Authorities in Mills County are waiting for results from the state crime lab to see if human remains found a few miles south of Council Bluffs point to a murder. Sheriff Mack Taylor says it’s hard to tell how long the remains had been there.
They got a call from a tenant farmer who’d been told to go clear off that part of the property, because apparently nobody had been out there working it for several months. Agents from the Division of Criminal Investigation came to examine the remains, and the site where they were found about five miles north of Glenwood. He notes that that part of rural Mills County is just a few miles from Council Bluffs, “a half-million population metro area.”
The body was sent to the DCI crime-lab in Ankeny, which hasn’t yet sent him results of the testing. The remains were just bones, and so far he’s not even commenting on whether the remains were male or female. The site in the northwest corner of Mills County is also about a mile from Interstate 29, and the sheriff says it’s not clear if the place where the remains were found is also a crime scene.
The site is less than ten miles from the intersection of Interstate-28 and I-80, and the sheriff says while anybody coming from the freeway would have to cross a couple of fencerows and a drainage ditch, they’d only have had to hike a mile or so from I-29. While the identification hasn’t been made yet, Taylor says once the lab gets him a description of the victim, if he can’t identify the person that data may be distributed nationwide.
Back in June, the body of 25-year-old Brianne Smith of Omaha was found in a roadside ditch in rural Glenwood by a family’s dog. Taylor says her death remains under investigation and no arrests have been made