Pinnacle Man Mystery Solved After Nearly Half A Century
The famous Pinnacle Man mystery has been solved after almost 50 years. The body found in a Pennsylvania cave in 1977 has finally been identified as Nicholas Paul Grubb of Fort Washington Pennsylvania. The identification was made thanks to modern databases and thorough searching of old case files.
The Pinnacle Man
After the evidence was confirmed, Grubb’s family was notified by the coroner’s office who expressed their gratitude and asked for his body to be laid to rest at the family funeral plot.
Pinnacle Man was named for the Pinnacle of the Appalachian Trail. Grubb’s then-unidentified corpse was found in a cave just below the Pinnacle.
The body was discovered on January 16, 1977 in the Appalachian mountains. He had no means of identification on him, and attempts to identify him failed. An autopsy was performed, declaring drug overdose as the cause of death.
While fingerprints and dental records didn’t result in identification in the 70s, that evidence would eventually be the key to solving the mystery.
Back In The Public Eye
The unusual circumstances of a body being found frozen in a cave in the mountains, and the inability to identify his body, led to the Pinnacle Man becoming a national mystery. It made national newspapers in the 1970s and has endured in the public consciousness as a famous unsolved case.
After authorities could not identify the Pinnacle Man, his case went cold and his fingerprints were lost. The case was reopened in 2019 when NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, flagged a pair of missing people as potentially having the same dental records as the then-unidentified body.
After the body was exhumed, the dental records proved that the body didn’t match those missing people, but it brought the case back to the attention of authorities.
Fingerprints
The turning point in the Pinnacle Man case came when Pennsylvania State Police Officer Ian Keck found the misplaced fingerprint information. Submitting this new information to NamUs resulted in a match with Nicholas Paul Grubb.
Mishandled Paperwork
Unlike most cold cases, the Pinnacle Man identification didn’t happen because of new technologies or techniques. While it may be less exciting, the ability to identify Nicholas Paul Grubb after so many years came down to paperwork and a willingness to investigate internal files to find information that was mishandled decades ago.
It’s Not Always About DNA
The identification of Grubb proves that mundane investigations and paperwork remain critical even in the age of DNA evidence.
The Pinnacle Man’s identification draws one of America’s long-standing cold case mysteries to a close. After almost five decades, the family of Nicholas Paul Grubb can finally get some closure on his disappearance and the rest of the country has an answer to an enduring national mystery.
Source: CNN
