After almost half a century of questioning, Nicolas Paul Grubb was finally identified thanks to fingerprints found by an investigator.
The end of a mystery that lasted nearly five decades. As announced by several American media outlets including CNN, “Pinnacle Man”, the nickname given to a frozen corpse found on January 16, 1977 in a Pennsylvania cave near the summit of the same name, has finally been formally identified by the American authorities.
That day, it was the hikers who found the lifeless body, while this eastern state of the United States was going through one of the coldest months recorded since weather records began.
An autopsy performed the next day concluded that the death was due to suicide linked to an overdose of medications, namely phenobarbital and pentobarbital. However, the identity of the man with the long hair and full beard remained unknown.
Footprints found
As the days went by, no one claimed the body, which was eventually buried in Potter’s Field Cemetery in Berks County. Until 2024, the unknown man was registered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database and his body was even exhumed in 2019 for a full forensic dental examination that yielded nothing.
It was finally in August 2024 that a major breakthrough took place. While various DNA tests carried out in recent years had yielded nothing, a Pennsylvania State Police detective in charge of unsolved cases finally found, in files, the fingerprints taken in 1977 at the time of the autopsy, which had been lost.
The prints were forwarded to an FBI fingerprint expert on August 12, who was able to find a match within an hour. The prints belonged to one Nicolas Paul Grubb, a native of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, who was 27 years old at the time of his death.
The family of the deceased has been notified and now wants the remains to be repatriated to a family vault.
