The night before last, the series' newest documentary, "The Woman in the Iron Coffin" (S17, E3), aired. I thought it well done and interesting. However something about the case continues to not really make sense to me.

The documentary explains that the woman's body was discovered during construction site digging. At first it was thought the decedent was a recent death, and that she was a probable homicide victim. However, didn't anyone realize, until following investigation, that the body, in the iron coffin, was found in the location of a known 19th Century African American church cemetery? The present-day church for that still-active congregation is located a mile away from the original's site.

It seems, to me, that, first of all, the old cemetery location would never have been entirely forgotten, and, secondly, that the site in question would have been carefully surveyed and land records sought out and studied prior to any actual digging. Yet, apparently, the construction site clearing crew came in with heavy equipment and actively began the digging with seemingly no "serious" site research done beforehand.

Why the body, found in that particular location, was such a total surprise to authorities, is one aspect of the story that was never really explained in the documentary. Also, perhaps more significantly, how is it that just the one decedent's coffin and body, but (apparently) not anyone else's at least bones, was found?

Wouldn't there have been obvious bones found all throughout the same dig area, right from the get go? I realize that the young woman in the iron coffin was in an unusually high state of preservation due to the type casket she was buried in: That explains why her intact body was found. Yet also the bones of everyone else buried throughout that old cemetery should have been quickly noticed while digging using the heavy equipment, I would think. Yet they weren't? If they were, it certainly never was mentioned in the documentary.