On September 2, 1980, a week after Stella Elizabeth Williamson died in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, the authorities climbed to the attic of her big three-story frame house on Forest Street and opened a steel-banded trunk. Inside, wrapped in newspapers from New York, Pittsburgh and Johnstown dated between 1923 and 1933, were the bodies of five babies. They had been sent there by a letter a family friend, Guy Schrack, found among her things, addressed to be opened after her burial. "I want to make things right if anything should happen to me," it began. The babies, she wrote, were hers.
Williamson was born in 1904 and never married or left the house where she grew up. To her neighbors she was a kind, heavyset woman in a housedress who scrubbed the floors of the First United Methodist Church, served as its treasurer until her health failed, and made hoagies for the firemen's benefit. After diabetes took her leg she would sit in a rocking chair and tease the children going by, cuddling them and cooking them treats. She was known as a woman who had never dated, let alone had a child. She died on August 25 or 26, 1980, by differing accounts, aged seventy-six.
She had written the letter in 1960, during a health scare when she thought she was dying, and left it to be found twenty years later. In the portions the police released, she said she had borne the babies to a man whose name was withheld, over a period of thirty years or more, that she did not know how she had gotten away with it, and that she did not want anyone else blamed. It was one reason, she wrote, that she could never marry anyone else. "Please forgive me if you can," she ended. Another released line said the man had never wanted her, only something to play with, and that she had been a fool in his hands. Police said he was still alive and living in the area, but he was not implicated, and his mental condition and health left him unable to tell them anything.
Cambria County Coroner John Barron took the remains for examination. The anthropologist Wilton Krogman studied the skeletons at the H.K. Cooper Clinic in Lancaster, and a forensic autopsy was carried out in the Philadelphia area. Three of the deaths were ruled homicides by strangulation; the causes of the other two could not be determined, and decomposition made it impossible to establish the babies' ages or sexes. In one, a cloth had been balled up and forced into the mouth; another had a cloth twisted into a rope around its neck. Four were wrapped in newspaper, the fifth in a piece of old cloth. Because she was dead, no one was ever charged.
Barron arranged a funeral for the five, and they were buried in a pine box at the county cemetery on October 29, 1980. The case did not end there. In the fall of 2024, during an audit at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, staff found a box labeled as two mummified infant heads, donated by the late forensic pathologist Halbert Fillinger and received in 1999, and identified them as two of Williamson's babies; one still had a noose around its neck. On July 7, 2025, Coroner Jeff Lees had the marked grave at Laurel United Cemetery excavated to reunite the skulls with the other remains, but found only bricks and a drainage pipe and no sign of any burial. The two skulls, wrapped in baby blankets, were placed in a vault and buried in the marked plot. Where the rest of the remains went after 1980 is not known.