Fisherman found skull in 1986. Now victim’s daughter helps ID him, PA officials say

When Richard Thomas Alt vanished, his daughter was 11 years old. Now decades later, she has played a critical role in identifying her dad’s skull that was found alongside the Delaware River in Pennsylvania in 1986.

Her father was 31 when he was reported missing in early 1985, according to a Jan. 30 news release from the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office. Alt’s parents had last seen him alive on Christmas Eve in 1984.

“At the time of his disappearance, Alt and his girlfriend were suspected homicide victims in New Jersey,” officials said. Her body, found in April 1985, was in the Delaware River in Mercer County, New Jersey.

More than a year later, in June 1986, a fisherman found a human skull on the Pennsylvania banks of the Delaware River, according to the district attorney. Authorities were unable to identify the skull.

“Bucks County Detectives took possession of the human skull in October 2019 during a probe of a homicide investigation, but then relinquished it to the Bucks County Coroner’s Office,” officials said. “Later that year, the Bucks County Coroner’s Office entered the skull into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database.”

Then in September 2022, the detectives retrieved the skull and sent it to Othram, a forensic genealogy laboratory in Texas, which provided its services for free, according to the release.

The skull recently matched the DNA of a user who uploaded a profile to a public genealogy database, officials said. The user was a 49-year-old woman in Florida.

Detectives talked with the woman and learned her father disappeared decades ago.

She agreed to share her DNA results from a genealogy site with Othram, authorities said, and Othram confirmed the skull belonged to her father.

“I can’t even imagine wondering and worrying about a lost family member for even a day, let alone for 37 years. That wait is now over for Mr. Alt’s family,” District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said in the release. “I’m just glad that we could give them some peace of mind with this identification, and the eventual return of his remains to his family.”

The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into the skull is closed “due to lack of evidence of any crime being committed in Bucks County,” authorities said. But the investigation into the deaths is considered unsolved in Mercer County, according to the prosecutor’s office.

This story was originally published January 30, 2023 at 6:14 PM with the headline "Fisherman found skull in 1986. Now victim’s daughter helps ID him, PA officials say."