Ive been thinking...if TSB turns out to be this UID found in Wellington, NV, then it would be obvious that he didn't meet with foul play back in 1987 (when his truck was discovered abandoned). Investigators have said that testing on the remains found in NV shows that the deceased had died sometime in 1991. Which leaves roughly 4 years, then, before his death (if this is TSB).
Here's a theory I'm playing with, though. I'm thinking about what his sister has said about his life at that time (post 2 in
this thread). Say because of all those big debts, and because he wasn't going to be able to see his daughter, anyway, he decided it might be advantageous to disappear and make it look like he'd met with foul play. So while enroute to CA with JD, he leaves his big rig running at a public rest stop, takes the cash out of his wallet, and leaves it and his identification and personal items in the truck so he'd come up "missing." Possibly the two of them are met at the rest stop by a third party who takes them into CA, where he obtains a new (fake) ID.
That way the people who were after him for all those unpaid debts might back off, and he could continue whatever he was doing undisturbed--possibly drug-running, and possibly with JD and/or associates (at least according to his sister's post).
So he gets a fresh stab at anonymity, perhaps gets a new ID, and carries on. Then, sometime in 1991 his past catches up with him, or his new associates turn on him for a deal gone bad, etc., killing him and dumping his remains there in NV. The stabbing multiple times appears to be a more 'personal' killing,' perhaps in retaliation for imagined or real double-dealing. This part of NV appears to have a long-standing problem with drug-dealing, according to the comments from area residents on the LCSO FBk page.