Jesse James outlaw mystery revived

The mystery of the missing outlaw from the Jesse James raid on Northfield might be a step closer to being solved.

Historians have long wondered what happened to the body of Clell Miller, one of two raiders shot to death in the street in the first few minutes of the great raid on the First National Bank on Sept. 7, 1876.

"There is a fascination with those outlaw characters from yesteryear," said Scott Richardson, president of the Northfield Historical Society.

In its most recent newsletter, the Historical Society says a former Mankato State professor has used a new technique called craniofacial superimposition to determine that a skeleton owned by a private collector could be that of Miller.

"This is not a definitive finding, but it certainly brings us a step closer to finding the skeletons of these two outlaws," Hayes Scriven, executive director of the Historical Society, says in the spring newsletter announcing the findings.

Richardson said last week that his hunch is that there is probably a 70-30 chance the skeleton is that of Miller.

"It's remarkable the reference points in that skull and that of Miller," he said.

Miller was shot to death by Henry Wheeler, who was home for the summer from the University of Michigan medical school. For more than a century, however, no one has known for certain what happened to his body or if a body buried in a Miller family plot in Missouri is in fact that of the outlaw.

James Bailey, formerly of Mankato and now a forensic scientist at the University of North Carolina, examined a skeleton found in Grand Forks two years ago that reportedly was in Wheeler's possession.

Wheeler reportedly obtained the body, and that of the second outlaw killed, after they were buried and took them with him to Michigan to use for training purposes.

But the Miller family asked for the return of the body for burial in Missouri, and a body was shipped back. "They did ship someone down there, and someone is buried in the plot," Richardson said.

He believes the body buried in Missouri is likely that of Bill Chadwell, the other outlaw killed during the raid.

"If it is Miller in North Dakota, we have to make sure he is properly buried," Scriven said. "Even though he was a bad guy, he still needs to be treated with respect after death."

Lore has it that Wheeler kept the Miller body and later its skeleton until he donated it to the Odd Fellows in North Dakota, where he was practicing medicine when he retired.

Bailey performed CT scans on the cranium and then, using a series of reference points, superimposed the scans on a postmortem picture of Miller.

Bailey presented his findings at the spring meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Bailey said the matches were "remarkable" and that the remains he examined could be that of Miller.

"It would be nice to know," Richardson said. "It would give us a fuller picture. We would get more opportunities to fill in the blanks."

Bailey is working with the Miller family on exhuming the skeleton buried in Missouri to test whether it is in fact Miller.

Richardson said it is likely that the body will be exhumed, possibly by October.

"I think the family is in favor of it, and there is a historical curiosity about it," Richardson said. "And there is some precedent for this. They did it with Jesse James."

Back in 1995 the remains of the famous outlaw were exhumed in Kearney, Mo., to verify their identity. The body, experts found, did belong to James.

Bailey has a track record with the Historical Society.

In 2009 he used DNA analysis to prove that a skeleton owned by the group was not the body of Charlie Pitts, another James-Younger gang member, who was killed near Hanska, Minn., two weeks after the robbery while fleeing.

"We still have it," Richardson said. "We just don't know who it is."

Heron Marquez Estrada • 952-746-3281