Human remains dug up four decades ago on a Florida beach have finally been identified as those of a Maryland woman who went missing in 1968, supposedly disappearing with her then-boyfriend.
The mystery of Mary Alice Pultz was finally resolved last week when a Florida sheriff’s office said that it had identified the remains found in a shallow grave on Crescent Beach, 50 miles south of Jacksonville, in April 1985.
Investigators had long assumed the case was a homicide but had no leads on who the victim was until the St John’s county sheriff’s office sent bone samples to Othram, a private lab in Texas, to develop a DNA profile.
That later matched Pultz through a genealogy database to her son in Arizona and sister in Virginia.
“The initial investigation revealed the victim was a white female, possibly between the ages of 30 and 50 at the time of her death,” the St Johns county sheriff’s office said in a 8 May press release. “Due to the circumstances, the manner of death was determined to be homicide.”
Construction workers had discovered the remains in a shallow grave while building a walking bridge on the beach. Her death maybe linked to her then-boyfriend, John Thomas Fugitt.
“Due to the times, communication was not great,” St John’s county sheriff Gene Tolbert said in an interview with Fox News. “The belief is that Mary Alice and – he went by Tommy – had kind of moved off together, potentially to either Florida or Georgia.”
Fugitt is considered a person of interest in the case but he died in prison after being convicted of the 1981 murder of his roommate in Georgia.
“Detectives learned that Fugitt, who was known to go by an alias of Billy Joe Wallace, was sentenced to death in Georgia related to a 1981 murder of a male roommate,” the sheriff’s office said in the statement. “Fugitt died in prison prior to his execution.”
How exactly Pultz was killed remains unclear. Medical examiners found that she had burr holes in her skull, indicating she had brain surgery after 1968. Detectives think she was “involved in some type of event that caused the traumatic injury and would have required hospitalization”, potentially a car crash.
The sheriff’s office said the homicide investigation was “a powerful example that we will never give up” and credited a “combination of highly skilled detectives and advanced DNA technology has given Mary Alice’s family some answers about her disappearance close to 40 years ago”.
