MYSTERY

Bones in Queens Backyard May Be Linked to 40-Year-Old Unreported Murder

NYPD forensic teams called to Brooklyn backyard after woman said she witnessed a body being cut up and buried in ’70s.

New York Police Department investigators recovered skeletal remains that are believed to be related to a 40-year-old cold case after a woman reported that she witnessed a body being cut up and buried in her backyard when she was 11 years old. A senior NYPD official told The Daily Beast that police received a call Monday from a yet-unidentified woman who witnessed her mother’s then-boyfriend cut up and bury someone in the backyard where she lived in the 1970s, when she was a child. On the night in question, she said she observed her mother’s boyfriend cleaning up blood with a mop and bleach at the barber shop where he worked. Early the next morning, she woke up to the a noise in the backyard and went outside to find her mother’s boyfriend chopping up someone with a machete and putting the body parts into bags. The woman, now an adult, was able to pinpoint exactly where forensic investigators should dig after investigators sent an image of the yard in its current form to her. The NYPD investigators then recovered two bags from the excavation with bones that were determined to be human. The bones are now being analyzed by the city medical examiners’ office.

—Pervaiz Shallwani