A unidentified body exhumed Friday in Georgia may unearth the answers to the mystery of Ronald Tammen's disappearance from Miami University in the spring of 1953.
Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson announced Tuesday that the skeletal remains of an unidentified man will be dug up and brought into Georgia's testing facilities this week. Butler County detectives traveled to Cleveland last week to collect DNA samples from Tammen's surviving siblings to see if they match that of a man found in Walker County June 24, 1953, Wilson said.
"Our hope is that the crime lab can extract proper tissues and samples for a match," Wilson said. "We have a probable chance that the missing young man and the unidentified body could be the same person."
The Warren County media release states that the body will be exhumed at Lafayette Cemetery at 10 a.m. Friday. It also states that among those present besides Walker and Butler County officers and coroner, Chief Medical Examiner Kris Sperry will also be on hand to collect possible DNA samples from the remains.
Sperry said that many factors are involved in collecting a solid sample after so much time has passed.
"An awful lot happens in 54 years," Sperry said. "Water could have entered the original body bag. There could also be only bone fragments left."
Sperry said at the medical examiners office at the Georgia Bureau of Investigations that most cases he sees are within several weeks of the person's death. However, he said he has worked on a few cases ranging from five to 10 years.
"I have never been involved in a case this old," Sperry said. "But if we don't look, we'll never know. We just have to look. It's a reasonable likelihood that we could find a sample."
Wilson remains optimistic about WalkerCounty solving the case.
"We have a good gut feeling about this,"Wilson said. "A lot of similarities exist in the two cases."
Wilson said almost no records exist from the time period when the body was found in Walker County. Detectives and officers typically filed information in their minds rather than on paper.
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However, the case of the unknown male remains a controversial issue in north Georgia, with nothing known about him than what was found on his deceased body.
Wilson said the young man was found just off a rural road by local workers hitchhiking to work in June of 1953. The men reportedly smelled an odor for a few days before investigating and subsequently found a partially decomposed body of a male entwined in honeysuckle plants.
"He'd clearly been there a few weeks at that point," Wilson said.
He was described by the coroner to local newspapers as a male of 5'9", medium complexion, 155-160 pounds, dark brown hair and long, slender fingers. The unidentified male's socks were reportedly military issue, so Walker County checked with the army to see if any men had gone AWOL, and also looked into "person found" advisories all over Georgia and the Chattanooga, Tenn. areas.
However, when the sheriff's office received no reply regarding a missing male, the remains were placed in a body bag in a box and buried in an unmarked grave in Lafayette Cemetery.
"There was a lot of media attention on this type of story in those days," Wilson said. "It was certainly uncommon for something like this to happen (in Walker County). It generated a lot of conversation for years."
Ronald Tammen went missing April 19, 1953 from his dorm room in Fisher Hall, which no longer stands on the east side of Miami's campus. With none of his belongings and his room untouched, Oxford police had no leads to follow. Tammen's case has remained one of Miami's greatest mysteries ever since, according to former Miami President Phillip R. Shriver.
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