Officials seek help to identify remains
Bones believed to be missing woman’s, but proof is needed
As a forensic anthropologist, Sharon Derrick has gone to numerous death scenes. But when she went last March to collect the bones from the wall of Mary Cerruti’s home in the Heights section of Houston, it stood out. She saw cat cages in the attic, as well as a missing plank in the attic floor.
She thought about what a horrible death it must have been.
Derrick, who works with the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, offered new details Thursday on a case that has captured widespread attention and that she is still working to resolve. She is asking for the public’s help to match the remains conclusively.
It is unlikely anyone will ever know how exactly the person whose bones were found in the wall died. There wasn’t enough evidence left to analyze. But Derrick still hopes to confirm whether the remains are Cerruti’s — and she believes they are.
“We really do believe that she is Mary Cerruti,” Derrick said,
referring to the 61-year-old woman who went missing in 2015. “We just have to scientifically prove it.”
It is, oddly enough, the kind of mystery Cerruti would have loved, a childhood friend recently recalled. The two grew up together in Kingsville, and she echoed what others who knew Cerruti have said: she was troubled, but also intelligent, mysterious and witty.
She had rubber rats in the kitchen of an old house, recalled the friend, Pamela S. Jones. She also had a wooden casket decorated for Day of the Dead — foreshadowing a job she would later hold at Casa Ramirez, a shop in the Heights known for its Day of the Dead merchandise. She wanted to hold one of her marriages at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
“I think she would have thought that was kind of cool,” Jones said. “That she created the mystery.”
The months since the discovery of the remains have not yielded much. There were no fingerprints left to scan. Two of Cerruti’s physicians were contacted, but neither had any imaging records. And, after a long wait, DNA analysis most recently came up short.
(Cerruti’s parents both died when she was young, leaving only cousins — who are less likely to provide a match — to compare against.)
So Derrick has turned to the public in search of more clues. Three significant possibilities for identification remain: the discovery of dental or medical images, evidence of Cerruti wearing glasses that match those found with the remains or analysis of a photograph of her face against the remains.
With dental records, an odontologist — the term for a forensic dentist — could be called in to look at the details and make a comparison. Medical records might match a fracture found in a leg bone.
“As we’re trying to compile as much circumstantial evidence as possible, eventually it hits a tipping point,” Derrick explained. “It’s very important that these people are given their name.”
The forensics office on Thursday meanwhile released an “unidentified decedent flier” with two images of the glasses. They are a reddish brown, with a faint, gold snakeskin pattern on the side. Lettering printed on them indicates they were manufactured by Foster Grant.
“Beatrice” glasses, the company calls them. The reading power was +2.50, according to the document. They hope someone will have a photograph of her wearing them. Neighbors said authorities might want to look at a grainy video of Cerruti speaking at a planning commission meeting in 2013 in which she’s wearing glasses.
Little pieces of evidence, over time, have added up. It was, after all, Cerruti’s house where the bones were found. The biological profile that emerged from the autopsy — that of a white, older woman — matched what is known about Cerruti, who had been missing. Who else would be in the wall? Relatives and neighbors and friends, of course, remain eager for answers.
“It bothers all of us when we have someone that remains unidentified because we consider that part of our mission,” Derrick said. “There is a feeling that we really need to get this done.”
Cerruti in the years before she went missing became known as a holdout in a gentrifying neighborhood of the Heights. A developer had bought much of the block all around her small, yellow bungalow and was building a towering apartment complex around it.
Still, Cerruti refused to sell her land. She documented in annotated photographs found later the construction that went on all around her little oasis. The home at 610 Allston St. belonged to her — and to her beloved cats.
Friends checked on her sporadically: A man who cut her lawn, a friend from a vintage shop. But her mail piled up, the yard grew wild and a missing person’s report was filed.
That was more than two years ago.
“I’m disappointed it’s taken so long,” neighbor Roxanne Davis said, “and I’m frustrated the DNA evidence was inconclusive.”
Mary Cerruti, for now, remains missing.