ST. LOUIS COUNTY â The man is buried in an unmarked grave shaded by two sweetgum trees, sandwiched between amber headstones.
He came to this spot in Bellefontaine Neighborsâ historic Friedens Cemetery nearly 30 years ago after fishermen pulled his naked body from the Mississippi River, near Rush Island in Jefferson County. No family came forward to claim the body. He had no tattoos, distinguishing marks or injuries hinting at his identity.
Officially, he is âJohn Doe,â the victim of unknown circumstances in a case that went cold decades ago.
But that may soon change, thanks to advances in DNA technology and renewed law enforcement efforts to solve old cases throughout the Greater St. Louis region. Crews last week exhumed his body and took DNA samples they will compare with others in a national database that did not exist at the time of his death.
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âWe will never stop trying to identify someone,â said Kathleen Hargrave, director of the Regional Medical Examinerâs Office for St. Charles, Jefferson and Franklin counties. âJust because this is a 30-year-old case, it is still an active case for us.â
Hargrave and a team of law enforcement officials from Jefferson, St. Charles and St. Louis counties have been working for years to try and identify the dozens of deceased individuals whose identities are unknown.
This John Doe is one of more than 115 people who have not been identified and are buried in Missouri cemeteries. ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” were men, women and even infants. Their ends were tragic, and their stories remain unknown.
Some of these cases, such as the female toddler found inside a suitcase in 1968 along the riverbank in West Alton in St. Charles County, date back decades.
Others are far more recent, including an infant who was found in July 2019 inside a freezer inside an abandoned St. Louis city residence. The boy, wrapped in a blanket, was wearing a diaper and a âWinnie the Poohâ onesie.
Missouri Representative Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, met with families of missing and unidentified people and then sponsored legislation mandating that the state pay for the DNA testing of unidentified remains. It will cover the costs of exhuming bodies and testing DNA in the state cold cases.
âThis is a familyâs worst nightmare â the not knowing,â Byrnes said.
Byrnesâ $1.5 million funding bill was included in the state budget passed in June after she went door to door in the state capitol sharing with fellow lawmakers the stories of the missing people from their respective districts.
She said the families of missing and unidentified individuals âdeserve justice and closure.â
State labs currently arenât equipped to do such work, said Sgt. Eric Brown, a spokesperson for the Missouri State Highway Patrol. So authorities will hire private labs that specialize in such cases.
âCurrently, no crime lab in Missouri can utilize the most advanced technology, known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy, for identifying unidentified remains,â Brown said. âThe Highway Patrol Crime Lab plans to use the funding to outsource samples for IGG, aiming to help identify these remains to advance unsolved crimes and provide closure to families in Missouri.â
In the Jefferson County case, the Sheriffâs Department paid the $1,700 cost of exhuming the body. The department is still searching for a lab to do the work, which is expected to cost about $2,300.
The work is daunting â reuniting hundreds of families with their long-dead loved ones â but Hargrave says they are committed to it.
âWe are not closing that chapter until we get a name and we can reunite them with their family,â Hargrave said. âDonât lose hope.â
John Doe
For weeks â and then years â after his body was pulled from the river, investigators tried everything they could to find John Doeâs next of kin.
They gave the news media detailed descriptions of the man and released sketches of his face. The Post-Dispatch published a news brief about the body being discovered, noting only that he was 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, had a three-day beard, and was wearing only socks.
Investigators at the time combed through missing person reports and attempted to match his fingerprints to those in national and state crime lab databases.
Nothing worked.
âThey did everything but DNA testing because it was not something that was well-known at the time,â said Lindsay Trammell, a forensic anthropologist with the St. Louis County Public Health Departmentâs Medical Examiner.
Eventually, the man was buried in an unmarked grave in the St. Louis County cemetery in 1995. The files at the privately owned cemetery and the Jefferson County Sheriffâs Office are the only records of his burial.
âTo the best of my knowledge, he is the only unidentified remains case we have,â said Jefferson County Sheriffâs Detective Lee Morris. He began researching the case in 2011 in hopes that he could match the manâs fingerprints to those listed in national databases.
âI read the reports, looked at the few photos we have handled his remains, and tried to provide whatever assistance I could in obtaining his identity. I hope we can put a name with the face,â Morris said. âIf there is family, I would like for them to know where he is.â
Such efforts have had some high-profile successes.
In 2022, investigators exhumed the body of another man buried in St. Louis County who proved to be a missing person from 1994 and determined he was Steven Asplund, who was reported missing in January 1994 from Moline, Illinois.
According to reports, Asplund likely intentionally went into the Mississippi River near the Interstate 74 Bridge in Bettendorf, Iowa. Police believe he became entangled in a barge before he was dragged down the river.
The discovery of his identity offered his family some relief.
âThe news, while bittersweet, will allow us some closure,â his family said in a 2022 statement to the Quad-City Times. âWeâll still think of Steve every day, and miss him just the same, but these answers will provide comfort to us and his friends.â
Investigators are âoptimisticâ
After exhuming John Doeâs body, samples were taken from the manâs head and arm and placed in cold storage.
Trammell said Wednesday the chances are high that the labs will be able to extract DNA from the samples provided because of the manâs age and because his remains âhave been buried and protected against the soil and the elements for 30 years.â
Testing is expected to take up to six months to complete.
Workers must extract DNA from the samples, map the manâs DNA sequence and then upload them into a national database. There, it will be cross-referenced against thousands of other samples, including those from family members who have reported missing loved ones.
If no matches are made, this task force will compare DNA results with those submitted to commercial ancestry genealogy companies.
Trammell and Hargrave say they are optimistic they will be able to identify this man. But they believe he could be from anywhere in the Midwest because he was found in the Mississippi River and had likely been dead for some time before he was discovered.
âUltimately, it is one of our big roles as officials to try to identify those individuals,â Hargrave said, âto reestablish them with their families for closure.â