Authorities don’t know for sure how a young woman’s skull ended up in a wall of a Batavia house. But now they know whose it is, thanks to DNA testing and sleuthing.
Kane County Coroner Rob Russell and Batavia police announced Thursday that the skull is that of 17-year-old Esther Granger, who died shortly after giving birth in 1866. She was buried in Merrillville, Indiana, Russell said at a news conference.
So why was the skull in Batavia?
“We believe Esther was a victim of grave robbing,” Russell said.
He said grave-robbing was profitable at that time, as a grave robber could get the equivalent of three to four months of wages for one body, often used by medical students studying anatomy. A student at a medical school in St. Charles was killed by rioters in 1849 after he stole a woman’s body from a fresh grave in Sycamore.
The house where the skull was found was built in 1850. People knocking down a wall during remodeling in 1978 found the skull. An anthropologist at the time determined the skull was at least several decades old and probably that of a woman.
From there — and again, authorities don’t know how or why — the skull ended up with the Batavia Historical Society. In 2021, the Batavia Depot Museum director and a volunteer found it in a box while auditing the museum’s collection. They notified the police, and the police turned it over to the coroner.
Othram forensic laboratory in Texas tested DNA from the skull in 2023. It compared the profile to others in a database of genealogical family trees and decided it was Granger’s.
Granger’s great-great-grandson, Wayne Svilar of Washington, gave a DNA sample to confirm the finding.
Svilar said Thursday that when the coroner’s cold-case investigator called him, he suspected it was a scam. Coincidentally, he is a former police officer who helped start a cold-case investigation unit in Oregon 20 years ago.
“What convinced me this was not some well-organized scam was their passion for the work,” and the respect shown for Granger, Svilar said.
He said his late mother and grandmother didn’t talk much about their ancestors. “The only thing they ever talked about was that (the Grangers’) life was really hard,” he said. Granger’s husband and child eventually moved to Nebraska, he said. He now knows what she probably looked like, as Russell had a photographer, a three-dimensional printing company and a forensic artist make an image of Granger.
Russell used crowdsource fundraising to pay for the testing. His office also asked the Lake County, Indiana, coroner to try to find Granger’s grave, but it was unable to do so. The skull was cremated, and the ashes were laid to rest in August in the columbarium at the West Side Cemetery in Batavia. Svilar attended the ceremony.
And even though the skull was old, Russell thought it was important to learn whose it was, out of respect for deceased people. “I don’t like undone things,” he said.