling of a 37-year mystery as the State Police and the Globe launched separate investigations to determine the identities of the dead and to bring some measure of peace to their survivors.
1976 boating accident
The crew of the Gloucester-based fishing vessel Kingfisher spotted the bow of Danny Kwiatkowski's boat poking up from the calm waters of Cape Cod Bay just after sunrise on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in 1976.
The boat was swamped, but that wasn't the only sign of trouble: the outboard motor was tilted up as though someone had been looking for a malfunction, while the anchor line looked like it had been cut.
Whatever had befallen the passengers – Daniel Kwiatkowski, 24; Elaine Kwiatkowski, 20; Daniel Poirier, 26; and Jana Coonan, 16 — appeared to have happened suddenly. Their baited fishing rods were still attached to the side of the boat, while a distress flare on the boat and three life belts were recovered unused.
For two days, the Coast Guard searched, focusing intently on 10 square miles near where the boat was discovered, logging 41 hours of search time by boats and helicopters. Many others pitched in, too, including the crew of a private yacht that recovered Kwiatkowski's gas tank and a lighthouse keeper who walked Duxbury Beach for signs of the missing people.
Late on Memorial Day, however, Coast Guard officials suspended the search, concluding in their daily dispatch that the 54-degree ocean water “yields 99 percent expectancy of death within 4.3 hours.”
They also disclosed that Elaine Kwiatkowski's pocketbook “contained a package of marijuana,” and suggested that Danny Kwiatkowski may have been at fault for the wreck, noting that the boat had only been out once before that year — and Kwiatkowski had run it aground.
But the families of the missing found serious flaws in the Coast Guard's findings, starting with the fact that all four were excellent swimmers — Elaine was a certified lifeguard — who might have made it to shore, especially if the boat were closer to land when it initially foundered.
They scoffed, too, at the idea that Danny Kwiatkowski might have caused an accident either by taking risks at sea or not maintaining his boat. Kwiatkowski was a machinist at Bay State Abrasives in Westboro who loved his Dodge Charger muscle car — and his boat. He knew his way around motors, relatives said.
“Danny knew mechanics well,” said his cousin Jim Williams. “He wouldn't take a boat to the ocean knowing there was something wrong with it. It doesn't make any sense at all.”
And, despite the Coast Guard's claim that Kwiatkowski's boat had suffered propeller damage, the crew at a Worcester marina didn't find any mechanical problems after disassembling the motor. The boat was still seaworthy.
Lacking bodies to bury, the families refused to believe their loved ones were dead. Could the four have been kidnapped, they asked. Were they out there somewhere in desperate need of their family's help?
So they kept searching.
“We feel there has been foul play,” Joseph Kwiatkowski, brother of Danny and Elaine, told the Worcester Telegram in early June 1976. Joseph Kwiatkowski, now deceased, spent that summer searching Cape Cod Bay, practically living on a boat for three months.
Meanwhile, the Kwiatkowskis' sister Linda went on the Worcester TV station Channel 27 asking for financial help so the families could keep looking.
"The whole family was in turmoil,” recalled Patty Habib, niece of Danny and Elaine Kwiatkowski. “They were obsessed with what happened, and it completely flipped their lives around and brought all of them down.”
And the obsession didn't fade with time. Almost two decades after the accident, Patty Habib wrote to the producers of the popular TV show “Unsolved Mysteries,” asking them to consider a segment on the dis-appearances.
“We would like to believe in our hearts,” Patty Habib wrote, “but reality has somewhat taken that hope away.”
But the show's producers declined, only adding to the families' despair.
In truth, investigators had precious little evidence to work with. Certainly, the hours leading up to the incident yielded few clues, no matter how many times family members reviewed that Memorial Day weekend of 1976.
They recalled that Elaine, a home health aide still living with her parents, had recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend and started to date someone new — Danny Poirier, a roofer from a large family in Worcester, who had returned in 1969 from two tours of duty in Vietnam.
With his dark good looks, Poirier was “footloose and fancy free, a ladies man,” according to Mary Jane Poirier, who was married to Danny's brother, Richie. And Danny Poirier clearly wanted to make a good impression on Elaine.
“He came to our house the day before he took off and asked me for a haircut,” recalled Mary Jane, who often cut his hair. “I was pregnant and I wasn't up for it. I said, 'Catch me tomorrow.' He said 'No I'm going to the Cape for the weekend.' ”
Danny Kwiatkowski brought along his 16-year-old girlfriend, Jana Coonan, whose parents were divorced and who was staying at the Kwiatkowski family home in Leicester.
Once a pudgy little girl, Jana had matured into a beautiful young woman while attending a special school for troubled girls, the Madonna School in Marlboro. But she bridled at discipline and liked to run away from home, her relatives said. Though Jana was supposed to be living with her dad, who divided his time between homes in Florida and Massachusetts, she was largely on her own.
Jana Coonan's older brother, Michael, who was already married and living with his wife when Jana disappeared, said that most family members didn't even know that his sister had a boyfriend, let alone that she was living with his family.
He was shocked when his father called him from Florida to tell him his sister was missing at sea. And that wasn't the only surprise. “That gave me a shock, too, him being in Florida and Jana being up here by herself. We never knew any of this,” he said.
The condition of the boat, with engine up and fishing gear set, made the accident even harder to comprehend.
“I thought maybe they ran away. There was no evidence of any foul play, really,” said Coonan, who lives in Connecticut.
As the years wore on, he still fantasized about finding his sister alive: “I thought she might have been playing some kind of prank on my mother. Your imagination can do strange things.”
Unidentified remains
Medical examiner Dr. George Katsas, was well-respected – he had done the autopsies on some of the victims of the Boston Strangler in the 1960s — but the odds were stacked against him. His equipment was ancient and he didn't even have an X-ray machine.
“Nothing's changed in 25 years,” Katsas told a Globe reporter in 1982. . . . . . . . .
Read more here: http://www.telegram.com/article/20130722/NEWS/307229919?TEMPLATE=MOBILE
.
Inside the nondescript cardboard box were a skull and other skeletal human remains, along with a plea and a clue. The plea was from the anonymous sender: Find out whose bones these are. The clue was about where to start, with four young people who vanished at sea in 1976, four whose families never gave up the dream of their return.
Marge Habib waved to her brother and sister as they rode past early that Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend in 1976. Her brother's 16-foot motorboat was hitched to the back of her sister's Mercury Cougar and they were heading to Plymouth for a day of fishing along with their dates.
“It was a beautiful day,” recalled Marge, who was working at a fruit stand on Route 9 in Westboro when the coast-bound foursome cruised by. “They were tooting and laughing and they were happy.”
That was the last time she ever saw her younger siblings, Danny and Elaine. The next morning, fishermen came upon Danny Kwiatkowski's tri-hull Arrowglass motorboat floating partially submerged — but otherwise undamaged — about 6 miles off the coast of Marshfield. The people were gone, leaving behind only Elaine's purse, two pairs of shoes, and some cans of soda.
The Coast Guard concluded that the four were probably dead — victims of the frigid Atlantic – but their families never believed it. They kept looking for the lost boaters, scouring the shoreline and islands of Cape Cod Bay, traveling the country on the advice of psychics, and appealing for help in every imaginable quarter.
But answers seemed lost to the vastness of the ocean and the passage of time — until the arrival last fall of one of the strangest packages ever mailed to The Boston Globe.
The worn-looking cardboard box, postmarked in Medford, contained skeletal remains from two human beings, including what appeared to be a human skull. Each was accompanied by a medical examiner's note from 1978 indicating that the bones had been evidence in police investigations.
Also in the box was official paperwork suggesting some of the evidence may have been linked to the mysterious loss of Danny and his mates.
And then there was the letter. “This is not a Halloween prank,” read the Oct. 29, 2012, typed appeal, written by someone using the pseudonym “Veritas” — the Latin word for truth — who said he was a doctor.
Medical examiners had given up hope of identifying the remains back in 1978, Veritas explained, and literally wanted to put them out with the trash — “dispose as you see fit,” the medical examiner said. Instead, a conscience-stricken state crime lab employee slipped the bones to Veritas for safekeeping until a day when science could figure out whose they were.
“Please see that justice is done now for the sake of these two victims,” wrote Veritas.
So began the unraveling of a 37-year mystery as the State Police and the Globe launched separate investigations to determine the identities of the dead and to bring some measure of peace to their survivors.
1976 boating accident
The crew of the Gloucester-based fishing vessel Kingfisher spotted the bow of Danny Kwiatkowski's boat poking up from the calm waters of Cape Cod Bay just after sunrise on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in 1976.
The boat was swamped, but that wasn't the only sign of trouble: the outboard motor was tilted up as though someone had been looking for a malfunction, while the anchor line looked like it had been cut.
Whatever had befallen the passengers – Daniel Kwiatkowski, 24; Elaine Kwiatkowski, 20; Daniel Poirier, 26; and Jana Coonan, 16 — appeared to have happened suddenly. Their baited fishing rods were still attached to the side of the boat, while a distress flare on the boat and three life belts were recovered unused.
For two days, the Coast Guard searched, focusing intently on 10 square miles near where the boat was discovered, logging 41 hours of search time by boats and helicopters. Many others pitched in, too, including the crew of a private yacht that recovered Kwiatkowski's gas tank and a lighthouse keeper who walked Duxbury Beach for signs of the missing people.
Late on Memorial Day, however, Coast Guard officials suspended the search, concluding in their daily dispatch that the 54-degree ocean water “yields 99 percent expectancy of death within 4.3 hours.”
They also disclosed that Elaine Kwiatkowski's pocketbook “contained a package of marijuana,” and suggested that Danny Kwiatkowski may have been at fault for the wreck, noting that the boat had only been out once before that year — and Kwiatkowski had run it aground.
But the families of the missing found serious flaws in the Coast Guard's findings, starting with the fact that all four were excellent swimmers — Elaine was a certified lifeguard — who might have made it to shore, especially if the boat were closer to land when it initially foundered.
They scoffed, too, at the idea that Danny Kwiatkowski might have caused an accident either by taking risks at sea or not maintaining his boat. Kwiatkowski was a machinist at Bay State Abrasives in Westboro who loved his Dodge Charger muscle car — and his boat. He knew his way around motors, relatives said.
“Danny knew mechanics well,” said his cousin Jim Williams. “He wouldn't take a boat to the ocean knowing there was something wrong with it. It doesn't make any sense at all.”
And, despite the Coast Guard's claim that Kwiatkowski's boat had suffered propeller damage, the crew at a Worcester marina didn't find any mechanical problems after disassembling the motor. The boat was still seaworthy.
Lacking bodies to bury, the families refused to believe their loved ones were dead. Could the four have been kidnapped, they asked. Were they out there somewhere in desperate need of their family's help?
So they kept searching.
“We feel there has been foul play,” Joseph Kwiatkowski, brother of Danny and Elaine, told the Worcester Telegram in early June 1976. Joseph Kwiatkowski, now deceased, spent that summer searching Cape Cod Bay, practically living on a boat for three months.
Meanwhile, the Kwiatkowskis' sister Linda went on the Worcester TV station Channel 27 asking for financial help so the families could keep looking.
"The whole family was in turmoil,” recalled Patty Habib, niece of Danny and Elaine Kwiatkowski. “They were obsessed with what happened, and it completely flipped their lives around and brought all of them down.”
And the obsession didn't fade with time. Almost two decades after the accident, Patty Habib wrote to the producers of the popular TV show “Unsolved Mysteries,” asking them to consider a segment on the dis-appearances.
“We would like to believe in our hearts,” Patty Habib wrote, “but reality has somewhat taken that hope away.”
But the show's producers declined, only adding to the families' despair.
In truth, investigators had precious little evidence to work with. Certainly, the hours leading up to the incident yielded few clues, no matter how many times family members reviewed that Memorial Day weekend of 1976.
They recalled that Elaine, a home health aide still living with her parents, had recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend and started to date someone new — Danny Poirier, a roofer from a large family in Worcester, who had returned in 1969 from two tours of duty in Vietnam.
With his dark good looks, Poirier was “footloose and fancy free, a ladies man,” according to Mary Jane Poirier, who was married to Danny's brother, Richie. And Danny Poirier clearly wanted to make a good impression on Elaine.
“He came to our house the day before he took off and asked me for a haircut,” recalled Mary Jane, who often cut his hair. “I was pregnant and I wasn't up for it. I said, 'Catch me tomorrow.' He said 'No I'm going to the Cape for the weekend.' ”
Danny Kwiatkowski brought along his 16-year-old girlfriend, Jana Coonan, whose parents were divorced and who was staying at the Kwiatkowski family home in Leicester.
Once a pudgy little girl, Jana had matured into a beautiful young woman while attending a special school for troubled girls, the Madonna School in Marlboro. But she bridled at discipline and liked to run away from home, her relatives said. Though Jana was supposed to be living with her dad, who divided his time between homes in Florida and Massachusetts, she was largely on her own.
Jana Coonan's older brother, Michael, who was already married and living with his wife when Jana disappeared, said that most family members didn't even know that his sister had a boyfriend, let alone that she was living with his family.
He was shocked when his father called him from Florida to tell him his sister was missing at sea. And that wasn't the only surprise. “That gave me a shock, too, him being in Florida and Jana being up here by herself. We never knew any of this,” he said.
The condition of the boat, with engine up and fishing gear set, made the accident even harder to comprehend.
“I thought maybe they ran away. There was no evidence of any foul play, really,” said Coonan, who lives in Connecticut.
As the years wore on, he still fantasized about finding his sister alive: “I thought she might have been playing some kind of prank on my mother. Your imagination can do strange things.”
Unidentified remains
Medical examiner Dr. George Katsas, was well-respected – he had done the autopsies on some of the victims of the Boston Strangler in the 1960s — but the odds were stacked against him. His equipment was ancient and he didn't even have an X-ray machine.
“Nothing's changed in 25 years,” Katsas told a Globe reporter in 1982. . . . . . . . .
Read more here: http://www.telegram.com/article/20130722/NEWS/307229919?TEMPLATE=MOBILE
.
