Skeleton found in Burlingame man's closet still a mystery

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 28, 2004 | by Christine Morente, STAFF WRITER

BURLINGAME -- San Mateo County coroner's deputies aren't much closer to solving a Burlingame mystery that involves a locked suitcase filled with a woman's skeleton.

Burlingame police found a handwritten note in 82-year-old's Douglas McLennan Fitzgerald's apartment, where the bones, possibly belonging to his deceased wife, were stored.

He died of lung cancer April 28 and was found dead in his apartment by a neighbor. Relatives cleaning the apartment found the suitcase in a closet.

Based on information in the note, police have gleaned information about Anne Rangely Fitzgerald. They say she was born in Boston, Mass., on July 15, 1913, and was educated in England. She married Richard Douglas Zavitz, who died on April 12, 1968. She also worked at Drenison, a manufacturing company in Las Vegas that closed down.

She married Douglas Fitzgerald on June 13, 1975, in Reno, and both lived at Burlingame's Villa Tuscany apartment complex at 789 El Camino Real for 20 years, Coroner Robert Foucrault said. Before that, she had lived in San Mateo, San Francisco, Southern California and Las Vegas.

Relatives and neighbors said that they knew she died 10 years ago.

But no one has been able to find her birth or death certificates and dental records. Some medical records have been found, but none that can confirm her identity or next of kin, Foucrault said.

"Everything (Burlingame police) have done has come up negative," Foucrault said. "They've researched pretty much everything."

The Coroner's Office released photographs of Anne Fitzgerald on Tuesday in the hope someone might recognize her and supply more information.

Douglas Fitzgerald was born July 19, 1924, in Oakland and was reportedly in the military as a clerk-typist. He was honorably discharged, Foucrault said.

He worked at the Laurel Woods Sanitarium, which closed in 1972.

At the time of his death, he had been collecting $556 a month in Social Security.

Friends at Behan's Irish Pub on Broadway in Burlingame said that although he was a private person, he would sometimes talk about three sons who live on the East Coast. He would talk about his time in the military as a code-breaker during World War II, and that he went to UC Berkeley and majored in English literature. But he also told them that he was born and raised in Millbrae.

He stopped going to the pub a year and a half ago.

At Behans, he never sat down, his friends said.

"He would say, 'I never sit down, because I'm always looking over my shoulder,'" a man at Behan's said. "He was controversial, but he was solid and he had a past. He was very tender about his wife."

A bartender who knew him for 13 years said she often drove him home.

"He was a very jealous and an angry man, but I was fond of him," she said. "He drank so much that he spent a lot more than he made every day. He would close the bar."

Clues from the skeleton

The skeleton belonged to a woman estimated to be 70 to 75 years old and about 5 feet 3 inches tall. Signs of trauma, which had been healing at the time of death, were found on the left side of her ribs.

Foucrault hopes that the skeleton will be identified through dental work. In the meantime, he plans to send a bone fragment to the state Department of Justice. They will extract DNA and send it to the missing-persons unit. It could take three months to a year to get the material processed.

Anyone who has information on Anne Fitzgerald, aka Anne Zavitz or Anne Morris, is asked to call the Coroner's Office at (650) 312-5562 or Burlingame police at (650) 777-4100.

Staff writer Lou Sian also contributed to this report.

Staff writer Christine Morente can be reached at cmorente@sanmateocountytimes.com .