New Clues May Help Plymouth Township Police Solve 'Mystery Bones' Case

Plymouth Township’s only unsolved murder continues to baffle investigators after the discovery eight years ago of what police call “mystery bones” that remain unidentified.

Detective Charlie Rozum told the Detroit Free Press that township police are “at a standstill” in the investigation, but are hopeful that “somebody will discover something.”

Until receiving new clues from a Crime Stoppers notice sent out in August, police didn’t have a place to start the investigation because nobody seemed to know anything about the victim, who died of blunt force trauma to the head, according to medical examiners. A portion of his skull had been bashed in.

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The bones, discovered on May 10, 1997, by a man surveying a wooded portion of Plymouth Township, were wrapped in a rolled up carpet. The skeleton of a male an autopsy showed died of blunt force trauma was dressed in a blue and white striped shirt, blue shorts and knee-high socks that read “USA 80,” memorabilia from the 1980 Olympics.

Police think he was about 5 feet, 6 inches to 5 feet, 9 inches tall, and between the ages of 35 and 50 years of age. He had a nonstandard surgical pin in his upper right arm, leading to speculation that he may have been treated for an injury in a military field hospital, suffered from Osgood-Schlatter disease and appears to have worn dentures.

Police think he had been dead for five or 10 years when the skeletal remains were discovered.

The Crime Stoppers notice asking for information about the man’s identity yielded several clues about a homicide that occurred in West Bloomfield Township in 1991. Two people were convicted, but the body of the victim — General Motors autoworker Gustav Prilepok, 56, who worked about a mile from where the bones were discovered — was never found.

Prilepok was killed by family members, who told police conflicting stories about what they had done with the body.

His stepson, Jan Borek, was convicted of second-degree murder, and Prilepok’s wife, Janea Prilepok, 47, was convicted of an accessory charge. They served prison terms and were deported, possibly back to their native Czechoslovakia. No other relatives remain in the country, West Bloomfield Chief Deputy Curt Lawson told the Free Press.

When police examined the Prilepok home, a section of carpet was missing.

Inconsistencies naginvestigators — the dentures. West Bloomfield police interviewed the victim’s dentist, who said Prilepok had his own teeth. The pants found on the skeleton were also much smaller — 30 inches at the waist — compared with the 38-inch waist on pants thought to belong to Prilepok.

Still, police are trying to match DNA taken from the bone of the skeleton to blood samples from the Prilepok crime scene, a process that could take up to two months.

“We’re kind of hoping that it matches,” Rozum said.