On Monday, the Cambria County Coroner’s office exhumed the believed gravesite of Stella Williamson’s babies in an attempt to reunite two of the babies’ skulls with the other remains and rebury the siblings in a shared vault — something Coroner Jeff Lees has vowed to eventually do.

According to old county records, the babies were believed to have been buried in a pine box in row 23 of the county-owned Laurel United Cemetery in Cambria Township.

But digging up the 30-by-30-foot marked area with a backhoe yielded more questions than answers as the remains weren’t found after hours of searching, Lees said at the time.

Since then, Hunt said the county’s staff have reached out to former staff members from several departments in search of maps and other records that could help solve some of the mystery surrounding the 1980 burial, like where the skulls were prior to being donated to the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia in 1999.

The Laurel United Cemetery entrance and directory building is seen in Cambria Township. According to old county records, the Stella Williamson babies were believed to have been buried in a pine box in row 23 of the county-owned cemetery. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

The museum reached out to Lees late last year after finding the skulls in their archives, he said on Monday.

According to Hunt, Lees has spoken with then-Coroner John Barron, who said no one from the county authorized a donation to the museum.

“He’s been aiding with everything he knows” about the situation, Hunt said of Barron.

Hunt said they’ve also spoken with former county employees, one of whom was reportedly there the day the babies’ remains were buried. The former employee claimed officials on Monday were “close to where we buried the bodies,” Hunt said.

As of now, officials haven’t found any records indicating the remains were ever moved, Hunt said.

Investigators take measurements on July 7 at the suspected burial site for the Stella Williamson babies at Laurel United Cemetery. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

Hunt said Lees is “leading the charge” of trying to find the cemetery’s plot map. In addition to finding the Williamson babies’ remains, officials are trying to figure out whether other people’s remains in the cemetery are where records claim they are, Hunt said.

“(The plot map is) what everybody is looking for and nobody can find,” said Allie Kaelin, curator of the Cambria County Historical Society.

Kaelin said she questions whether the cemetery’s directory, which lists the Williamson babies in row 23, is accurate. Some of the marker numbers on the directory don’t match up with the records on file at the historical society, she said.

Potter’s field

Laurel United Cemetery is estimated to have 2,500 people buried in it, according to the historical society’s records.

The burial location guide shows the presumed location for the Williamson babies at Laurel United Cemetery. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

“It’s got a lot of people and we just don’t know who everyone is in there because it’s so old,” Kaelin said, noting the first people were buried there in the 1850s.

That’s when the Poor House — a county nursing home facility on the property — opened, Kaelin explained. The facility has been referred to by multiple names since then, including the County Home and the Cambria County Almshouse, she added.

Homeless people, people who were abandoned by their families and people who were “very, very ill” and couldn’t afford treatment would end up in the county’s care at the Poor House, Kaelin said.

When they died, they were buried in the potter’s field site at the cemetery with cement disks that corresponded to the number assigned to them at the Poor House, she said, noting some of the markers have sunk into the ground.

Hunt said the coroner’s office still uses the county-owned cemetery to this day. It’s the final resting place for county residents who were either too poor to afford a private burial or whose bodies were unclaimed, he said.

Those who were cremated and buried in the cemetery are well documented by the coroner’s office today, Hunt said.

“We know where those people are. We obviously have a better system than they did in 1980,” he said.

In 1992 — 12 years after the Williamson babies were buried in Potter’s Field — the cemetery was dedicated under its current name, Kaelin said, adding at least two people have claimed they saw the plot map at the dedication ceremony.

“It was at Laurel Crest at that time,” Kaelin said of the map. “Sometime a few years later, it disappeared and now no one knows where it’s at.”

In December 2009, the county sold the nursing home to private ownership.

According to Hunt, some have speculated that the county’s records were left there to be thrown out during the transition. But “that’s just speculation,” he said.

Kaelin said she doesn’t believe there’s any truth to those claims because it was only last year when the historical society received its Laurel Crest records from the Maple Heights Health & Rehab Center.

“They had some of them,” she said of the county’s records. “They didn’t throw everything out.”

Still a mystery

The missing remains were found by authorities in Williamson’s attic trunk after her death. Officials said they were left there, wrapped in newspaper clippings from the 1920s and ’30s, for decades.

Joe Kasprzyk, a former Johnstown Tribune-Democrat reporter, still remembers the day the babies’ remains were discovered in early September 1980.

“The one thing that really struck me was the shock that was in the community when that happened,” Kasprzyk said.

Kasprzyk said he drove to Williamson’s cream-colored house, which sat at 310 Forest St. in Gallitzin the day the news broke to speak with neighbors about the situation. The building has since been demolished.

Everyone — even Marie Williamson, Stella’s sister-in-law — was left in the dark about Williamson’s secret that she took to her grave regarding the dead children, Kasprzyk said.

Kasprzyk said he’s still puzzled by the fact that nobody at the time knew Williamson had children.

“Gallitzin is a small town and like a lot of small towns, everybody knows everybody’s business,” he said. “The fact that this could remain a secret for so long … It’s a puzzle to me that these people all lacked knowledge about Stella.”

A forensic autopsy performed in the Philadelphia area determined that the deaths of three children had been ruled homicides while the other two deaths were of undetermined causes.

Kasprzyk said, after speaking with Williamson’s relatives, he doesn’t believe that she killed her own babies.

“I felt it was someone close to her … that was my theory,” Kasprzyk said, adding he was shocked when he found out the believed burial site was exhumed last week.

“It was something that I would have never anticipated, and I’m surprised that there’s another mystery 45 years later,” he said.

Mirror Staff Writer Matt Churella is at 814-946-7520.