How Did the Embalmed Severed Head of a Woman End up on the Side of a Pennsylvania Road?

A teenager walking along a country road in Economy, Pa., noticed something strange in the brush. It was a cold December day in 2014 when the kid called police to let them know he had found a head. When they arrived, they noticed it was so well-preserved that you could still see two moles on the side of what was once a woman's cheek, per The Washington Post.

The mystery of the Beaver County severed head only deepened as authorities soon realized her eyes had been removed and were replaced with rubber pellets. She was also embalmed, which might explain the missing eyeballs, but it wasn't much to go on. Her story is being told in Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries in the hopes that someone will come forward with answers. Here's what we know so far.

It was clear the woman was professionally embalmed, though the way the head had been removed from the body suggested the person who did it had "some anatomical knowledge," Beaver County District Attorney Anthony Berosh told The Washington Post. The main goal was to figure out the identify of the severed head so authorities could figure out how it made its way to a fairly empty road.

They focused on the pellets in the eye sockets and decided that perhaps her eyes had been donated before she died. Unfortunately this was a time when a DNA database didn't exist and organ donation organizations were restricted by privacy laws, and could not give out any information. Either way, her DNA would have been affected by the embalming process.

Getting in touch with various medical schools who might have been using the severed head and/or missing body for teaching purposes also yielded frustrating results. "The number of people needing cadavers grossly exceeded anything in our wildest imagination," said Berosh. Everyone was at their wit's end. "We all feel here not only a legal obligation but a moral obligation," Berosh explained.

Michelle Vitali is a forensic artist who often helps police get the word out about these sorts of infuriating conundrums. Obviously police couldn't circulate a photo of the actual severed head, so Vitali did a sketch of the dead woman. Tips began rolling in but each one was discarded using the severed head's dental records. That's when Vitali started drawing younger versions of the woman. It was a stroke of genius, though it did nothing to move the needle.

Her final artistic attempt to identify the woman was a 3-D model of the woman. It took Vitali 40 hours and 10 pounds of clay to construct the bust of the woman. "It’s something to have somebody, to look her right in the face, to hold her head in your hands and say, ‘I really hope we’re able to resolve this for you, to find out what happened,'" she told the Beaver County Times (per the Washington Post).

They eventually held a funeral at the Beaver Cemetery and buried the head in a spot that overlooks the Ohio River. Economy Borough Police Chief Michael O’Brien was particularly affected by this case, and told the Washington Post that she was on his mind "24 hours a day." For him, this was about making things right. "She needs to be identified, so she can have her name put to her face."

For more on this story watch Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix which will be available to stream July 31.