The Skeleton Key Chronicles

8 hours ago

There’s a basement at the University of Odense in Denmark where they’ve kept thousands of human brains. Close to 10,000 of them.

The program began on April 1, 1945 and built up over the next few decades, with specimens coming from patients who had been treated in psychiatric hospitals.

The brains were collected for research, with scientists examining them to study issues related to various conditions. The collection continued to grow for close to 40 years, until it was closed May 1, 1982.

Today, 9,479 of those specimens are still preserved, making it one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

13 hours ago

On May 9, 1978, a logging crew working in a remote part of Josephine County, Oregon came across human remains near Holcomb Peak, just outside the small community of Williams.
There wasn’t much to go on, with just a skull, part of a shoulder blade, and a few pieces of fragmented clothing found. And despite early efforts, the case gradually went cold.

It stayed that way until 2020, when the remains were reexamined using more advanced DNA methods at the University of North Texas. Testing confirmed the remains belonged to a male, but there still wasn’t a match to anyone in available databases like CODIS.

The next logical step was forensic genetic genealogy. DNA Labs International worked alongside the local medical examiner’s office, to begin building out a family tree. The process took time, and by 2023, only a partial branch had been mapped out leaving large gaps.

Then in September 2025, a newly uploaded DNA profile helped extend that tree further. With more pieces in place, genealogists were able to narrow the identity down to a group of siblings, there they found one brother who seemed to disappear from any type of record sometime in the mid-1970s.

When investigators reached out the family, they confirmed it. Their brother, Mark Smith, had left Billings, Montana in 1974 to travel around and never returned. He was just 19 years old. Follow-up testing confirmed the connection, giving a name to remains that had gone unidentified for nearly fifty years.

To this day, what happened after he left Montana is still unknown, and even after all this time there’s no clear explanation for how he ended up in that remote part of southern Oregon or what led him there.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

1 day ago

When Bonnie and Clyde were laid to rest in Dallas in 1934, their graves were just a couple miles apart. This tidbit is even more bittersweet when you consider Bonnie had said she wanted to be buried next to Clyde.

After their story came to a close in 1934, both were brought back to Dallas. Clyde was buried at Western Heights Cemetery, and at the time, the expectation was that Bonnie would be laid to rest in the plot beside him. But her mother, Emma, saw things differently. She refused to allow it and instead had Bonnie laid to rest at Fish Trap Cemetery, just 2 miles from Clyde.

But Bonnie didn’t remain there.
In 1945, after Emma passed, Bonnie was moved to Crown Hill Memorial Park to be next to her mother, placing her farther from Clyde than before.

Even now, decades later, members of both families have continued pushing to have them reunited, trying to honor Bonnie's last wishes to be next to Clyde for eternity.

Clyde Chestnut Barrow
March 24, 1909 – May 23, 1934

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker
October 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934

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