Who was Marie Heiser? Woman's body found 44 years ago identified as wife of cop who never reported her missing
The body of a woman which was found in a wooded area in Delaware in 1977 has finally been identified. The deceased, identified as Marie Petry Heiser, was revealed to be the wife of a cop who never reported her missing and told their two children at the time of her disappearance that she had just abandoned them.
Police have learned that things "weren't good at the house" where the woman lived with her highway patrol cop and their kids. The husband sold their family home in Philadelphia shortly after and moved to Florida with their two children. He died in 2006 from cancer.
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Who was Marie Petry Heiser?
Heiser was a Philadelphia woman whose body was found in a wooded area off a road in June 1977. The then 50-year-old was married to Philadelphia Police Department’s Highway Patrol member William Heiser Sr.
Heiser was a 'homemaker' who spent time raising their two children, while her husband went on to work as a truck driver during the 50s, and early 60s. Heiser's body was found by a teenager who was riding home on his bicycle. At the time, a medical examiner had ruled that the then-unidentified woman had most likely been dead for weeks.
New Castle County Police announced on Tuesday, March 23, that the unidentified body was that of Heiser. “The children had been told by their father that their mother had packed her bags and left the residence in Philadelphia, leaving behind no information on where she had gone,” police revealed. They deduced Heiser had never been reported missing by anyone and her husband had gone on to sell their house and move states.
“We were told things weren’t good at the house,” Heiser’s son and retired police officer, Bill Heiser Jr, shared with FOX-29. “We never in a million years ever thought that it was foul play or something would happen to her.”
POLICE ANNOUNCE THE IDENTIFICATION OF A HOMICIDE VICTIM FROM 1977 ( New Castle, DE 19720) Today (Mar 23) The New Castle...
Posted by New Castle County Police on Tuesday, 23 March 2021
How Heiser's body was identified
New Castle County Police and officials from the Delaware Medical Examiner’s Office together launched the investigation into the body of the then-unidentified Heiser back in 1977 after the medical examiner called her death homicide. The case however 'grew cold' as officials didn't have the luxury to identify bodies through fingerprints and dental records yet.
Eventually, information about the body and the circumstances it was found in were filed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in 2008. At the time, the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification had tried to match the data but didn't obtain a match, police said. A Virginia-based company specializing in DNA phenotypic data attempted identification of the body once again in 2017. Producing a digital image of Heiser, the company was successful in finding genetic information that could be used to create a potential family tree.
When Montgomery County Maryland Officer Steven Smugeresky took reigns of the ancestry research of the body's DNA profile in 2019, leads were used to obtain DNA samples from possible relatives until a match was found. The case, however, still remains under investigation.