DNA reveals identity of Jewish man missing for more than a decade

On a cold December day, beneath the canopy of barren trees and one of the season’s first snowstorms, Abby Mendelson said goodbye to his brother during an afternoon graveside service.

To anyone on the outside, the service was a typical Jewish funeral. Community members surrounded Mendelson and his family; Poale Zedeck Rabbi Daniel Yolkut delivered blessings, prayers and a eulogy that included references to the weekly parshah; mourners took turns shoveling dirt to cover the pine coffin housing Mitchell Mendelson’s remains. There was nothing that looked unusual about the events taking place.

And yet, looks can be deceiving.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
W.B. Yeats

Thinking about his relationship with his brother over the last few decades of his life while sitting shiva, Mendelson alluded to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming.”

“He would spin out here and come back, spin out here and come back,” Mendelson said. “There were times that he would cut off all contact, be very insulting and then come back and be very avuncular.”

That wasn’t always the case.

Mendelson said he and his brother were best friends growing up and “thick as thieves.” He described a series of games and activities played in the New York neighborhoods where the pair was raised.

By the time Abby Mendelson was at college, the two were no longer as tight — Abby Mendelson was an older, more distant brother to his younger sibling who was busy playing sports and working on cars.

That physical distance soon became emotional. The brothers saw each other infrequently during their adult years. The last time Abby Mendelson shared space with his brother was in 1996. He last communicated with him in 2009.

It wasn’t simply his family with which Mitchell Mendelson frayed and tore the bonds of relationship.

In 2012, while on a walk through a wooded area near his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Mitchell Mendelson died, possibly from a diabetic stroke. The body lay on the forest floor for nearly three months until a hunter found him. The body didn’t have a wallet — it was most likely stolen at some point during the time he was undiscovered in the woods. When the police were notified, they canvassed the surrounding area. No one remembered him, not even a landlady from whom he rented a room.

His remains sat unidentified for more than a decade as the trail seemingly grew colder and colder. The mystery of Mitchell Mendelson’s identity would have remained unsolved, according to his brother, but for the doggedness of Lancaster County Deputy Coroner Richard Graff.

“He wouldn’t let it go,” Abby Mendelson said. “He hates loose ends. Every time he got a new piece of information it was like, maybe I can get a next piece and a next piece. He didn’t let go.”

It turns out that the coroner wasn’t the only one interested in the case; National Geographic shadowed Graff as he has endeavored to solve the mystery and is producing a documentary about it.

Graff said that given the lack of reported missing persons in the area and the proximity of a train station, law enforcement thought that the remains might have been those of a transient from Harrisburg or New York that simply ended up in the woods.

The skull was even sent to the FBI, which created a drawing of what the person might have looked like. It was circulated by the police and even featured in local papers. No one responded.

“We were dealing with the theory that this individual was from outside the area,” Graff said.

That was before the coroner’s office had available funds and used them to send the remains to the DNA Doe Project.

DNA Doe Project
The project, founded in 2017, uses the emerging practice of investigative genetic genealogy which combines traditional genealogy and genetic genealogy to investigate leads in cases involving violent crime and unidentified human remains.

“It took them a while,” Graff said, “but eventually they came back with the name Mitchell Mendelson. They had done research, and the research showed that he had a brother in Pittsburgh.”

In July 2024, 12 years after Mitchell’s death, Graff reached out to Abby Mendelson, letting him know that an unidentified body was found and that DNA records indicated the two were related.

Abby Mendelson told Graff about the relationship he had over the last few decades with his brother and that, given the state of their relationship, he never filed a missing person’s report because he wasn’t aware that his brother was missing.

A man for all seasons
Mitchell Mendelson was born on Simchat Torah. The brothers became fast friends.

“We were pals. We played endlessly together,” Abby Mendelson remembered. “We made up games, we made up characters, we had a great time. He was a funny, clever, inventive, talented kid.”

Soon, Mitchell Mendelson was following in some of the interests of their father.

“My father had a dark room,” Abby Mendelson recalled, “My brother did it, too. He just picked it up.”

And, like their father, Mitchell Mendelson was mechanical, worked on cars and took pride in the fact that he could tune his own car.

While in high school, he played hockey and took freelance photos for the local newspaper.

Perhaps the first signs of trouble appeared when Mitchell Mendelson quit college and found a job working at a shoe factory stitching shoes.
Soon after, he found a job in radio playing records and giving commentary.

Mitchell Mendelson eventually ended up in Birmingham, Alabama, writing a well-read column, “The Alabama Experience,” by Vine Boy.

“He invented this whole persona,” Abby Mendelson said. “He became a Southern gentleman, the Vine Boy, who talked about Southern life. You would have thought he was a sixth-generation Alabamian, but he was a Jewish kid from Long Island.”

Mitchell Mendelson moved his father to live near him and then left when he quit his job at the newspaper. Abby Mendelson then moved his father to Pittsburgh to care for him in his twilight years.

Mitchell Mendelson’s last employment was for a bus company in Lancaster, which he quit shortly before dying.

Abby Mendelson said that over the years his brother would often find fault over trivial things. Like the falcon in the Yeats poem, each time his brother would fly away, the ellipse of absenteeism was longer until eventually the brothers became estranged.

Dueling DNA tests
Abby Mendelson said that Graff contacted him in July of this year and asked if he’d be willing to take a DNA test. He was.
The first was inconclusive. The popular genetic site Ancestry DNA showed the two had a 100% familial relationship. A mitochondrial DNA comparison showed that 99.98% of the population could be excluded from being a match.

Graff wasn’t only depending on DNA though. He had a sketch done from skeletal remains that he showed to Abby Mendelson who said, if asked, he would have sworn it was of the pair’s uncle.

The police and coroner’s office felt they had enough information, but science’s wheels grind almost as slowly as the government’s. It took nearly five months for Mitchell Mendelson’s body to be released. During that time Abby Mendelson was able to contact an adopted daughter from Mitchell Mendelson’s first marriage. She gave the OK for Abby Mendelson to handle the funeral arrangements, as she also had been estranged from her father, as were both his first and second wives during his life.

Eventually, Abby Mendelson contacted Rabbi Elisar Admon of Pittsburgh, who collected the remains and assisted with the Jewish ritual questions.
“Usually, you dress a person in a shroud; here you can’t,” Admon said. “So, you lay the shroud in the coffin and put the remains on top. Usually, you wash the body with a certain amount of water, like a mikvah; you can’t do that here.”

But the idea of upholding a person’s dignity, even in death, continues to apply, he said, going so far as to use the same type and size casket as normally utilized.

“We make sure everyone has the same respect,” he said.

Healing
Rabbi Daniel Yolkut called the circumstances of the death “tragic,” but said Jewish tradition didn’t preclude or alter a typical Jewish burial. The words he spoke graveside, he said, were for the living.

“I think about what would be the most healing and uplifting for the family,” he said. “I tried to find the message that’s the most meaningful for something that could very easily be an unmooring kind of experience.”

Abby Mendelson has been thinking a lot about healing. In retrospect, the time it took for the process to unfold itself might have been a godsend. The elder brother has spent the last several months forgiving his younger brother for the breach in their relationship and for the time lost.

“I remember the happy funny, clever kid and the great guy that he was,” Abby Mendelson said. “I have nothing but love for him in my heart.” PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.