A man who was found frozen to death in a cave in the US state of Pennsylvania nearly five decades ago has now been identified, as CNN and the Guardian, among others, reported yesterday. Police had tracked down long-missing fingerprints and thus solved a mystery that had long preoccupied authorities in the Appalachian Mountains, a mountain range in eastern North America.
The Berks County coroner was able to identify the man as Nicholas Paul Grubb, then 27, of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Grubb had long been known as the “Pinnacle Man,” a reference to the mountain peak in the Appalachians near which hikers stumbled upon his body in 1977. At the time, authorities said there were no signs of foul play and that the death was a suicide due to a drug overdose.
However, the body could not be identified based on its appearance and clothing. During the autopsy, investigators analyzed his teeth and took his fingerprints. However, these were lost. The authorities were left with only a composite sketch, as the copies of the fingerprints were of poor quality.
Clues keep cropping up
Authorities regularly reopened the case when promising evidence surfaced, but Grubb’s identity always remained a mystery. His body was even exhumed in 2019 to obtain DNA after dental records linked Grubb to two missing people in Illinois and Florida, sources said.
In August, a state trooper discovered Grubb’s lost fingerprints in an old police archive. An FBI expert matched them with Grubb’s in just 53 minutes. Grubb was a member of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard in the early 1970s. Two years before his death, he had an “encounter with police” in Colorado, which led to his fingerprints being automatically stored in a system.
The Berks County Coroner notified a relative of Grubb that they had confirmed his identity. That relative requested that the coroner rebury Grubb’s remains on his family’s property.
