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Students and faculty in UNH’s Forensic Anthropology Identification and Recovery (FAIR) Lab recently assisted the Office of the Medical Examiner in the analysis of unidentified human remains found in Bristol almost 40 years ago, contributing to an investigation that ultimately produced an identity in the cold case.

A human skull was located in a wooded area of Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1986, though it remained unidentified despite “investigative efforts at the time,” according to a release from the New Hampshire State Police. The identity of Warren Kuchinsky, born in 1952 and last known to be alive in the mid-1970s, was announced earlier this month.

Photo courtesy of New Hampshire Attorney General's Office

 

 

Renewed momentum in the case picked up in 2025, when the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, assisted by the New Hampshire State Police and UNH’s FAIR Lab, partnered with the DNA Doe Project to “apply advanced forensic genetic genealogy techniques to the case,” the state police release says.

Kuchinsky’s identity was ultimately confirmed through DNA testing of a surviving family member. The state police say there is no evidence of foul play associated with his death.

The FAIR Lab, directed by Amy Michael, a biological anthropologist and assistant professor at UNH, has contributed to the solution of several cold cases in the last handful of years. It operates out of Spaulding Life Sciences and features about six students per semester (two paid positions and three to four volunteers) who get to be directly involved in lab work.

“Students working with faculty in the UNH FAIR Lab learn how to analyze human skeletal remains from archaeological, historic, and modern contexts,” Michael, assistant professor of anthropology, women’s and gender studies, and justice studies, says. Using scientific methods, Michael says students learn how to estimate age at death, skeletal sex, stature, population affinity, and postmortem interval to generate information about unidentified human remains.

“The end goal of all skeletal analysis is return of remains, reburial, and/or repatriation,” Michael says. “As a professor, it's rewarding for me to see students develop technical skills alongside a deep appreciation for, and acknowledgement of, the need for human identification in historic and modern cases.”

Students in the FAIR Lab have played roles in several high-profile cases in recent years. They have assisted on field recoveries, including the recovery of remains identified as Alberta Leeman, .

Among the more prominent cases the lab has been involved in was that of , which resolved a mystery that began when a woman’s head was discovered by two children in a public park in southern Illinois in 1993.

Michael reached out to the local sheriff’s office in 2021 in hopes of jumpstarting the case using updated forensic methods and the FAIR Lab ultimately joined forces with Laurah Norton, writer and host of The Fall Line podcast, and Redgrave Research Forensic Service to identify the remains.

Michael and UNH students were invited to the press conference when the woman’s identity was revealed as Susan Lund, 25, of Tennessee.