GREENFIELD – Authorities have scheduled for Thursday morning a press conference to announce a major breakthrough in the effort to identify human remains found in Warwick in 1989.

Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan, First Assistant District Attorney Steven E. Gagne and representatives of the State Police Detective Unit attached to the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office will be on hand for the case update at the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office at 10 a.m.

Female remains, with limbs separated from the torso, were discovered by a motorist yards away from the New England Trail on June 24, 1989. The body was estimated to have been in that spot – just off Route 78 about 1½ miles north of a parking lot for Mount Grace State Forest – for between two weeks and three months. Authorities sent the victim’s DNA to Othram, a Texas corporation that specializes in using forensic genetic genealogy to resolve unsolved murders, disappearances, and identification of unidentified decedents or homicide victims.

Gagne previously told the Greenfield Recorder that the decision was made to reach out to Othram due to the company’s success in identifying the so-called “Granby Girl” as Patricia Ann Tucker, a 28-year-old woman found shot to death in 1978, but who went unidentified until just more than a year ago. Gerald Coleman, Tucker’s husband when she died, has been identified as a person of interest in the murder. He died in state prison in 1996, and prosecutors say he never reported his wife as missing.

“You know, this was likely somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter. So there may be somebody out there wondering whatever happened to their loved one, like we had in Granby,” Gagne said of the Warwick case, adding that it is “very possible the person who did this may still be out there, and to the extent they may either pose an ongoing threat to public safety or just to hold them accountable for what they did back in 1989. Either way, we’ve got to give it the old college try and do what we can do.”