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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Emily Collis & Alahna Kindred

Mystery over 16 bodies dug up near one of UK's biggest car manufacturing plants

The bones of 16 bodies that were dug up from an unmarked grave near a car manufacturer plant remains a mystery despite an extensive search to find out who they are.

The human remains were uncovered on land close to the Jaguar Land Rover factory off Damson Parkway last November .

It was previously reported that the remains were found near where police had previously been digging for the Milk Carton Kids, 13-year-old David Spencer and 11-year-old Patrick Warren, who disappeared from Chelmsley Wood in 1996.

Police later confirmed the bones did not belong to the missing kids, BirminghamLive reports.

George John Funeral Directors, which organised a funeral for the remains in April, was contacted in February about resettling the remains.

The coffin handles dated back to the 1800s (George John Funeral Directors/BPM MEDIA)

George Cutler, the owner, and his team tried to trace where the bone came from by dating the coffin handles found in the unmarked grave.

George said: "There were no identifiers among the remains apart from part of a headstone.

"However the parts that we would normally need to ID the remains like the surname and the dates weren't there.

"We could see that it said 'Sarah, the wife of' so we based our searches on that and started looking at survey maps, however, there was never a cemetery in the spot where they were found. It was a bit of a mystery."

A carbon dating test found the bones belonged to people who died sometime between the 18th and 20th centuries.

The coffin handles were then dated back to the 1800s.

Old survey maps and ancestry reports on headstones in the Elmdon area led researchers to conclude that the people had originally been buried in the nearby Elmdon Churchyard.

It remains a mystery as to why they ended up so far away.

Part of a headstone found in the unmarked grave helped researchers to find where the remains had come from (George John Funeral Directors/BPM MEDIA)

George said: "The only graveyard near there was the one at the church and when we looked into it, we were able to say that this headstone had definitely been there at some point.

"We believe that when the church had an extension built over an older part of the graveyard, the instructions were to move these bodies to the other corners of the graveyard.

"We can't be 100 per cent sure it's the same one, but when someone did a survey of the headstones after the extension, this headstone had gone missing.

"To us, it seems as if these remains were not moved where they were meant to. We don't know why they were so far away, but probably because it was farmland at the time, whoever did it thought no one would know."

The team also retraced the bloodline of "Sarah", the woman whose headstone was found among the remains, and found her only daughter had died.

The other 15 people could not be identified.

A traditional Victorian funeral was held for the 16 people, when a horse-drawn carriage returned the bones inside a coffin marked "unknown persons" to their original resting place at Elmdon Church.

George said: "With their graves having been disturbed and moved, we wanted to put these people to rest in a way they would have been when they died.

"We agreed with the church to use one of their very old copies of the bible and got hold of some flaming torches, which is what they would have used back then.

"We wanted the coffin to be suited to that era so we liaised with the Coffin Works in Birmingham and they donated a set of handles too."

He said a headstone is due to be erected at the graveside in due course.

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