(suspenseful music)
- She's always the one to put a smile on your face.
You know, just, she was always happy.
You never seen her down.
She was always smiling, giggly,
just, just all around happy person.
- Sherry would not just up and leave
and not tell anybody,
no friends, no family, nothing.
And the fact that she had three small children at home,
it just, it was just something that she wouldn't have done.
My dad was in contact with the police department
on a regular basis.
It was always, they had no answers.
They haven't, you know, seen or heard of her.
Nothing.
But I feel like he kind of like lost hope,
as far as getting any help from law enforcement.
(suspenseful music)
- We were gonna do everything
with our power to recover that body
for the family to pay the last respects that they need.
- We also contacted Dr. Dennis Dirkmaat
from the Mercy Hirsch University
for his forensic anthropology team to
essentially excavate the site
and find these remains.
- We're out in the woods
and there is a rock fence there
and a hunting cabin.
We've dug a series of holes every, every two feet.
So there, there is about five people with shovels.
I used a ceramic tile probe in each of the holes.
One of the state troopers,
he's sort of in the lead there,
he got down on his hands and knees
and was looking in the hole.
And when I looked down at it, I said,
"That's a human tibia and a human fibula from the leg."
As we excavate it, we could see
that the arms and legs and other parts of the body
were unnaturally positioned in the grave.
Some of the bones of the neck
that should be right with the skull
were sitting in the pelvis.
That indicates that the body was placed in the grave
in advanced state of decomposition.
He sort of stuffed her into this grave.
We got all of the bones
and brought them back to the laboratory
to see if there's any evidence of trauma,
any broken bones, any knife cut marks.
We didn't see trauma on the rest of the skeleton,
but we saw it in the skull.
Very significant damage to the skull.
It was blunt force.
Even though we're, as forensic anthropologists,
usually not in the business of saying how somebody died,
the fact that the trauma was so extensive
that would've led to her death.
(slow music)