An unmarked package arrives at a UPS distribution center; When the employees open it, they discover a severed human hand- Who was the Dauphin County Jane Doe, who sent her arm, and who was supposed to recieve it? (2025)
Hello everyone! As always, thank you for all your votes and comments under my last post about Nihar Mehta- I hope that he will be found soon.
Today I have a really bizzare case I wanted to cover, with a lot of questions and very few answers.
DISCOVERY
On the 17th of August, an unmarked package arrived at a UPS Center in Middletown, Pennsylvania, USA. The package was pulled aside with other boxes whose labels were damaged, missing, or otherwise unable to be processed, so that the workers could later open them and determine who sent them and where, according to company procedure. When the employees opened one of the unlabeled packages, they found out that it contained a shocking cargo: a severed human hand, wrapped in bubble wrap.
The gruesome discovery was reported to the authorities, and the hand was taken for an autopsy.
The limb had likely belonged to an adult woman, but nothing else about its owner was managed to be established- not her race, exact age, approximate height and weight, or any other details regarding her looks or demographics.
The hand was removed from the body using precise surgical cuts, and it had been embalmed at some point before it was shipped. It was noted that it was dehydrated and that it visibly shrunk because of it. The coroner's office tried to rehydrate the hand to take a set of fingerprints off of it, but it seems like the attempt was unseccessful.
It's unclear who send the hand and what was its destination- either the box was put into a drop box without a label, or it's possible that the label fell off at some point during processing.
CONCLUSION
The case is not currently considered a crime, as selling and buying human body parts is legal in Pennsylvania and in majority of other US states. There's a chance that the hand was legally owned and sold, and that it was a part of a medical or reaserch transfer- though it being bought by a private oddities collector is just as possible. The sale of human remains in Pennsylvania isn't regulated or tracked- just like in the majority of other US states. If further investigation into the unidentified hand will indicate that it was stolen or obtained through a crime, police will take over the case from the coroner.
If you have any info regarding this case, either who the hand might've belonged to, who sent it, or who was supposed to recieve it, contact the Dauphin County Coroners Office at (717) 564-4567 (case number J-2025-08-0656).
SOURCES:
Jane Doe's websleuths.com thread
Posted Sep 5, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC