Skull found by hunter 40 years ago helps identify missing woman, Washington coroner says
A hunter stumbled upon an unidentified human skull 40 years ago in Washington, officials said.
DNA testing just identified the skull as belonging to Mildred Allison Hubertz, 59, who was reported missing from St. Ignatius, Montana, in 1968, the Pend Oreille County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said in a March 31 news release.
The hunter first found Hubertz’s skull in an area north of Newport, Washington, in November 1982, officials said. Newport is about 50 miles northeast of Spokane, near the Washington-Idaho border.
Multiple agencies reviewed the remains at the time, but no identification was ever made.
Then the skull was found in a box in 1999 at the Pend Oreille County Sheriff’s Office. Undersheriff Mike Cress continued the investigation, officials said.
In March 2017, the skull was sent to the Washington State Forensic Anthropologist where it was estimated as belonging to an adult woman.
That same month, the case was also submitted to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a federal database.
The case was also logged in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System after DNA was extracted from part of the skull, officials said in the release. A match was never made.
In 2022, however, a section of the skull was sent to Othram, a private lab in The Woodlands, Texas.
Othram used forensic-grade genome sequencing to get an advanced DNA profile. This profile was uploaded to genealogical databases in January.
Once the DNA profile was added to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, there was a match to Hubertz.
Her great-granddaughter’s DNA was tested, confirming the skull belonged to Hubertz.
The coroner’s office officially identified her remains as Hubertz on March 20.
Officials said the “circumstances of her disappearance are not known.”
This story was originally published April 3, 2023 at 12:08 PM with the headline "Skull found by hunter 40 years ago helps identify missing woman, Washington coroner says."
