He is Found!

A brother. A son. Grave “f,” Lot #1, Block #21 at Forest Home Cemetery marked for decades only with a black cross, flanked by a pink rose on each side, tended by local medical examiner Crystal Schaub’s desire to find an answer, and closure for a family. That closure would come over 40 years later aided by new technology, Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG).

This March 20, 1980 clipping from the Rhinelander Daily News chronicles the discovery of the body of an unidentified male found deceased in the Town of Pine Lake. The body was identified in 2023 as Norman Grasser. (File photo)

Around Christmastime in 1979, Allen Grasser was planning his wedding and, in fact, had asked his brother Norm to be his best man. There was no way he could have known that less than a month later, his brother would go missing, leading to a decades-long search for answers. Nor could he ever imagine how all of the stars would align after all of that time, to bring closure to his family, and many of the answers to the questions that haunted their minds.

As reported in the Rhinelander Daily News, a body was interred at Forest Home Cemetery, labeled only as John Doe 1980. The body was found in wooded area near Rhinelander, but little else was known about the individual. Grasser later found out his brother was seen by one local resident, when he knocked on that person’s door around 4 a.m. the night he went missing that January. The resident, he said, was understandably shaken and distrustful of this person who had showed up at their door asking for a ride to town at this time of the early morning. Unfortunately, Norm Grasser’s demeanor and reported disorientation was likely due to the effects of hypothermia setting in after being outdoors that cold, winter night.

Grasser’s brother was found later in a wooded area with a contusion on the back of his head. The medical examiner said he likely slipped on the ice, hitting his head while falling backward. This would have been enough for him to succumb to hypothermia, which brought about his untimely demise.

Grasser said his brother was into genealogy and took to researching their family tree. After Norm went missing, eventually Grasser took that hobby up himself, taking a DNA test on Ancestry.com. That database, he said, is secured and private, but he was learning about his ethnicity. At one point a fellow genealogist told him about FamilyTreeDNA.com, another database, but one where results were available to certain entities. Grasser said he was not impressed as much with that platform, as he was not finding the number of matches he had with Ancestry.com, and soon forgot all about FamilyTreeDNA.

However, the fact that Grasser ultimately used FamilyTreeDNA’s website turned out to be the key to the whole mystery.

“Finding my brother could be similar to the analogy of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, where in this case the ‘breadcrumb trail’ was actually a trail of clues that followed back to me,” he said. Not only did Grasser upload his DNA profile to a database that was searchable, he also memorialized several family members in another database, Find-A-Grave.

Ramapo College in New Jersey began an IGG Department officially in 2015. In April of 2021, Grasser’s brother’s body was exhumed for DNA collection The femur and jar bones were sent for analysis and the body and coffin were reinterred into a concrete vault. This was the beginning of finding the answers the Grasser family had been looking to find for decades. Because Grasser had decided to upload his DNA information into the searchable database, and also had chosen to memorialize several family members, including his brother, on the Find-A-Grave website, Traci Onders, of Ramapo’s IGG department was able to provide the initial link between Grasser and Oneida County John Doe 1980.

“It all started with the phone call,” Grasser said. “It seemed to come out of the blue one day after Memorial Day in 2023. It was a Tuesday morning when detective sergeant Brian Barbour of Oneida County Sheriff’s Department called.” Grasser missed the call, but returned it when he got back home. It was then that Barbour asked him if he knew a Norman Grasser. Grasser said he could not speak for at least 10 seconds before responding, to find that the detective felt Norman Grasser’s body had been found, and that it had been in an unmarked grave in Rhinelander for decades.

The Memorial

In March of 2024, Grasser made the trip from DesPlaines, Ill. Back to Rhinelander to pick up his brothers remains after having him cremated. On Norm Grasser’s birthday, March 20, 2024, he was finally re-interred with their mother at All Saints Catholic Cemetery in DesPlaines. Although this finally brought closure, the story did not stop there. 

“The idea came to me in a dream, and I knew I had to do it,” Grasser said. “All of those years ago, I invoked St. Anthony to pray for us, that my brother was missing and not forgotten.” With his brother’s body finally in its rightful resting place, Grasser knew he had to somehow memorialize the story of how John Doe 1980 had been identified, as well as the story of his brother’s life. That set the wheels in motion to create a unique and stunning memorial, a attribute not only to Normal Grasser, but as a testament to those who had worked so hard to identify this John Doe.

“It was a long process,” Grasser recalled. “It took a couple of years working with Rhinelander Monuments. They almost gave up on me twice.” Grasser chuckled, thinking back to his vision of the memorial to his brother. He wanted the memorial stone, on the grave where Norm had spent years as a John Doe, to be in the shape of an hour glass. This proved problematic, however, as engraving could not be done in a curved surface. Sourcing the special blends of stone’s Grasser wanted was another hurdle in bringing his vision to reality, but that, too, seemed to work out just in the nick of time. Rhinelander Memorials sourced the stone from India, one of only two places from which it could be purchased. It arrived in the California just days before higher tariffs would have drastically increased the cost of the stone, sending the project costs soaring. 

Grasser said he was happy with the final iteration of the memorial stone that would be placed on his brother’s former grave at Forest Home Cemetery. The sides of the stone were curved in the recognizable hourglass shape, with the front and back of the stone flat, so it could be engraved. The bottom inscription on the front of the memorial is, “Time waits for no man.” The back of the hourglass has a replica of the simple black cross that adorned the John Doe grave as well as a pink rose on each side of the cross.

The memorial itself hints at the full story, with Grasser’s brother’s name and date of birth as well as information regarding his listing as a John Doe for 43 years. Those interested in learning more can capture a QR code on the memorial and be directed to a website created by Grasser’s son, Joseph. The website memorial.normangrasser.com includes a biography of Norman Grasser, the timeline of his disappearance, and all that went into ultimately identifying him. There is also a timeline of events from Forest Home Cemetery as well as information from the Ramapo IGG Conference, where Grasser spoke about his brother’s story in 2024. The website also highlights the time capsule Grasser placed in the now-empty gravesite where his brother was originally interred and is now memorialized. 

Grasser placed a time capsule in the concrete vault of his brother’s grave in Rhinelander. He included the last known photograph of his brother, taken at Christmas time a month before he would disappear. He also included a photograph of the original black cross, flanked by pink roses, which were placed and subsequently tended by the medical examiner, Grasser said. He also included a photograph of himself at his brother’s grave site in DesPlaines, the original death certificate of the John Doe, as well as the corrected death certificate after Normal Grasser was identified, and many other pieces of memorabilia that would help someone piece together the stories of Norman’s disappearance and eventual identification.

“If someone digs it up hundreds of years from now, they can see my brother’s story,” Grasser said.

Those interested in learning more about Norman an Allen Grasser’s story can go to the website at memorial.normangrasser.com.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].