Nicolas Paul Grubb was found dead from a barbiturate overdose in a cave along the Appalachian Trail in 1977. Officials used a fingerprint database to identify him.
After almost fifty years, authorities were finally able to identify the body of 'Pinnacle Man,' found on the Appalachian Trail in 1977. The Berks County Coroner’s office identified him as Nicolas Paul Grubb. At right is the police sketch authorities studied for decades.On a late January afternoon in 1977, two hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Berks County stumbled upon the body of a dead man.
“He went back — he challenged the assumptions that we had lost the fingerprints. He found the fingerprints,” George Holmes, chief deputy coroner of Berks County, told In 2019, the Coroner’s Office changed tack. The coroner exhumed Grubb’s body, in an effort to test his DNA against those of missing men from Florida and Illinois. That effort failed; a second attempt in 2023 also failed. Grubb’s facial bones had deteriorated too much to do a forensic facial approximation, a process that creates the image of a face from unidentified human remains.
“All I knew is that he disappeared and spent some time in Colorado,” he said. “I’ve always been kind of intrigued by it.”
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