His case was taken by Parabon NanoLabs.
DNA yields prediction of victim's appearance in 1997 cold case
DONNA THORNTON | THE GADSDEN TIMES | 3 hours ago
Alabama - For more than 24 years, a man found dead along a remote Marshall County creek remained a mystery — nameless and faceless, with investigators unable to determine how he ended up on the bank of Cataco Creek, or what led to his death.
Much of that mystery remains, but on Wednesday, investigators unveiled an image — created using DNA from the remains found April 15, 1997 — of what the man may have looked like.
The sheriff's office contracted with Parabon NanoLabs, based in Virginia, to take the DNA and create a "phenotype" report predicting what the victim may have looked like.
In September 2019, the sheriff's office took the case to the public again, with Chief Investigator Keith Wilson laying out what they knew and what they did not, in hopes that someone would remember a person who went missing around that time.
The body was found — missing a head, hands and feet — by a youngster, perhaps skipping school and playing around the creek, Wilson said, in a remote area of Union Grove in northern Marshall County. He was not murdered there, investigators believe, and his body had between dumped there within three days of its discovery, the investigator said in that 2019 press conference.
Keith Wilson, chief investigator with the Marshall County Sheriff's Office, talks to the media about an image created through DNA phenotypying that predicts what a 1997 murder victim — found missing head and hands — may have looked like.
The body was decomposed, but that, too, had occurred somewhere else before the body was left at the creek.
Wilson said the man died from sharp edge trauma. The investigator said he believes this is someone who went missing, but was never reported missing.
Details from medical examiners were grisly. The head and hands were removed with some type of saw. Wilson said Wednesday the victim's feet had been "gnawed" away by animals. There was another mutilation — the removal of the heart and spleen, he said in 2019.
The head and hands were eliminated, investigators believe, to hinder identification. Wilson said they speculate the heart and spleen may have been removed because they contained wounds and potential evidence.
Wilson and Sims said the investigation has used advancing technology as years passed. They searched missing persons databases, and DNA was checked against CODIS and other databases with no hits, Wilson said.
Sims said after he took office, investigators were discussing cold cases and decided to renew efforts in this one.
"I told them to look at what we could do," Sims said, and when they found the technology offered by Parabon, he said "go for it."
Marshall County Sheriff Phil Sims talks to reporters about contracting with Parabon NanoLabs to use DNA to create an image of a 1997 murder victim, and his hopes that it will help identify the man and jump start the cold case investigation.
The snapshot prediction results came at a cost of $12,000, Sims said, after about a year of work with the company. DNA from the victim also is being used to track familial DNA — to look for relatives who've submitted DNA samples to a genealogy company, and potentially contact them to try to identify the victim.
It's the technology used in recent years to find a number of suspects in criminal cases — most notably in the Golden State Killer case — and to identify human remains as well.
Sims said the search for family through DNA led them to a few distantly related people — third cousin or beyond — but not to an identity.
The DNA leads took them to South Alabama and to Virginia, the sheriff said, but with relations as distant as those developed so far, people might not have known the victim.
Parabon used DNA evidence from the investigation to produce trait predictions for the victim, making individual predictions for the subject's ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling and face shape.
Those attributes were combined, according to information supplied by Parabon, to create a "Snapshot" composite depicting what the victim may have looked like at age 25, with an average body mass index of 22.
It's important to note, the company said, that the composite is a scientific approximation of appearance based on DNA — not likely to be an exact replication of the person's appearance. Environmental factors such as facial hair, hairstyle, scars, etc., can't be predicted by DNA analysis, and can cause variations between the predicted appearance and the person's actual appearance.
Sims and Wilson said they believe identifying the victim is the key to finding his killer.
As investigators tried to follow leads in the case, Sims said they were hindered by the lack of information. Without knowing what might have happened, he said, they didn't know what to ask.
The sheriff said they will continue to search for the victim's identity — hoping that this image and trait information help — and to use familial DNA to look for family members.
Anyone with information about the victim or the case is asked to contact the Marshall County Sheriff's Office tip line at 256-571-7851.
Marshall County cold case: DNA predicts the face of 1997 murder victim
