They Went Looking For Gold... And Found A Mummy

The identity of human remains from a 60-year-old crash site in Alaska have finally been identified. In this case, DNA analysis and advanced fingerprinting techniques appear to have finished the race in a dead heat.

The Associated Press reports 36-year-old Francis Joseph Van Zandt, of Roanoke, VA was among 24 merchant marines and a crew of six onboard Northwest Airlines flight 4422, a DC-4 that crashed into a glacier on the side of Mount Sanford in 1948. The men had just delivered an oil tanker to Shanghai, and the plane was thought to be retuning to New York with a load of gold.

Two pilots, Kevin McGregor and Marc Millican, discovered the wreck in 1997. Two years later, while searching for artifacts to allow identification of the plane, they found a severed, mummified arm and hand. Alaskan State Troopers took a set of fingerprints, then embalmed the limb.

Database searches never turned up a match for the prints, because they were not clear enough. DNA analysis was unsuccessful because the tissues had become too dehydrated.

In 2006, Dr. Odile Loreille at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab in Maryland developed new methods that allowed her to read the mitochondrial DNA, raising the possibility of a match through the female lineage of the victim.

In a parallel search to match the prints, Edward Robinson, a professor of forensic science at George Washington University, used a newly-developed rehydrating solution and special imaging techniques to produce a complete set of useable fingerprints.

Last September 6, 2007, the prints were finally matched with records at the National Marine Center in Arlington, VA. Loreille was able to confirm the finding with nuclear DNA from a nephew of Van Zandt's.

Scientists say this is the oldest identification of fingerprints by post-mortem remains ever. Thanks to the relentless work of researchers, one more decades-old family mystery has reached closure.

FMI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_4422