[url]http://kyw.com/news/local_story_161085845.html[/url]
KINGSTON TWP., Pa. (AP) State police continued searching for remains at a home where authorities uncovered parts of a third, fourth and fifth body buried in a backyard.
The human remains were unearthed from the same yard where the bodies of a missing pharmacist and his girlfriend were discovered last week, officials said.
"I have ... pieces of three other people," Luzerne County Coroner George Hudock Jr. told The Associated Press on Monday. He was working with forensic experts brought in from New York and Florida to identify the additional bone fragments.
State police continued to search for remains at a dig site outside the Kingston Township home of Hugo M. Selenski.
The additional bone fragments were discovered while authorities unearthed the bodies of pharmacist Michael Jason Kerkowski Jr., 37, and Tammy Fassett, 37. Hudock said both had been strangled and he classified their deaths as homicides.
Kerkowski and Fassett had been missing since May 2002, when Kerkowski failed to show up for sentencing on charges he illegally sold prescription pills.
Luzerne County District Attorney David Lupas divulged few details of the investigation Monday, other than to say that "investigators have made significant strides to this point and significant progress."
Selenski was arrested by state police on Thursday -- the same day police found the bodies of Kerkowski and Fassett -- for allegedly threatening and robbing Kerkowski's father.
Investigators said Kerkowski sold almost 334,000 OxyContin, Vicodin and Lorcet pills without prescriptions and filed $60,000 in false insurance claims. He pleaded guilty to two counts of distributing a controlled substance and two counts of insurance fraud and no contest to recklessly endangering another person and filing a false Medicare claim.
Shortly before his scheduled sentencing hearing, his relatives and Fassett's family filed missing-persons reports.
Investigators say Selenski, 29, forced the missing pharmacist's father to hand over $40,000 at gunpoint while he was at the father's house. Kerkowski had given the money to his father shortly before he disappeared, police said.
Working with Hudock are Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally known pathologist and chief medical examiner for the New York State Police; and Anthony Falsetti, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida who helped identify remains after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800 crash.
Kingston Township, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, is about 110 miles north of Philadelphia.