In the summer of 1964, police in Texas found just the torso of a John Doe that began a 60-year-and-counting mystery which authorities hope to solve after they recently exhumed the corpse from a its resting place.
The torso had no head, legs or arms and has remained a constant enigma in the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office for decades.
Now, Detective Scott Minyard is leading the investigation for the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office in order to finally identify who Joe Doe is through DNA.
“I've been working primarily cold cases for about four years,” he tells Inside Edition Digital. “What we know now with advances in forensics with DNA and the ability to develop DNA profiles from things like blood and saliva, semen, and that kind of thing, the ability to do that is just grown exponentially over the last few years.”
Cops say the dark-haired white male was around 50 years old, approximately 6 feet tall and weighed about 185 pounds. John Doe also had a broken rib but no other identifying marks.
The skull and other limbs that were not on the torso have never been found, Minyard says.
The other cryptic part of this John Doe saga is not just who he is but what happened to him and who is responsible. Theories have ranged from a Mafia-style killing to wild animal attacks, Minyard says.
The DNA work will hope to answer that, but Minyard says, “the first goal in this case would be to identify this gentleman's family and hopefully lead to an identification. Now, I don't know if that's going to lead to any information that might solve the case, but you never know and we've got to at least identify.”
Despite the body being discovered in 1964, it was held in a freezer for 20 years before given a proper burial in a grave of other John Doe’s in the area, according to Minyard.
“There was no clothing, no jewelry, no tattoos or any identifying marks at all [on John Doe]. No known obvious sign of death, like a gunshot wound or something,” Minyard says. “At that time, they sent all the autopsies over to the Harris County medical examiner, and they did an autopsy over there. The medical examiner at the time, he stored the body in a refrigerated cooler thinking someone would come forward eventually and they would identify him. He stayed there for 20 years. Finally in 1984, they decided we've got to bury this guy. So, they buried him in the little cemetery next to the parasol.”
Last week, the torso was exhumed from the cemetery and Minyard says when they opened the casket, the body had fully decomposed but his skeleton was intact or as the detective put it, “the bones were in pretty good shape.”
With the skeletal remains and tissue samples that were salvaged from 1964, he is hoping to get answers.
“We had no real remains available to us. There were some tissue samples that were being stored at the medical examiner, and we tried to get a DN profile from that, but that didn't work out. So, the next logical step is exhuming the body, take some cuttings from the bones that are there, and then send those off to the lab,” he says.
The remains have now been sent to the Fort Bend County Medical Examiner’s Office where an anthropological examination will be conducted.
The skeletal samples have been sent to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification where DNA analysis will be performed.
“What I found is there's always family members. There's always friends and family that knew the person, knew about the crime, and it's just unresolved. Their loved one was murdered or you've got an unknown body,” Minyard says. “I've identified some folks that when I've reached out to the family, and it's like they got hit with lightning. It's just, it is fresh and raw to them the day it happened. And so, being able to at least say, ‘Hey, we found your loved one. We identified them. And now we can return them to you for burial.’ And at least there's a little bit of resolution to it.”
Minyard also says that if this John Doe was murdered and there is no statute of limitations for murder, “justice needs to be done for the victim and the family. It doesn't matter how old it is.”
Anyone with information related to this case is encouraged to contact the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office at 281-341-4665, option 1 or Detective Minyard at 281-341-4651.
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