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GREENSBORO — With trowels in hand, anthropologists from UNCG worked well into the night on Nov. 17 to help solve a mystery.

Earlier that day, a survey team had stumbled upon a pile of bones in a wooded area off Hicone Road just northeast of the Greensboro city limits.

Investigators with the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office arrived, looked at the remains and called for assistance from UNCG to determine the identity of the victim.

“Our people who work these types of crimes in our department don’t have the experience to determine a date range (of the bones), description, sex or probable race of the person we find the skeletal remains of,” said Col. Randy Powers, chief deputy.

They turned to an expert — Carlina de la Cova, a physical and biological anthropologist and assistant professor at the university.

She previously has helped identify skeletal remains found in Guilford County — all of which turned out to be from animals — often reported by concerned pet owners whose dogs have carried the bones home. 

But a human skeleton in the countryside? That’s a rare event, and investigators wanted to handle it with great precision.

“They had asked me if in the event they ever do find human remains ... if I could come and help recover them,” de la Cova said. “This is a service that many of us in the biological anthropology field do to help bring peace to families with missing loved ones.”

So de la Cova, archaeology lecturer Linda Stine and UNCG senior Tamara Cagle gathered their tools and headed to the site that afternoon.

They waited for an official with the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill to give the OK to start the recovery and then they went to work.

According to the sheriff’s office, the crew had most of the full skeleton. Many of the bones were scattered on top of the ground, but some were partly covered by soil.

As the crew worked, they called out clues to the investigators based on what they could determine from the bones.

* The victim was a black man.

* He was older than 40 to 50 years old.

* He stood more than 6 feet tall.

* He suffered from severe arthritis.

Those clues, along with information about the man’s dental characteristics and previous injuries noted on the skeleton, led investigators to make a tentative identification in about three hours.

“The fact that she was able to give us a race and approximate age allowed us to narrow our missing person reports down quickly,” Powers said. “It was quickly narrowed down to two or three reports from the surrounding area.”

The man was tentatively identified as Henry Wilson, who was 83 years old when he was last seen at The Depot in downtown Greensboro in December 2004.

According to a missing person’s report, Wilson suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and may have been trying to get to Danville, Va. Clothing remnants also were recovered at the site that were similar to the clothing Wilson was last seen wearing.

The sheriff’s office contacted Wilson’s family, and they are working with the medical examiner to make a positive identification through DNA analysis.

“I felt very relieved for the family,” said de la Cova, who likens her work to the plot of the Fox television show “Bones.”

“I tell my students that everybody, regardless of who they are or their condition — they had somebody who loved them and (identifying them) gives that family peace,” she said.

“It gives them a start on the road to peace and closure.”

Contact Ryan Seals at 373-7077 or ryan.seals@news-record.com