![]() "It showed a 97.5 percent chance that the person lived in the 1700s, and only a 2.5 percent chance it was past that," Bailey said.Ĭharlie Pitts' real name was Samuel Wells. The Netherlands laboratory also conducted carbon testing to figure out the age of the skeletal remains, Bailey said. Not only did they not match the DNA of the descendants, but the bone fragments didn't match each other and it is possible that they came from males of two different ethnic groups based on the DNA markers, said Tom Reynolds, a forensic scientist at Fairfax Identity Laboratories. Victoria Lywood, a forensic artist from Canada, volunteered to produce a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional reconstruction from a CT scan, putting a face on the skeleton, while Bailey tracked down two distant relatives of Pitts for DNA comparison and had three separate labs conduct DNA testing, one of them being the Netherlands Forensic Institute. "It could have been fabricated," Bailey said. Kate Blue, an anthropology professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, examined the hole but could not determine whether it was truly the result of a gunshot, Bailey said. But the investigators weren't able to prove it conclusively. When it went unclaimed, it passed to a succession of medical students and museums before winding up in Northfield again - but there was suspicion that the bones might have gotten mixed up with others along the way.Ī postmortem photograph, showing a gunshot wound in Pitts' chest, seemed to match up with a hole in the skeleton's breastbone. His body was briefly displayed at the State Capitol. ![]() Pitts was wounded, but he narrowly escaped Northfield, only to be tracked down two weeks later at a swamp southwest of Mankato and killed in a shootout with a posse. The mystery began after the Northfield shootout, in which two gang members and two townspeople were killed. ![]() Jim Bailey, a professor at University of North Carolina in Wilmington, decided to assemble a gang of curious researchers to find out. 7, 1876, to rob the First National Bank.Īfter the gang's legendary defeat there, he never returned - at least, not alive.įor the last 25 years, the Northfield community thought they had brought Pitts back when the Northfield Historical Society got possession of his skeleton.īut in 2007, a group of researchers decided to use science to find out: Was this truly the remains of an infamous outlaw? Charlie Pitts rode into Northfield with Jesse James and the rest of the James-Younger Gang on Sept.
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