Plot Synopsis

This non-fiction series follows two forensic anthropologists, Dr. Michelle Hamilton and Dr. Kate Spradley, as they help solve four unusual cold cases from American history. Hamilton and Spradley, two of America's foremost experts, are faculty at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University-San Marcos, where they have most recently studied how traditional methods for estimating time of death can be wrong, especially in regions of the country with vultures. In each one-hour episode, Hamilton and Spradley are presented with a collection of unidentified bones, and they use skeletal analysis to help them understand the origin, lifestyle and cause of death of the person they're studying. Cases include: a 1750s male skeleton, exhumed from a British military cemetery inside Fort William Henry, that shows no signs of being a British soldier and may actually be a Native American who worked with the British; the 1860s skeletons of a young man and woman, buried together in a single coffin in Cincinnati; an 1840s male skeleton, buried at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento during the Gold Rush, which was found with musket balls in his coffin; and an 1870s male skeleton, a large-boned man in Denver, that had a broken nose, pathological leg, diamond-shaped gap in his front teeth, and a toe bone that shows signs of disease.