Two babies’ skulls found at Mütter Museum linked to Gallitzin, Pa., murder mystery from 1980

On a Friday last November, staff at the Mütter Museum were in the midst of conducting an audit of the medical history museum’s collection of some 6,600 human remains when they found a box in the library stacks of their Center City building.

The tag on it read, “Two mummified infant heads,” said Erin McLeary, senior director of collections and research.

It had a “found date” of 2005, which meant an employee noticed the box that year and flagged that not much was known of its origin, except the donor, the late forensic pathologist Halbert Fillinger, and June 9, 1999, the date the skulls were received.

“A woman whose parents had kept a boardinghouse in the 1920s or 30s was dying, and her last words were ‘Go look in the attic’ … and the name of a … man who lived in the town. They found the mummified remains of five children,” the notes in Mütter’s donor file read.

The handwritten notes also indicated that the remains came from Gallitzin, Pa., a small town near Johnstown.

When Mütter staffers searched newspaper archives, using keywords from the notes, they made a chilling discovery: The two skulls were connected to a notorious crime that made national news 45 years ago.

Back in 1980, the remains of five infants — believed to have been killed decades earlier — were found in the Gallitzin home of a woman named Stella Williamson after she died at 76.

“In the attic of her big, three-story, white frame house, in a beautiful hand-carved steel-banded chest, were the bodies of five babies — born between 1923 and 1933 and kept wrapped and bound in yellowing, crumbling newspapers all these years,” a Philadelphia Inquirer Sept. 7, 1980 report reads.

In early 1960, following a health scare, Williamson had written a letter with instructions to open the chest after her death. It wasn’t found until after she died 20 years later.

“I want to make things right if anything should happen to me,” it read, according to an article that was published in the Washington Post in October 1980. It went on to quote more of the letter; some of its content redacted by local authorities.

“In the attic in an old trunk you will find babies I had to [redacted] 30 years [ago] or more. How I got away with I don’t no [sic] but I did so I don’t want anyone else to be blamed for something they know nothing about. This is one reason I could never marry anyone else. I have lived a good life sense [sic] so as God is my judge this is the truth. Please forgive me if you can. Stella.”

According to the Washington Post, then-Cambria-County coroner John Barron told reporters that he believed that three of the children were murdered. Their presumed father, whom he did not identify, was not involved. He added that, due to deteriorating health, the man was incommunicative and could provide no further insights.

The letter also hinted at Williamson’s strained affair with the father, who was married to another woman: “He never wanted me,” she wrote. “Only something to play with and I was a fool in his hands.”

News reports of the time said neighbors recalled Williamson as a quiet, kind churchgoer, and “spinster” who scrubbed floors at United Methodist Church and fixed hoagies for local firefighters. She often sat on her porch to greet the neighbors’ children with candy and treats.

The Inquirer report also mentioned that following a leg amputation due to diabetes, Williamson continued “sitting on the porch, as she always had done, watching and nodding hello or waiting to play with one of the neighbors’ kids, especially the infants. She loved to hold them, kissing, cooing and teasing just as if she was a grandmother.”

Despite Williamson’s letter, not much was known about the children whose remains were found in the box. The state police helicoptered the remains to Philadelphia for further examination. Assistant Philadelphia County medical examiner Fillinger and forensic anthropologist Wilton Krogman conducted tests to determine the infants’ sex, age, and cause of death at Krogman’s office in Lancaster.

Due to decomposition, the tests did not yield many answers. Using X-rays, Fillinger and Krogman concluded that four were infants, carried full-term but only months old. The fifth was older, between nine months and a year old.

Three children died by strangulation, with what newspaper accounts described as a “noose-like cloth” that accompanied each body. They could not determine the cause of death for the two other babies.

“The problem we have here is a 50-year time period between the time it happened and today,” Barron told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a story published on Oct. 11, 1980. “It’s going to remain a mystery, unfortunately. There are some things we’d all like to know, but they’re buried with the people.”

Today, Barron, who still lives in Johnstown, believes that while Williamson has long been blamed for the deaths, there is no conclusive evidence of her guilt. He sees the letter as a confession that the children were hers, but not that she killed them. The Williamson family home had served as a boardinghouse for many years; Barron suspects others may have been responsible.

“There were a couple players in the home [when the infants died] — her mother, there was a boyfriend," said the 71-year-old former coroner who later served as a district judge. “It was so frustrating because there’s so many questions we wanted to ask, but we couldn’t, because there was no one to answer.”

On Oct. 29, 1980, Cambria County authorities buried the remains of what they believed to be all five infants in the county’s former “paupers’ cemetery,” today called Laurel United Cemetery.

The bodies returned from Lancaster in a pine box that was already sealed, Barron said.

Nobody opened it to see that two skulls were missing.

In 1985, five years after the burial, Fillinger was named a fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the private medical society that oversees the Mütter Museum.

Earning the moniker “Homicide Hal” for his track record of solving high-profile murder cases throughout the Philadelphia region, Fillinger was a renowned forensics teacher for the FBI, the armed forces, and Temple University. After leaving the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office, he opened a forensics consulting company and later served as coroner for Montgomery County.

By 1999, Fillinger, in his early 70s, was living in Lower Gwynedd and looking to run again for the position of Montgomery County coroner. That year he was moving his office and, exercising a somewhat common practice among College fellows, decided to donate specimens and artifacts to the museum.

According to McLeary, his donations, dated April 30, 1999, and June 9, 1999, included funds for a new computer system, an X-ray tube, and a mercury-vapor lamp, as well as anatomical specimens like a bladder stone, the skulls of five fetuses, a fetal skeleton — and the two mummified skulls from Gallitzin.

“This was handled with no check and balance, and absolutely no dignity and respect by Fillinger or this museum, in my opinion,” current Cambria County Coroner Jeffrey Lees said to The Inquirer.

“When we received the call to my office [in November 2024], I thought it was a practical joke … my first question was, ‘What the hell are you doing with them?’

“[Fillinger] took these two skulls without authorization. He does not own these skulls. And who are you to accept, what I believe, is stolen property? They don’t belong to you.”

In the eight months since the museum reached out to him, Lees has pored over documents and interviewed anyone he could find linked to the case, including coroner Barron who, in 1980, had sent a deputy to Lancaster to collect the remains after Fillinger and Krogman finished their report.

Wary of potential grave robbing, given the international attention the case had received, Barron buried the remains privately in an unmarked grave.

Reflecting on the situation decades later, Barron remembered one other crucial detail from the examination.

“Dr. Fillinger had asked me that day in Lancaster if he would be able to obtain one [skull] or whatever, and I said, ‘No, we’re going to bury them all,’” said Barron. He had “no knowledge or understanding” of what could have happened after the doctors completed their examination, he said.

Fillinger died in 2006 at the age of 79.

Maggie Fillinger, 74, does not recall her late husband discussing the Williamson case or any details about donating specimens to the Mütter.

But keeping the skulls, she said, doesn’t sound like something he would do.

“I don’t think Hal would’ve stolen the remains or any of that type of stuff,” said Fillinger, a retired nurse-practitioner in Ambler. “He was very ethical, moral and ethical, in his practice … I knew my husband very well. He would never do anything like that, so it’s not in his character at all.”

For Lees, who studied under Fillinger as part of the Pennsylvania State Coroner’s Association, seeing the doctor’s name was an unpleasant surprise.

“He was somebody that I looked up to within my own career, and I was very proud and honored at the time to be part of his last class,” said Lees. “Today, I have different feelings.”

The handwritten notes in Mütter’s donor file for the Gallitzin skulls were written by Gretchen Worden, the late director of the museum who raised its national profile with appearances on David Letterman’s show. Her notes did not state Worden’s motivations or name Stella Williamson.

“There is no one around to ask anymore about what folks were thinking, I just don’t know,” said McLeary. “It’s a very somewhat frustrating blank slate.”

The two Gallitzin skulls arrived at the museum in a glass jar from Fillinger, according to McLeary. Then, for decades, they sat locked away and unnoticed in the climate-controlled stacks of the College’s historical medical library.

At some point, the remains were transferred to a “museum-quality archival box with museum-quality archival plastic with museum-quality archival tissue cushioning.” There are no records indicating that the decomposed skulls — which remain in a delicate condition — were researched or displayed.

While the Mütter has been in possession of the remains for 26 years, the museum never formally accessioned the specimens, meaning that it did not legally take ownership of the Gallitzin skulls.

“We have not been able to locate any accession paperwork or any signed transfers of material … I don’t know why, but staff did not move, in 1999, to make them a permanent part of the collection,” said McLeary.

This is not uncommon for museums.

Over the past two years, the Mütter Museum, starting under its former executive director Kate Quinn, has attempted to tackle complex questions about holding and displaying human remains in its collection, most of which were obtained during the 19th century with little information about their provenance.

In most cases, as in the case of the skulls, the people whose bones and organs are in the collection did not grant their consent. Quinn embarked on the Pew-funded project Postmortem: Mütter Museum, inviting the public’s feedback through town halls and an exhibit, and initiated a collection-wide audit that has not yet been completed.

McLeary acknowledged there is an accessioning backlog that she and her staff have been addressing as part of the audit.

According to a statement from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia:

“The museum understood these materials to be legally and appropriately in Dr. Fillinger’s possession when he transferred them to the Mütter. At that time, the museum’s process for accepting these types of materials included clear language requiring a donor to have ‘good and complete right, title and interest’ to do so, and there is no question that Dr. Fillinger understood this requirement.”

In mid-May, the Mütter gave the box of two mummified skulls to Cambria County officials, who planned to reunite the remains with those buried at Laurel United Cemetery, 45 years after they were laid to rest.

Lees had agonized over the decision.

“You think about these five angels. They never committed a sin … Two of them were stolen, then down the road, they’re at a museum. It’s heart wrenching,” he said.

“I felt awful, possibly disturbing them, but I wanted to make them whole.”

On July 7, Lees led a team to bury the skulls and exhume the infants’ remains from the unmarked grave, but could not locate the bodies.

He returned days later with John Pupo, a former maintenance worker who helped dig the grave in 1980, to confirm his memory that the babies had been buried in the same vicinity.

On July 18, Lees brought in a ground-penetrating machine to analyze the plot. The team erected a large tent over the area for privacy, exhumed the skulls that were buried on July 7, and tried once more to locate the pine box, digging deeper.

“According to the forensic anthropologist, the anthropology team, the backhoe operator, and the operator of this machine, all indications — a grave was dug there,” said Lees. “We went down approximately seven feet. Nothing. We hit shell.”

Some seven hours later, Lees ended the search. He told reporters that the machine indicated a “clear disturbance” at the grave site, but he couldn’t account for why, how, or when that could have occurred.

“I have no clue where this pine box and these babies are located,” Lees told The Inquirer. “What I can guarantee you [is that] they’re not where they’re supposed to be.”

To Barron, there’s no mystery about what happened.

“They were buried, and that was the end. I mean, these children need some peace, and we need to move on,” he said. “Remember, they’re almost 100 years old now. 100 years old is a long time of decomposition [when] you’re not in a coffin … I’m sure [the box is] decomposed. I mean, it’s been 50 years.”

Lees believes the box should still be mostly intact. The coroner said his search is not over, and encourages anyone with information about the case to contact the Cambria County Coroner’s office.

For now, the skulls found at the Mütter Museum are buried at Laurel United Cemetery, in the plot where their presumed siblings had once been interred. Before burying them, Lees removed the cloth, which was once wielded as a weapon, from one of the remains and placed it in his evidence locker. He cradled the decomposed skulls in baby blankets.

He still hopes that he may, one day, put all five infants to rest, together.