UNSOLVED DEATHS RARE IN PERRY COUNTY

PERRYVILLE -- Few people die without a good reason in Perry County.

When the reason isn't good, law enforcement either finds out why in a hurry, or the case goes unsolved forever.

Fortunately for Perry County, both of these extremes are rare. In the only two murders in Perry County this decade, police either appeared at the scene as the victim was dying or the murderer came to them.

The only unsolved deaths on record couldn't be any colder. Investigators found human bones, and nothing more.

The most recent find was by two fishermen on the banks of the Mississippi River, three miles south of state Highway 51, said Perry County Sheriff Gary Schaff. When the skull was discovered late in the afternoon on Oct. 15, the lower jaw was missing, but the upper teeth were intact. Law enforcement agencies can do little with skeletal remains except turn them over to a coroner, Schaff said. For the Sheriff's Department to open an investigation, some evidence of a crime is necessary."All we had was a skull lying in the mud," he said. "If it were tied to a rock, then we'd have something to investigate."Perry County coroner Herb Miller eventually gave the skull to the St. Louis County Medical Examiner's office, which handles more difficult cases for several counties in the region.

Most of the time, the person's identity can be determined, said Mary Case, St. Louis County medical examiner. "We almost always find out who it is," Case said. "We have a more stable population, unlike New York or some other cities like it that have a very transient population."With the use of dental records, X-rays and DNA tests, the medical examiner can determine gender, race, age and the number of years since death. Older remains are more difficult to date, Case said.

Skeletal remains from deaths estimated beyond 25 years are not investigated by the medical examiner's office. They are turned over to the state Department of Natural Rescues as relics."If it's truly ancient, we wouldn't be concerned on an individual basis about who this person was," Case said.

Medical examiners rely completely on law enforcement for possible identities."Working with remains isn't hard if you have a person to compare them to," Case said. The Perry County skull likely belonged to a white male between the ages of 20 and 40, said Gina Overshine, forensic anthropologist with St. Louis County. When the man actually died and how is less certain. The skull has gone through complete decay, leaving no soft tissue but many signs of scavenging, she said. Overshine believes the man died between five and 25 years ago."You can tell it's not that old because of the fillings in the teeth," she said. "They are all in decent shape and fairly recent."Dental records can be compared with missing and unidentified persons through the FBI's National Crime Information Center. The missing persons file has existed since 1975, while the unidentified persons file was added in 1983.

No possible identities for the skull have been suggested yet, Overshine said."There's a good possibility that it washed out of a cemetery," she said. "During the 1993 flood, whole burial vaults went floating down the river."The other unidentified skeletal remains belonging to Perry County were found by fishermen on March 21 along the bank at Tower Rock. The chance of these being from an old burial site is easier to assume, since clumps of rusty, handmade square nails were found alongside the bones, Schaff said.

A team of FBI agents went over the area inch by inch with tiny scoops, and came to the same conclusion as the sheriff.

As for the person's identity, area residents gave Schaff suggestions. Willard Thompson of Perryville told the sheriff of two brothers, Abe and Gabe Henson, who operated a moonshine business on the river. Sometime between 1932 and 1934, one of the brothers died and the other buried him behind their shack by the river.

Thompson also recalled the death of an unknown black man who was killed accidentally by a train while he was walking along the tracks. The man was buried near the railroad tracks, but Thompson couldn't remember the location.

Schaff knows that he will probably never discover who was buried by Tower Rock."But it would be neat if we could give the remains back to the descendants," he said.

Now and then, an unknown body will be pulled out of the river. "A lot of people get knocked off barges," Schaff said.

These cases are relatively easy to solve, provided that the person had good dental records or an accurate clothing description is available, he said.

The Perry County Sheriff's Department has had better luck solving murders than less significant crimes such as thefts and burglaries, Schaff said. He estimates that 60 percent of the county's burglaries are solved each year. Less severe crimes are solved less often due to their sheer number, Schaff said. Deputies can't devote as much time to a burglary as a murder, he said.

Perry County's two murders this decade haven't demanded much investigation.

In 1990, Jeffrey Pautler shot Paul Schmidt at his home in the southeast corner of Perry County when a drug deal went bad, Schaff said. As Pautler drove off from the murder in Schmidt's car, he decided to stop at a gas station where police were having coffee. The police noticed that Pautler was acting strangely. An officer asked Pautler for identification. The car's license plate was called in to a dispatcher, who reported that it wasn't Pautler's car. The last murder in Perry County was almost as simple to solve, Joe Copeland said.

Copeland grills steaks nowadays at the Olympic Steakhouse, but before that he put heat on criminals as an investigator of 20 years in the Air Force and then a detective with the Perryville Police. He solved Perry County's last murder in a matter of moments. The detective was filling in on the night shift June 4, 1994, as he drove around the Perry Plaza about 11:30 p.m. As he passed the Plaza Lounge, Copeland thought he heard a woman scream. But he didn't see anyone. As he turned right into a driveway, a murder played itself out in front of him.

Copeland described seeing a man holding a woman by the neck. She was struggling, and then broke free from him. She was bleeding profusely from the neck as she walked toward Copeland. Barbara Roth tried to speak, but couldn't since her voice box had been cut by a knife."She just died right there in my arms," Copeland said. "The medics told me later that if a surgeon had been there, there's nothing he could've done."Meanwhile, Lawrence Coppaway, the man who had held her by the neck, started to shout about how she had cut him. The man had a gash on his throat, Copeland said."He had cut himself to try to cover it up," Copeland said.

Later, after Coppaway was hospitalized, he attempted to tell Copeland how a stranger had attacked them both in the parking lot. But the murder had already been solved.

Law enforcement officers are almost never at the scene of a crime as it happens, Schaff said. "In this sense, Perry County has been fortunate," he said. "I hope it stays that way."