I think I might have set a record for “smallest part of a person recovered”

I found out the other day that they discovered an itty bitty piece of Richard William Moss‘s body: a single vertebra (one of the sections of your spine) not far from where his car turned up a little over a year ago.

I think this is the smallest partial remains recovered where I resolved a case. I have a case up where they found a woman’s finger, but you can easily live without that.

Frankly I’m surprised they found even that much of Moss. He accidentally ran his car off a cliff in coastal California known as the Devil’s Slide in May 2017, but the accident wasn’t witnessed and no one realized what had happened until July. The rest of him has presumably been claimed by the ocean.

Moss isn’t the only person on Charley who met his end at the Devil’s Slide. In 1945, a 14-year-old girl named Thora Chamberlain was murdered and thrown off there. They never found her body, only her socks, wedged in the cliff face. Her murderer was identified, confessed and was executed.

5 thoughts on “I think I might have set a record for “smallest part of a person recovered”

  1. Christie August 31, 2018 / 1:12 pm

    Wow, thats cool but sad.

  2. Ivana August 31, 2018 / 3:37 pm

    Diane Augat’s case is terrifying, however

  3. Peter Henderson Jr. September 1, 2018 / 6:24 am

    Outside of Ted Bundy’s confession, the closest investigators got to proof of Debra Jean Kent’s murder was the discovery of a human kneecap, but nothing more.

    Kevin’s (Kevin M. Sullivan, author of “The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History”) research indicates that authorities believe the bone is Debi’s but never obtained DNA conformation.

    Since then Debra was added to NamUs Case file MP # 27776 (February 2015) and then removed. I concluded that the bone was finally tested or that the family asked that she be removed for NamUs

    If interested, the whole convoluted sequence of events starting with my first post on August 18, 2010

    • Meaghan September 1, 2018 / 5:20 pm

      I hope, when they do identify the kneecap, we all hear about it so I can resolve her case. Poor kid. Her family should have more than a kneecap to bury.

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