Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 episode 3: The Severed Head case explored 

Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 dropped five episodes on Netflix on July 30, 2024, and featured five different cold cases in each episode. These cases, much like the ones in the series' previous volumes, were left unsolved due to various reasons, including lack of substance. One such example is The Severed Head case, which took place in Pennsylvania in 2014.

As per Reuters, a woman's severed head was found lying in the woods, 10 yards from Mason Road in Economy Borough, a small town near Pittsburgh. According to the publication, the woman's mouth was "open," her "eyes were closed" and she had gray and "fluffy" hair. A head was first spotted by a teenage boy around "half past noon" on December 12, 2014.

The case was featured in episode 3 of Unsolved Mysteries volume 4. According to Netflix Tudum, the episode's logline reads:

"After a teen finds an embalmed head in the woods, investigators uncover a possible connection to a black-market organ trade as they try to ID the victim."

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Unsolved Mysteries volume 4: Investigators revisit The Severed Head case

Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 episode 3 was directed by Syke Borgman and filmed in Economy Borough, Pennsylvania, the original scene of the decade-old crime. CBS News described the case as "one of the strangest cases in Western Pennsylvania." Michael O'Brien, the Police Chief of Economy Borough, noted that the national coverage of the Netflix show would help figure out the identity of the victim.

The 48-minute-long episode started with an audio of the first phone call that was made to the police about the severed head, which prompted several questions such as what Jane Doe's head was doing in a field of a "nice neighborhood in a nice town." "Where did she come from?" "Did she die a natural death?" were some of the other initial questions that were raised.

Andrew Gall, the Chief of Detectives at Beaver County's D.A.'s office, was one of the prominent people featured on episode 3 of Unsolved Mysteries volume 4. Presented as one of the frontrunners of the case, he shared details about the town where the crime took place and provided a general outline of the investigation that followed.

Chief Michael O'Brien explained that the boy, who found the body, was walking up to a deer processing place where he came across the head. The chief added that the boy thought it was a "gut pile" to begin with but realized soon enough that it was a severed human head. He further mentioned that he thought it was going to be a prank when the call came through. However, it turned into a cold case.

Andrew Gall's initial reaction was that the head hadn't been in the woods for too long since it was found lying on top of the leaves. O'Brien added that it wasn't "decomposed." Looking at the evidence, the police guessed the victim to be between 60 and 80 years of age.

As Unsolved Mysteries show progressed, the frontrunners went over the stages of the investigation, starting with transporting Jane Doe to the morgue so they could get an autopsy done.

The Unsolved Mysteries docuseries featured the autopsy technician, Timothy Manzewitsch, who examined the head. He recalled looking at the head with his jaw on the floor in shock when it was first presented.

"Is this real, or is this fake?" Timothy said.

As per the findings, it was declared that the person was "professionally" embalmed and that it was severed afterwards. Timothy revealed that the embalmed skull didn't have eyes. Instead, it had red rubber balls which was "unusual."

Andrew got in touch with several funeral directors and embalmers and discovered that nobody used red rubber balls in the process. Coincidentally, Andrew walked into his favorite pizza place and noticed that there was a bubblegum machine that dispensed gum in red rubber balls. The lead, however, was a dead end as the balls were extremely common and there was no way to track them.

The police gathered a search party to look for other body parts in the surrounding areas but as explained in the Unsolved Mysteries episode, they couldn't find anything. When they started questioning people, one name, Jay Grabner, came up since he lived across the scene of the crime.

"The day of the search, Jay came down out of his house, came up to some of us while we were at the search," O'Brien explained.

He added that they were able to interview him. Jay was interested in finding out who did it and the teenager who discovered it. In an interview included in the Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 episode, he said that it was "too convenient" and "too pretty" for a child to have found it and believed that the 15-year-old child who found the head was responsible.

Despite examining DNA samples, the police were unable to identify who the victim was. That is when they got in touch with Michelle Vitali, a forensic expert to help them recognize the victim so they could put a sketch out for the public to seek the head. Michelle also created a sculpture to further the investigation.

In Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 episode 3, the investigators stated that they followed up on a possible lead that came from the coroner of Fayette County, 90 minutes away from Economy Borough.

The coroner explained that there was a head missing from a person who was in a casket, and police hoped that was it. Although there were similarities between the person who was in the grave and Jane Doe, she was not it. In the episode, they discovered that the two were not a match based on dental records.

The police later deduced that some funeral directors would sell body parts in the black market, which widened the scope of the investigation but also made it more difficult to identify the criminal.

Despite various leads and multiple angles, including body brokers selling parts of the body for $500, the police kept coming back to square one. However, one theory the police had was that - Jay Grabner put the head in the field and had a telescope set up to see what would happen and tried to blame it on the child, as revealed in the segment.

Eventually, the police asked Jay to take a polygraph test, which would determine the credibility of his story and the latter agreed in an instant. As part of the test, he was asked several questions about the head and each of his answers indicated "deception." According to the police, this meant there was a "99.9% chance" that Jay wasn't being truthful.

In the true crime Unsolved Mysteries, Blake showed the results of the test to Jay but the latter was insistent that he wasn't responsible. Although he was an unofficial suspect for a while, they couldn't come up with concrete evidence that he was involved.

In 2020, six years after the crime, Jay committed suicide. Andrew stated that he was the "last string" he had in solving the case. Soon after, the police buried the head and performed a funeral service for her so she could have a proper funeral, as revealed in the episode.

The Severed Head case remains unsolved even a decade after the head was found. Watch the investigation in Unsolved Mysteries volume 4 episode 3 that is currently streaming on Netflix.