| Owen
County Coroner Lannis Garnnett thought Tim Cammack was pulling
a Halloween prank when Cammack called him on Saturday just before
noon.
Cammack, a former emergency medical technician who knows the coroner
well, told him he and his brother-in-law had discovered some human
bones while moving a pile of junk that had been stored under his
house.
But, days before Halloween or not, it was no prank.
“I was shocked,” Garnnett said.
Cammack and his brother-in-law spotted what appeared to be parts
of a human skeleton in an old bag that had been stored beneath
Cammack’s house on Kelly Court in Owenton.
The bag popped open as they went to load it onto a truck and haul
it off with other junk from under the house’s crawlspace.
The former EMT tried to rationalize whether the remains were real
at first, thinking they might have been part of an old schoolroom
anatomy model.
“I saw the skull and thought, ‘Well, they must be
fakes,’” he said, when he first saw the bones from
about five feet away.
But a closer look led him to believe the remains were real.
“We decided we needed to stop and make some phone calls,”
he said.
Cammack called the coroner, who in turn called police. Officers
marked of the area with yellow crime tape and began their investigation.
Using some of the logic from his days as an EMT, Cammack never
thought it was foul play, since there were no hair or clothing
present.
“It didn’t appear that someone had dismembered a body
and put it in a bag,” he said.
But he said his wife Kitty was petrified by the possibility that
their house could’ve been the scene of a past homicide.
Officers began calling former owners of the home, and Kentucky
State Police Sgt. Vic Hubbuch said they soon ruled out the possibility
of foul play.
Their investigation led them to Ruth Allnutt, widow of late Deputy
Sheriff H.T. Allnutt.
Allnutt told officers the remains, which Garnnett identified as
most of a full skull and jaw bone, two humorous bones, a couple
of vertebrae and a radial bone, washed out of a cemetery near
New Liberty.
Hubbuch said they were discovered sometime between 1974 and 1978.
And they apparently sat under Allnutt’s house ever since,
as county officials tried to determine what to do with them.
It’s unknown who the person was.
Investigators believed the remains are of a middle-aged black
male who was possibly between the ages of 35 and 50 when he died.
Garnnett said the remains indicate the person was a hard laborer,
possibly a slave, who was of “very, very small stature…
about the size of a jockey.”
He said they will try hard to find out where the remains were
originally located in order to give them a proper burial.
But it might prove tough for investigators to determine exactly
where the bones were originally buried.
If the person was a slave, Garnnett said, it’s possible
there never was a grave marker for the body or “there might
have been a wooden marker that deteriorated over the years.”
Dr. Emily Craig, a state forensic anthropologist in Frankfort,
said the investigation is still ongoing. She is unsure when it
will wrap up.
“Everything is still open right now,” Garnnett said.
“We’re looking at every detail on this.”
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