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Covington residents were rattled two years ago when a routine archaeological excavation uncovered the remains of 16 people, likely slaves, buried in an old barn. Nearly 70 years later, the body of a teenage girl had been buried in amongst the bones. The girl, who the coroner determined had died violently, has yet to be identified.
The mystery, or mysteries, developed even greater complexity after the Genealogy Committee of the Kentucky Society for Black History received the results of DNA testing on the older remains from the barn. The committee partnered with researchers at the University of Georgia’s DNA Diaspora Center to have five of the skeletons tested in order to identify possible descendants.
“It was important to the community to try and find out if there were any descendants – anyone to speak for them, people who might have questions about their history and their people,” explained Nora King, head of the Genealogy Committee. “Slavery destroyed and scattered families – this kind of work is intended to help people rebuild connections to the past. But sometimes you turn up unexpected things.”
According to the Diaspora Center’s head researcher, Dr. Marcus Holland, it’s not uncommon to find connections to white families. The way this program works, participants have a choice about what kinds of information they learn. Sometimes they just want to know how far back their lineage goes, or where their ancestors lived. Sometimes they do want all the details but, according to Dr. Holland, “it can be a lot for some folks to take in.”
In this case, the facts were even more surprising. When the DNA sequences for the five individuals were submitted to the Ancestry.com database for comparison, one of the individuals triggered an alert at the Kentucky State police: a match with the teenage girl who’d died in the early 1920s and been buried in the same barn.
“At first we thought there must have been some contamination, or mix up between the remains, but once we looked into it, it was clear that was not the case,” explained Sergeant Allan Whett, who maintains a database of the state’s cold cases. The samples were taken from the back teeth and submitted independently – the tests weren’t even run by the same lab. “We’d submitted alerts for DNA matches in the hopes that we would be able to identify the victim by linking her to family. This wasn’t quite what we expected.” It wasn’t a perfect match, but close enough to confirm a relationship. “The man in the grave could have been her great grandfather, maybe, great uncle, something like that. It’s not the story we were expecting to uncover.”
Whett wouldn’t comment on the speculation that the girl was a member of the Hagan family. Some local historians, including Joanna Carteret of the Covington Historical Society, speculate that the girl could possibly be Margaret Ruth Hagan. Margaret was reported to have died of scarlet fever in 1907 at age 2. Though her death had been reported at the time, there was no stone set for her in the family cemetery. Her sister, Anna Grace, who died two years before at only six month is memorialized, as well as her brother Adam Wayne, who died of a fever in 1912 at age five. According to Carteret, “The Hagan family has a longstanding reputation in the area of being a bit strange, a bit shady.”
Her new book, Ohio River Outlaws, describes an account taken from the memoir of a Cincinnati rum runner who actually visited the Hagan Farm several times in the mid 1920s. John Albert Hagan, the patriarch at the time, let the smugglers use his property’s rickety wharf and was involved in local product distribution. He had one injunction for the Cincinnati crew: keep clear of the barn, and to pay no mind to whatever they heard. Boyce Granville, the memoir’s author, had no problem dealing with Hagan, though he described him as both a mean brute and a miser when it came to business affairs. He noted Hagan sheltering other criminals, including the county’s notorious Everett Lee for a time when the man was allegedly on parole. It was the barn that ended the partnership. One of Granville’s men swore he heard a girl crying and singing – Hagan beat the man nearly half to death, resulting in a shootout in which two more of the crew were injured. Granville claims he shot Hagan too, ‘but the devil don’t die easy.’
Carteret, who was deep in the writing of Ohio River Outlaws at the time that the Hagan barn bodies were discovered, said that Granville’s memoir was the first thing she thought of when she heard about the finds. “The timing works out – I think it’s absolutely possible, but without further DNA testing, this is as close as anyone can come to solving the mystery.”
The further testing that Carteret, and others who have become invested in this unsolved cold case, are suggesting is to compare the girl’s, and the other body’s, to DNA samples taken from exhumed remains of the Hagan family. It’s a catch-22: with no living members of the family, there is no one to authorize the exhumation. William John Hagan, the last known descendant to carry the family name, died in 1993. William was the youngest of the Hagan children, born in 1921. Martin Sellers, whose documentation claiming to be a long-lost nephew of the deceased has since been called into legal question, succumbed to injuries inflicted by a fellow inmate in 1999.
What of other possible descendants? According to Dr. Holland, there have been no other matches to the DNA submitted to the project. “Even if someone turned up, they’d have to spend a lot of money to make a case to allow the testing, let alone the cost of the testing itself. And for what? What good can come of knowing you shared blood with people like that? There’s no justice to be had for that poor girl, not nearly a century on, let alone the others.” Even without DNA, the ties are undeniable: the property had been in the Hagan family since 1758. However the bodies came to be in the barn, the Hagans were most certainly involved, if not directly responsible. Blood may or may not out, but as Nora King pointed out when asked about the issue, “anyone can spit on a grave for free.”