Sister of missing NJ man identified after 37 years has one mystery left to solve

In her heart, Judith Rapping knew that her brother was dead — had been for decades — and was most likely killed along with his girlfriend in the mid-1980s.

But finally getting confirmation — by way of a sophisticated DNA sequencing and a skull found near a boat ramp — was a shock any sister would struggle to process.

“It’s still emotional,” Rapping said Monday, her voice cracking. “I think we all knew. He was not off in the Bahamas living it up.”

Bucks County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Matt Weintraub announced Monday that forensic genome testing and genealogy had identified the skull found on the banks of the Delaware River nearly four decades ago as Richard Thomas Alt, who disappeared in 1985.

For Rapping, the undeniable certainty, confirmed through 21st-century science, provided some relief. But it has done little to ease the pain of his loss.

On the day that Bucks County authorities announced they identified Alt, Rapping, who lives in New Mexico, shared details of her decades-long search for answers.

The long journey would reveal a family secret that almost derailed efforts to identify her younger brother’s remains, while sparking a whole new mystery involving his short and complicated life.

A mysterious disappearance, a decades long search

Rapping was 10, when a 3-day-old boy arrived at her family’s home in Windsor, New Jersey. Her parents named the newborn Richard, but everyone called him “Tommy.”

Her younger brother was blonde-haired, blue-eyed with dimpled cheeks. He was a child of the 1960’s, Rapping said. His wild streak got him into a bit of trouble in high school, but nothing out of the ordinary for the time, she said.

As an adult, Alt found himself getting into more serious trouble, mostly with drugs, she said. He married young. A daughter was born in 1973. Eventually, he and his wife separated, but never divorced.

The last time Alt’s parents saw him was on Christmas Eve 1984. He was 31 and struggling with drug dependency. He was living with a friend in Trenton and it was not unusual for him to be out of touch with family for months at a time, Rapping said.

But red flags went up in April 1985 after two fishermen spotted the body of Alt’s girlfriend, Laurie Suydam, floating in the Delaware River near the Mercer County, New Jersey public boat launch.

Suydam’s family and friends hadn’t seen her since February, and police said it appeared she had been in the water for an extended period of time. She was wearing a ring that Alt gave her.

At the time Rapping was living in Massachusetts. Her mother called to break the news and tell her they had not heard from Alt in months. The family provided information to the Trenton Police and filed a missing person’s report.

But with no leads, the police investigation quickly stalled, Rapping said.

Over years, then decades, Rapping said that she continued to keep in touch with police. At least two cold case files for her brother were opened, but no progress was made, she said.

In 2002, police reopened the autopsy on Suydam, which initially ruled her death as undetermined. After the second review, it was listed as a homicide, Rapping said.

Trenton detectives hinted that members of the outlaw motorcycle gang, “The Breed, '' might be involved in both deaths, Rapping said. She learned that Suydam and Alt had been arrested on drug charges shortly before they disappeared.

By then, though, everyone in the family had long let go of any hope that Alt was still alive.

“I had known all along he was probably murdered along with Laurie,” she said. “Nothing was showing up on him and the evidence to me was that he was probably dead.”

What no one knew is that the key to what happened to Alt was found on the other side of the Delaware River in Bucks County.

DNA results reveal a match, and a family secret

A fisherman found a human skull on the river banks near the Morrisville Boat Ramp in June 1986, 14 months after Tommy was reported missing.

The man took the skull to his local police department in Buckingham.

What happened after is unclear, but in 2019 Bucks County Detectives reexamined the skull as part of a homicide investigation, then turned it over to the county coroner’s office.

Later that same year, the coroner entered the information about the skull into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database better known as NamUs.

The Morrisville skull remained in the coroner’s custody until last September when Bucks County Detectives sent it to Othram, a private forensic genealogy lab in Texas. The company offered to perform sophisticated genome sequencing and forensic genealogy services on the skull for free.

The lab's technicians discovered a potential match in GEDMatch, a public database where people can upload DNA results and research family lines. The profile was used to identified the skull as likely belonging to Richard Thomas Alt.

In early January, Bucks County Detectives contacted the person who contributed the DNA. It was Rapping’s niece. Alt's daughter, now 49-year-old and living in Florida.

The woman told detectives she was 11 when her father disappeared, and his girlfriend was found dead on the Trenton N.J. side of the Delaware River. She agreed to share her DNA results with Othram scientists.

Four days later, a direct parent/child match with Richard Thomas Alt was confirmed.

The DNA results that confirmed the identity of the skull also revealed a well-hidden family secret, Rapping said.

When Alt was born, Rapping said her parents were told that Tommy’s father was a blood relative, the reason they took him in, so he wouldn’t be raised by strangers. The adoption was handled privately, Rapping said.

But when police took DNA samples from other family members who were believed to be her brother's biological siblings, none matched with the Alt side of the family, Rapping said. The same thing happened when she compared her DNA results with her niece.

“Since (her niece) was the only possible match to Tommy, once she started looking at her DNA, we realized she had no matches to any of the paternal Alt DNA,” Rapping said.

Which is how they learned her brother's biological father was not someone in the Alt family.

Her niece is now working with Bucks County officials to make arrangements to bring her father’s remains to Florida, Rapping said. The family has space at a vault where he will be interred.

Her brother’s case remains an open criminal investigation, according to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.

For now, though, Rapping and her niece, who are amateur genealogists, are working on solving the other lingering family mystery: Who was Alt’s biological father?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DNA IDs man whose skull found in Delaware. Mystery remains