Dispatcher's devotion may put name to victim
By TATSHA ROBERTSON
April 17, 2001
QUINCY - On March 21, 1991, Bobby Lingoes, a civilian dispatcher at the Quincy Police Department, was called upstairs to the detective bureau. ''Bobby, come see this,'' said a lieutenant, handing him a report about newly discovered skeletal remains belonging to a 5-foot-8 white male who died about 1988.
Earlier that day, a Quincy man came to police with two bones wrapped in a quilt. He had found them while jogging deep in the woods off Quarry Street. There, under a pile of plywood, police discovered more skeletal remains, a plaid shirt, and a pair of socks buried in a 3-foot grave.
Lingoes, whose dream of one day being a police officer led him to his post as a civilian dispatcher, took to his computer. But he could find no clues to the dead person's identity through law enforcement networks.
Shadowed by his own anguish - the tragic murder of his nephew - Lingoes never stopped searching.
''I was just determined,'' said Lingoes, now 45. ''I knew he was someone's child.''
Now, 10 years and thousands of fruitless inquiries later, Lingoes may have solved mysteries that had long baffled authorities in Quincy and Italy.
Police said the fractured bones and the jawless head that remain in a Quincy morgue could be those of Josef Unterhuber, a translator from the Italian province of Bolzano.
Unterhuber had come to the Boston area reeling in pain from a broken heart. He was last seen on Jan. 11, 1988, just weeks after his 23-year-old girlfriend in Italy had turned down his marriage proposal.
Three weeks ago, Unterhuber's 80-year-old mother gave blood to authorities so that Quincy police can have the DNA samples analyzed and compared with the skeletal remains. Authorities are awaiting the results.
''We don't know if it's him or not,'' said Lingoes. ''My every waking hour is thinking about this case - wondering, anticipating about this poor family.''
For Lingoes, who never scored high enough on the police exam to become a police officer, putting a name on an unidentified homicide victim became a personal specialty, his way of fulfilling his commitment to law enforcement.
What many people didn't know, and what Lingoes doesn't like to admit, is that he was thinking about his own family when he first got the assignment.
His 18-year-old nephew was killed in 1988 when he tried to break up a fight.
''He was my sister's only son and he was like a son to me,'' said Lingoes. His nephew, who shared his name, graduated from vocational school and was planning to be a plumber.
All Lingoes could think about was a lonely family somewhere, waiting for knock on the door that would never come.
Thousands of miles away, Maria Edler, the mother of Josef Unterhuber, awaited just such a knock.
Ever since her son left his hometown in Italy in 1988, Edler has felt incomplete.
''From the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to sleep at night it was Josef,'' said Edler, who lives in Bolzano and speaks Italian in the heavy German accent common in that region of Italy.
Just before his disappearance, Unterhuber, then 32, traveled to Austria to ask his girlfriend to marry him, she said. After her refusal, he returned home on Jan. 11 and asked for two weeks of vacation from work. That night, about 6:30 p.m., he called his mother from the train station to tell her he was going on a vacation. It was the last time he talked to her.
''I just had a bad feeling,'' she said.
The family called police and they contacted his friends. His mother even remembers going to his apartment with the ex-girlfriend, who is now a doctor in Austria.
Georg Unterhuber described his younger brother as a dashing and brilliant man who was happy and doing well for himself. He had a good job as a translator at the Languages Office of the Independent Province of Bolzano. He spoke Spanish, English, German, and Italian. He'd just bought a white Volkswagen and lived by himself in a large apartment in a residential area. His home was filled with up to 300 books.
Georg said his brother was a bit of a ladies' man, which is why he was so surprised to hear that his disappearance was prompted by his loss of a girlfriend.
His brother had one real love, and Georg believes that is what drew him to Boston: American culture, especially that involving Native Americans. Josef had studied in New Orleans for three months and always dreamed of returning to America. His favorite writer was Karl May, a German writer who died in 1912, never having visited America but writing dozens of best-sellers in Europe about the American West. Georg believes his brother got so caught up in his American fascination that he decided to travel to America on a lark.
On Feb. 12, 1992, four years after Unterhuber left Bolzano, the Italian Consulate in Boston contacted the family and Bolzano police to tell them that Unterhuber's passport had been found on a bench at The Homeless Older Adults Center at Holy Trinity Church in Boston's South End.
It would be another nine years before they would receive any additional information about him.
In the intervening years, many things crossed the minds of family members, said Georg. Maybe his brother wasn't doing so well in America and became homeless. Or maybe he had made it ''in the land of opportunity.''
His mother believed he was ashamed to call home after letting so much time pass.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Lingoes, the Quincy police dispatcher, was trying to find just who was killed and buried in the woods.
''He was tireless,'' said Captain Robert Crowley.
Part of Lingoes's job at the Police Department is to try to match identities of a missing person with a homicide victim. Through the years he had continued to search law enforcement Web sites for some link to the remains found in the Quincy woods. He even spent his free time in the public library searching for clues. Sometimes, he'd ask Crowley for help poring through the records.
After each one of his library or computer searches, Lingoes would walk up to the third floor of the Police Department and hand Crowley a piece of paper hoping it contained a promising new lead.
Two months ago, said officials, he began to search on missing person Web sites, particularly one called The Doe Network. This included cases outside of the country, something he hadn't thought about. As soon as he typed in ''Quincy'' and ''plaid shirt'' (which was found in the grave) and then added ''Boston,'' Unterhuber's name and information popped up.
''I was astonished,'' said Lingoes. ''I said `This could be it.'''
Lingoes found striking similarities between Unterhuber and the remains. Height and hair color matched. The plaid shirt Unterhuber was wearing in a photograph was similar to that found in the grave. But the most promising and yet disturbing characteristic that Unterhuber and the deceased share, according to the family, was the fact that both had broken a bone in the upper part of the body, which had mended years earlier.
Unterhuber's mother said the injury, which her son received as a little boy during a summer vacation, was the one thing that has nearly convinced her that those remains found in Quincy belong to her son.
''I don't want it to be true, but deep down inside,'' she said, ''I know.''
The Boston Globe