How DNA experts and law enforcement uncover hidden identities. 

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He's a man of mystery. After all these years, no one knows his real name.

When road workers neared the makeshift place the man called home, they thought the strong smell might be emanating from a dead animal. Moving closer, the Utah Department of Transportation crew found the man's decomposing body lying on a ledge.

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• A road crew in 2012 discovered the body of an unknown man under this overpass on Riverdale Road in Weber County.

He lived there, under a Riverdale Road overpass and above the roar of rushing freeway traffic. His remains had decomposed to the point that his facial features were no longer distinct.

"You couldn't even tell what he looked like," said Brian Davis, an agent with the State Bureau of Investigation "Deterioration had left his hands nearly mummified."

Among the man's few scattered possessions—a sleeping bag, a few items of clothing—there were no documents to identify him. There were shoes, water bottles, a pipe and pipe tobacco. A bus ticket was dated March 21, 2012. The road workers found him six weeks later, on May 7, 2012.

Long, graying black hair hung from the man's head. A medical examiner determined that tuberculosis or lung cancer might have been the cause of death. He told Davis it appeared that the man hadn't visited a dentist in years.

Davis hoped they could collect a fingerprint, as some tissue and skin remained on the man's hands. The hands were removed and rehydrated by the state crime lab, Davis said, but whoever the man was, his record was clean.

"There was one good thumbprint," he said. "But he was not in anyone's system. He could be anybody."

Some people reporting seeing the man when he was alive. When Vern Waters was a library manager at the Southwest Library Branch in Roy, Utah, the mysterious man visited the library every day for three years. He wore jeans and work shirts in layers under a flannel jacket. Beneath his beanie hat, Water said, the man's eyes were a striking blue. Waters recalled the man's weathered face, graying hair reaching his collar and his beard.

"He came in and read the newspapers and travel guides," Waters recalled. "He would just open all the newspapers and leave them scattered. We said, 'If you could fold the newspapers, we will gather them.' He was kind about doing that for us."

When they spoke, the man said his name was Terry. But Waters has no idea if that is a first name or last name, or whether it's real. He recalled how "Terry" would rummage for food in the dumpster of a nearby donut shop and corner gas station, and how, in time, those business took to setting out bags of clean food.

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• “Terry’s” final resting place: As yet unidentified, the man was known to visit an area library where he read newspapers and travel guides.

"In some ways, the community adopted him," Waters said, recalling one instance when a library patron called the police to respond to Terry's loitering. "They came to ask me if he ever panhandled or harassed library patrons. I said, 'not once.' Sometimes, people gave him money, but the exchange was always discreet. ... I didn't have any reason to kick him out."

"Terry" is still unidentified today. The man's identity is the only one that Agent Davis hasn't been able to close out in 23 years of police work.

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• “Someone must play that role and try to find the family.”—Kathy Mackay, cold case analyst with the Utah Department of Public Safety

Finding Answers
Kathy Mackay is a cold case crime analyst with the Utah Department of Public Safety and oversaw the cold case database when she started working for the department in 2018. She said there are currently 45 unidentified cases in the state—six women and 39 men.

"They are bones or bodies that are still unidentified. They are kept at the state medical examiner's office," Mackay said. "We try to do investigative genealogy. Someone must play that role and try to find the family."

In a Millard County case where unidentified bones were discovered in the desert, the remains were found to be related to a woman in North Carolina. "The last time she saw her dad was when she was 8 years old," Mackay said. "This past Christmas Eve, the daughter—who is now 90 years old—learned that her father, Robert Holman Trent, was positively identified." His identity known, investigators are still working to determine Trent's cause of death and what brought him to the Utah area.

Utah's nonprofit Cold Case Coalition is primarily a volunteer-run organization, officially established in 2018. In 2019, the Cold Case Coalition expanded and founded Intermountain Forensics, a fully accredited forensic DNA laboratory. And in 2022, Intermountain Forensics was separated from the Cold Case Coalition to become a separate, independent nonprofit.

The Cold Case Coalition defines a "cold" case as one that law enforcement hasn't actively investigated for three years. One Utah homicide victim is an example—he graduated from high school in 1975 and decided to hitchhike from his Colorado home to visit relatives in California.

He was seen alive in Wendover, Utah, one day before an unknown assailant murdered him. A day later, someone discovered the young man's body in a rural Tooele County landfill. The victim was estimated to be between 17 and 22 years old. He had a white scar on his forehead and vaccination scars on his left shoulder and wrist.

After the examination of his body was complete, he was buried in the Tooele City Cemetery. No one identified him for almost 40 years.

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• “We want to be a support [to law enforcement], not a hindrance,”says Deborah Dilley, executive director of the Cold Case Coalition.

Deborah Dilley, executive director of the Cold Case Coalition said it's difficult to conduct a homicide investigation without first establishing the victim's identity. Their work often involves receiving bones or bone samples and extracting DNA for an analysis that is compatible with CODIS, a national DNA information repository maintained by the FBI.

With CODIS, state and local crime laboratories are able to store and compare the DNA profiles from crime scene evidence and convicted offenders.

"We don't want to step on law enforcement's toes," Dilley said. "We want to be a support, not a hindrance."

With many techniques and investigative partners, Intermountain Forensics (IF) has helped solve numerous cases. One such case is the Preble Penny Case. On May 25, 1968, in Preble County, Ohio, a group of children discovered the remains of an unidentified female in an advanced state of decomposition.

The body was short, with a slight build, Dilley said. A flood in the local area had disturbed the remains, which were believed to have been previously buried in a shallow grave. There was no identifying clothing and the body had been left outside for some time, allowing local wildlife to scatter the remains. At the time of the discovery, a coroner stated that the victim could have experienced complications if she had given birth.

"In Ohio, they believed it to be a woman and wanted to send us some of the bones," Dilley said. "When they arrived, we discovered that Preble Penny was not female—there was a male pelvis. Because he was so small, it was an easy mistake to make."

After IF created a DNA profile, they were able to match the victim's genetic markers with his great nieces and identify the body. "We do believe it was a homicide," Dilley said.

Reclaiming Names
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) partnered with IF on another case of a young woman whose body was found in an alley between Cortland and Richton Streets in Detroit, Michigan. The young woman wore a white T-shirt with yellow and black smiley faces, a white skirt, socks, gym shoes and a teddy bear watch.

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• The remains of Mindy Clevidence, killed in 1996, were identified in 2023 with the help of Intermountain Forensics.

By analyzing a piece of jawbone that NCMEC sent, IF was able to identify Mindy Clevidence, who was 17 when she died 27 years ago. Clevidence was a high school girl who showed sheep and steers in 4-H, earned scripture awards in the Baptist church, and loved sketching, writing poetry, singing and dancing.

"Her parents had been trying to find her for years," Dilley said. "There is power in knowing who somebody is, in giving them back their name and identity."

She added that while justice may focus on getting "the bad guy," another important part of justice is resolution and "restoring the name to the victim."

One of the first cases Intermountain Forensics identified through genetic genealogy was that of Peggy Dodd out of Harris County, Texas. Dodd disappeared in 1984 at age 29 and her family waited 38 years for answers, never knowing Dodd's unidentified body had been found in a field roughly 20 miles from home only weeks after she went missing.

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• In 2022, Intermountain Forensics helped identify Peggy Dodd, who disappeared in 1984.

Fort Bend County Sheriff's investigators spent decades trying to fit the pieces of an intricate puzzle together with only minimal information, including approximate height, age, weight and clothing located with the remains. Intermountain Forensics scoured every item and explored every available technology, Danny Hellwig, IF's director of laboratory development, said. "Astrea Forensics took a rootless hair and helped us turn it into a genetic genealogy profile," he said. "Utah Cold Case Coalition's genetic genealogists turned that profile into a genealogy lead."

The use of genetic genealogy to research cases of unidentified remains—referred to as John or Jane Does—has transformed the work on long-term cold Doe cases, says Pam Lauritzen, a senior director with the DNA Doe Project.

Lauritzen said that people who are isolated from family and friends can disappear without generating a missing persons report. And in past decades, when law enforcement lacked tools to check for records outside their area, it was even harder to make connections.

"Many cases went cold because the unknown person had been disconnected from their family and community," Lauritzen said, "especially when their remains are located in another part of the country."

In the past seven years, a cutting-edge new tool called Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) has come to the forefront of law enforcement, says Mitch Morrissey of United Data Connect. IGG combines DNA sequencing, commercial DNA database searches and genealogical research.

Morrissey added that IGG has identified hundreds of previously unidentified men, women and children, giving families answers about what happened to their loved ones. A Jane Doe or John Doe might be a murder victim whose identity is unknown to law enforcement. Currently, IGG is the last resort for identifying nameless bodies.

These tools have applications outside of law enforcement, as well. Along with providing investigative genealogy in John and Jane Doe cases, Intermountain Forensics offers services for personal genealogy work. Sometimes called "Keepsake" DNA service, IF will evaluate personal items to unlock new ancestral branches to research.

"People send in hats, razors with whisker hair, watch bands, envelopes and locks of hair that people have saved," Dilley said. "We'll test any artifact from which we believe usable DNA may be extracted."