AN ANTHROPOLOGY expert is being used to determine whether the remains of a man found in a field near Worsbrough came to harm before he died.
The bones, including an incomplete skulls, were found by children at the tiny hamlet of Swaithe, on Sunday.
Police are now raking through missing persons files dating back up to 20 years, which is how long they belive the bones could have been there.
One of those missing men being considered is Edmund Neil Spencer, who was 38, when he went missing in January 2002.
At that time police set up an incident room to try and track him down, amid concerns for his safety after he was named as an accomplice by notorious killer Daniel Thompson, who murdered local man Shane Collier and cut his body into eight pieces before taking it to Dent in Cumbria where he buried it in two graves.
Officers spent months trying to find Mr Collier’s body after his death in October 2001, only making the grisly discovery in March 2002 after an appeal led to a local man contacting officers as he remembered Thompson coming to his house and asking to use the telephone.
In the midst of the search for his body Mr Spencer went missing.
Thompson went on to blame the man he called ‘his best friend Spenner’ for the murder during his trial, claiming he had only buried the body after being threatened.
But the jury convicted him after hearing Mr Spencer had gone missing weeks after receiving a menacing letter from Thompson in which he asked for cash from his friend to pay off a debt he owed.
Six months after father-of-three Mr Spencer went missing his mother, Jean Thewliss, said she believed her son was dead.
At the time she said: “Deep down I don’t think he’s still here, I think he’s dead, but I have to keep hoping. It’s the not knowing that is the worst thing for me.”
A post mortem on the remains was carried out yesterday.
