Miranda Eve

What would you do if you found a corpse interred in your backyard? This was the situation that John and Ericka Kramer found themselves in.  They decided to give the corpse a name, Miranda Eve, and then they turned it over for investigation.  What followed was an investigation that took “more than a thousand hours of research,” which finally revealed not only the name, but also a living relative of the girl in the glass casket.

Interestingly enough, the Kramers’ house was built on the site of a former cemetery owned and operated by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.  This cemetery accepted burials from “1865 until about 1902.” While the other corpses from the cemetery were exhumed and transferred to Greenlawn Cemetary in the early 1930s, Miranda’s body was mysteriously forgotten.  Given the knowledge of which cemetery she was buried at gave researchers a head start on uncovering her identity. In fact, they found a development plan for the cemetery at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. They then digitally overlayed the plan for the Kramer’s neighborhood and then identified which family plots Miranda was likely buried in. Researchers even studied the DNA preserved in her hair to identify her sex and search for possible genetic descendants who would give a clue as to which family Miranda belonged to. Finally, after thousands of hours of poring through genealogy charts and the like, researchers found the family to which Miranda belonged to and even discovered a living relative.

Miranda Eve’s name is actually Edith H. Cook. She was the second child of her family, and, according to her DNA, had died of undernourishment. Funeral home records called the cause of her death “marasmus.”  Based on these two pieces of information, it can be assumed that Edith Cook died in 1876 due to malnourishment and wasting as a result of a chronic illness. She was buried in the Garden of Innocence, a foundation dedicated to burying abandoned children, on June 4, 2016.  Of course, now that her identity is known, she will be honored with a true memorial service on June 10, 2017. What was the response of 82-year-old Peter Cook, Edith’s only living relative,  to hearing about her?- “I was jumping for joy because it gave me more opportunity to find out about my family,” he said.