The search for one missing man: Quincy skeleton may be that of Italian jilted by girlfriend


The search for one missing man: Quincy skeleton may be that of Italian jilted by girlfriend

March 13, 2001
The Patriot Ledger
By ROBERT SEARS The Patriot Ledger

QUINCY n Josef Unterhuber, a translator in a government office in northern Italy, took two weeks vacation early in 1988 after his girlfriend said no to his proposal of marriage. He disappeared and hasn't been seen since.

It was three years later, in March 1991, that a hiker in the woods off Quarry Street in Quincy found the skeletal remains of a man whose head had been smashed with repeated blows by a blunt object. The bones of the murder victim were never identified.

Now a civilian police dispatcher for the Quincy Police Department has found information on an Internet web site suggesting it was Unterhuber who was beaten and buried in the woods. Authorities cannot be sure without comparing dental records or DNA, and are waiting for those to come from Italy.

Police have some information on how Unterhuber may have traveled from Italy to the Boston area and said he may have been homeless. But they are still filling in the details.

Unterhuber, 32, was a native of Bolzano, a province in the north of Italy where many resdients speak German. He worked for the provincial government as a translator and was last seen there Jan. 11, 1988, Quincy Detective Capt. Robert Crowley said yesterday.

A few days before his disappearance, Unterhuber asked his girlfriend in Austria to marry him, Crowley said.

She refused, and Unterhuber returned to Bolzano and spent several days alone at home without telling his family what had happened. He requested a two-week vacation and left his office at about 6 p.m. on the day he disappeared.

At 6:30 p.m. he called his mother from a railroad station, told her that he was leaving, but he did not tell her where he was going, Crowley said.

His family never heard from him again.

An Interpol investigation found Unterhuber requested a visa for New York at the Vienna airport the day after he disappeared. Interpol learned that he left New York July 7, 1988.

The Bolzano police were informed Feb. 12, 1989, by the Italian consulate in Boston that Unterhuber's passport had been found on a bench at the Homeless Older Adults Center at the Holy Trinity Church in Boston's South End.

At that point, the trail went cold.

It wasn't until Jan. 25 that Quincy police dispatcher Robert Lingoes, of Quincy, came across a promising lead while searching a missing persons web site.

Lingoes said he had been working for 10 years to find the identity of the murder victim whose skeleton was found March 21, 1991.

"I can't even begin to tell you how many missing person reports I've looked at over the years," he said. "I'd guess thousands, and I was so frustrated that I couldn't find anything that matched. I was looking for a needle in a haystack.

He had been searching on law-enforcement networks, but two months ago he started looking at missing persons web sites.

"I found one site in particular, the Doe Network . It listed only cases with police involvement and only cases prior to 1993," he said.

"It had a search engine that allowed me to put in minute bits of information," he said.

Lingoes typed in "plaid shirt," because one was found with the skeleton, and "Quincy," but there was no response.

"Then I tried Boston,' and lo and behold, it came up," he said.

Unterhuber's height, 5-foot 81/2 , his age and wavy brown hair matched what was known about the skeleton following an autopsy.

Furthermore, both the skeleton and Unterhuber had broken bones that had mended.

The skeleton had a mended break of the left clavicle, or collar bone. According to the description on the Doe Network , Lingoes said, Unterhuber had a broken bone in his upper left arm. Police say they are unsure of the language describing the location of Unterhuber's broken bone and believe it may be describing the same break found on the skeleton.

Through the Doe web site, Lingoes found that Unterhuber had been featured on the weekly Italian Television program, "Chi l'ha visto?" which in English means "Who has seen them?"

The program sent a reporter and video camera operator to Quincy yesterday to do a story on the possible link with the skeleton.

When Lingoes contacted the program's staff in January, they agreed to ask Unterhuber's family for dental records and possibly a DNA sample.

The family agreed, but Crowley said there has been a problem locating the dental records.

Ultimately, police hope to be able to compare the dental records with the teeth of the skeleton, which has been stored since the autopsy at the Southern Mortuary in Boston.

Crowley said he did not want to raise the hopes of Unterhuber's family too soon, but he said police have their most promising lead to the skeleton's identity yet.

"In this kind of an investigation, sometimes you can identify the victim and sometimes you can't,'' he said.

Crowley said that if the remains are identified as those of Unterhuber, investigators will try to determine who killed him.

"I'd like to know who this person was, but I'd really like to know who killed him," said Detective Robert Ceriello, who with Detective William Lanergan worked on the investigation in 1991.

"We held back on releasing this new information until we could be sure, but since Chi l'ha visto' has been so much help to us and wanted to know more about the case, we felt that we should tell people now," Crowley said.