Exclusive | Elite NYC forensic team using science to solve decades-old mysteries and get justice for the dead

Dead men do tell tales.When skeletal remains washed up near the Brooklyn Bridge in August — a skull; arm bones; partial ribs and vertebrae; pelvic, leg and foot bones — the Medical Examiner’s Office called in its Forensic Anthropology Unit to investigate. The elite team, which handles about 150 cases per year, collected and cataloged the bones found on the rocky shoreline on three different days, before beginning the task of determining the person’s age, sex and ethnicity.“This one was a tricky scene,” said Dr.

Angela Soler, an anthropologist on the ME’s team.“It’s a very rocky area with lots of crevices.” The shape and size of the bones — particularly pelvic bones, which are smaller in men than in women — told the unit’s four specialists the victim was male.

The experts found no indications of foul play.They believe bone fragments found nearby at Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Thursday are from the same man.Now, they’re relying on his bones and clothes — a pair of Calvin Klein jogging pants, Five Star work boots and a red anklet — to find out who the John Doe was and figure out his cause of death. The unit, which does most of its work out of a nondescript 1960s government building on First Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, represents the final chance for many families to solve the excruciating  mystery of what happened to their loved ones, some of whom have been missing for decades.The forensic investigators have been quietly working their way through 1,250 cold cases, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s.“We didn’t have the same technology back then,” Soler said.

“We didn’t even have the Internet.”One of the cold cases the team recently helped solve was that of a 16-year-old known as “Midtown Jane Doe,” whose remains were found in 2003.The girl had been bound with electrical wire and buried under the concrete basement floor of a building that once housed the club The Scene, where Jimi Hendrix a...