TESSA is the name for the digital photograph collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, and among the many thousands of images are those of the Valley Times, a newspaper that was in print from 1946 to 1970.

One particularly chilling photograph of theirs shows Burbank detective Robert Coveney holding what appears to be some large pieces of rock – only there were suspicions that they were in fact the remains of a burned human heart, lung and bones.

The heart, which had threads of what appeared to be silk attached – perhaps from the clothes its owner had been wearing? – had been found by Lionel Meeker on October 13, 1948 when he was cleaning the incinerator at the rear of his new home, a small white cottage on North Catalina Avenue.

The grim and puzzling discovery was described as “plunging police into a full-scale investigation of a possible mystery murder,” and the items were rushed to the sheriff’s crime laboratory in Los Angeles for analysis.

What had happened? Had someone been killed and their remains burned in an attempt to hide the crime? Police established that a Robert Lincoln Scott had lived there from 1933-1938, but he was since deceased, and before Meeker, two young men had lived there together.

It wasn’t unknown for medical students to play pranks with amputated legs or hands they had purloined from their classes and studies, but this was different. When further “bones” were found in the ashes Meeker, 22, told police he had washed away into the street at the end of a nearby avenue, investigators became more concerned.  

Detective Coveney felt there was “no doubt” they were human, but then the laboratory results came through, and Lieutenant Fred V. Wolfe reported that preliminary analysis showed them to be inorganic matter, perhaps plaster of Paris or asphalt.

The story disappeared from newspapers immediately, and perhaps these “human remains” were just old props from a movie designer or make-up specialist, or were thrown into the flames by a frustrated artist.